For years as a fiction writer, I have felt pressured to write creative nonfiction, even though I’m not that into the genre and don’t really like talking about myself. But everyone was making such a big deal out of the memoir that I felt it was something I should be doing. There was something going on in the culture where the idea of something being literally true (as opposed to metaphorically true, which is what you see in fiction) made it more worth reading.

Of course, James Frey and Herman Rosenblat show that truth and the memoir can be a very fuzzy thing. Maybe that’s part of why nonfiction sales are dropping while fiction is rising. “Sales of this year’s top 10 non-fiction books in October were down 52% year on year, while sales of hardback fiction titles have soared by 90%,” says Bookseller.com.

Finally, a trend in publishing that I like.