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I'd take some of that in my house, though. Rrowr. That person is two exclamation points away from Terry Pratchett's definition of insanity.

A long time ago my husband was in grad school in ed psych and I was in grad school in library science. I went to one of his parties and it was awful. From then on we always went to the librarians' parties which were uninhibited, boozy, talky, witty, and just really fun. I guess things have really changed in the last 30 years with librarians.

Funny~ When I saw the cover of SLJ I just knew some people would focus on the alcohol issue and nothing else. It's inevitable, I suppose. I'm a library media specialist in training, and I for one enjoy the occasional White Russian. I don't think that makes me unprofessional in the least. I love books and I love an occasional cocktail.

Geez, some people have no respect for the post horn.

what, exactly, do you suppose they were objecting to with that issue of HB? the cover? the magazine itself? the horn, since that is what's closest to the comment?

Perhaps the writer was offended by the font selection.

Roger, to link this to the other kidlit discussion of the moment, your model would have fit perfectly into NEW MOON. Quelle abs!

That "model" is, I believe, Bill T. Jones, author and dancer of _Dance_ (Hyperion 1998.)

Years ago, as a librarian in a public library, I did a workshop for college-level education students. I presented a lot of great, new (at the time) picture books. Jones' _Dance_ was among them.

One of the students, the only male in the bunch, wenk berserk. He HATED that book. When asked why, he sputtered, Well...just...look at it!...I mean...it's just...I don't know. I don't like it. I mean...

I trust he was a straight male student.

I love the Bill T. Jones image. Gosh, that person must not get the NYTimes, because every Arts section has equally lovely pictures of dancers in various stages of dress. You bet I read my paper every morning.

I can't wait until SLJ starts looking more like Vanity Fair. If I ever get to be a cover girl, I just want to make sure they make me look like Scarlett Johansson.

1. I am going through the old boxes an find that HB cover to hang on my office wall. *dabs forehead with hanky*

2. The SLJ cover reminds me of every ALA conference I've ever been to. I didn't even blink. I was once told by a hotel worker in Atlanta (at least I think it was Atlanta--blame it on all those bars) that they love it when ALA comes to town because librarians drink more than anyone.

Roger,

We're happy to make a home for that cover in our house. A positive image of a good looking black male is always welcome.

To her "Yuck" I say "Yum!"

Usually these conversations spiral around for a while before arriving at the absurd, self-important, and offensive Hitler/Holocaust metaphor. By simply starting there, Alan Kaufman has saved us all a great deal of time!

Does Godwin's Law apply outside the internet?

O, snap!

Love it!

Word

Well, he's the editor of "Outlaw Bible," so you'd expect a Howling Jeremiad, no? It's a style thing.

And, Jews being "people of the book" (not "people of the e-book") -- I dunno -- I think he's doing a good job of getting a rise from his audience. Jeremiads are all about getting your people riled up. (Anyway, Roger, it is no fun to agree with you.)

Ah Roger, I would have thought this a comment from my son the rock-and-roller not elegant you. Nevertheless, I howled! GTFOY indeed.

And Anonymous 1--spot on!

Jane

what is GODWIN's law? and who is Godwin?

Wikipedia has a good explanation of Godwin's Law (and who Godwin is); roughly it means that people who need to invoke the Nazis in order to win an argument have already lost. I'm petitioning the Department of Rhetorical Standards to pass Roger's Law, which bans from public discourse any proponent of gay marriage who compares himself to Rosa Parks.

many thanks for the explanation of G"s Law (very useful to know!) and for RS's law, which has wonderful alternate applications when one substitutes new names and causes

just checked wikipedia - what a surprise! all this time I'd been thinking it had something to do with Mary Shelley's father and couldn't rationalize it!

There are two types out there, I am realizing: those who, when curious about an unfamiliar phrase, cut, paste, and Google, and those who don't. I'm confused by the latter. I'm not calling the people asking about Godwin's law Nazis (though it's tempting), but I want to ask, if you don't know what something means, why don't you just look it up?

But beware, Anon., lest you be labeled a "Google is your friend"-Nazi. Personally, I don't mind inquiring minds--they often take the conversation someplace good.

Novels for younger kids, however, are getting much shorter. It seems that series books are replacing longer novels for kids. Moxy Maxwell Does Not Love Stuart Little, for instance, reads like a slightly stretched out chapter in a Ramona book.

Also, doesn't the length of a book depend partly on the publisher's design decision? If a publisher wants a book to look like a big, meaty fantasy (and, post-Harry, some do, don't they?), they might go with a higher page number -- skewing your results slightly. Comparing word counts might be more scientific :o)

I feel like print has in general gotten smaller, but that could certainly be my eyes!

I've also noticed more and more parents who refuse to buy short books. If a child approaches with a short book (especially a short hardcover) in hand, typically parents say it's not "worth it" because they will finish it too quickly. Often I find myself working harder to sell the book to Mom than to the kid.

Does it seem to you that books explain things more than they used to? You don't have to think as you read-- the book tells you everything you need to know. Nothing happens without an explanation of why it happened. No one is angry, or sad, or upset without an explanation -- "Patty was sad because her mother had left her and because her foot hurt and because she wasn't going to be going to the prom after all." If the reader already knows that Patty is an orphan with a broken leg on the night of the big dance, isn't "Patty was sad" enough? There are no allusions or hints--or if there are hints-- they are always fully spelled out before the end. Maybe all those explanations make for higher page counts.

Maybe it's just me.

But I've seen children who are "good readers" read books 20-30 years old and they tell me, not that they don't like the books, but that they can't understand them. I wonder if they are just conditioned to having explanations and are uncomfortable without them.

It isn't your eyes. I wish publishers would also consider that the smaller print is harder for young readers to "scan."

However, given the US literacy rate is pretty low, the fact that more children are willing to read a long book is encouraging. (remember the days when kids selected books at school based on how thin it was?)

But bloated is a problem. My kids were enamored with a certain "black book" series which could have been equally compelling with half the words. If I remember correctly, 50% of the word count comprised the words "dazzling" and "ice cold." :-) The fourth book in the series turned them off completely - not because of word count, but because of utter stupidity and a meandering text that sank in its own quicksand.

Seriously - longer doesn't mean better, and I do feel for book reviewers who have to wade through it all.

I've found that many of the kids I know like thicker books. The thicker, the better. When they borrow books from me, they are drawn to the bigger ones.

I'm the opposite: if it's thicker, it sure as heck better be written so well that I won't care.

I’d say the biggest difference now is the sheer number of guilty pleasure series novels specifically targeted at teens and tweens.

It would be interesting to compare the page count of the modern YA series (The A List or whatever’s trendy these days) with something like Sweet Valley High. True, it’s been a very long time since I saw a SVH book, but I remember them being fairly long. Particularly the specials and spinoff books. Meanwhile, I’ve paged through a few of the current crop of teen series books, and it seems like most of them barely make it into triple digit page counts.

The popularity of these series books has to be influencing the publishers in how they market their other offerings. Ensuring a really long page count is probably one of the easiest ways to do this (not quite as easy as the artistic black and white slightly fuzzy photo on the cover, but close). I think readers are conditioned to think of longer books as being “better.”

And so the length of the novel is appealing to parents, as an above commenter says, because they’re tired of paying $10 for a book that will be read in 3 hours and never touched again. Spending $20 on the 500 page “literary” YA novel is much more appealing. The teenagers with literary pretensions probably also appreciate this marker: I distinctly remember lugging The Mists of Avalon into every restaurant, museum, and historic site on a vacation my family took in 7th grade just to make it clear that I read “real” books, and not little kid books. Schools are happy to encourage longer books, hoping that it will encourage more fluent reading and that more SAT words will pop up. I believe that it’s fairly common for schools and libraries who do reading tracking count the pages read and not the books read, or have some sort of points system that takes length of book into account.

Either way, I think it’s really cool that there’s so much out there for teenagers. There was so little when I was a teen, and I think it really turned a lot of kids off reading.

How nice to know that someone else besides me reads and appreciates Robert Westall!

Either way, I think it’s really cool that there’s so much out there for teenagers. There was so little when I was a teen, and I think it really turned a lot of kids off reading.

Sanctimommy, please tell me you are seventy years old. If you say you are thirty and stand by that statement, I will weep.

I am forty and have fond memories of a wealth of great YA lit from my teen years. But I hear this "there was no YA when I was a teen," so often lately and it frustrates me.

Interesting. I recently read a blog post that argued that romance novels were getting shorter in the last ten years or so: Does Size Matter?

I agree with Santimommy,

I"Great wealth" of YA depends on perspective. I was bored by what was available and the sameness of it all. And the lack of diversity was inexcusable. I defaulted to adult books by the end of elementary school out of self defense.

I've noted that my daughters have access to a much broader range of titles than were available when I was their age. I envy them for it.

I've been told by editors that kids really do seek out the longer books; it's a bigger challenge and a greater achievement and hence a marketing advantage. I should learn from this; I should.

(maybe in the next writerly life)

Kristin Cashore is right about design, though--I'd be really interested to see a comparison of word counts. Maybe my opinion is skewed because I work in fantasy, but I really think that since the mid-90s we've been giving texts more leading between lines and slightly bigger font sizes (not to mention nicer fonts that may take up more kerning space than your old standards). This is something we actually studied at Simmons in my publishing class--we looked at a number of books and measured font size, kerning, and evaluated the design, and from that (very small sample size) I found that most newer books have much more generous design parameters.

Word count may have increased as well, on average--I can't be sure. But I think that would be a more accurate test than page count.

Regarding "great wealth" of YA available, I'm 35 and we only had one YA shelf in our tiny Carnegie library in my hometown library. It all depends on where you grew up and how much access you had. Even if I could have afforded to buy books back then, the nearest bookstore was 1/2 hour drive away, and I didn't have a car. So yeah, back then, I didn't have access to a "great wealth" of YA, and the renaissance we're now experiencing in YA didn't really start until the mid-90s--several years after I'd graduated high school. I didn't discover The Giver until about 1999 or 2000. So I think it depends on where you live and how aware your parents/teachers/librarians are of YA, as well.

For what it's worth, the Graceling published by Harcourt Children's Books in the USA/Canada is 471 pages long. The Graceling published by Gollancz in the UK/Australia/NZ (for the adult market) is 340 pages long. Same word count. Big page number difference!

Sorry Gina, but I am actually 30! And I still stand by my statement. Yes, there was YA but as Roger said and I agree, it was for younger kids. I'm Googling right now for the kinds of books that are considered YA novels, and basically if they were around when I was a teenager, I had read them by 6th grade. And that's not because I was particularly advanced: it was the age range they were written for, really. And once I was done with those, there was nowhere to go but to adult books. And most adult books just don't grab the interest of the average 13 year old: when I was 13, how was I supposed to relate to the themes of love and life and class and death that are written for adults? Yes, I wasn't the most mature 13 year old, I admit, but still: I didn't know about any of those things. For about 10 years I read only non-fiction.

The current crop of YA novels, I think, are far more likely to appeal to older teenagers. That's all I'm saying.

What books do you remember enjoying as a teen? There were obviously some out there, but I really do think they were mostly for younger kids, and there weren't nearly enough to keep a voracious reader in books.

Ditto on the Robert Westall comment. Devil on the Road is forgotten but superb, and still scares and saddens me.

Great YA books for older readers published before 1990:

The Pigman (1968)
The Chocolate War (1974)
Annie On My Mind (1982)
Forever (1975)
The President's Daughter (1984)--the first book in Ellen Emerson White's recently revived and now highly lauded Meg Powers series
Don't Look and It Won't Hurt (1972)
Are You In The House Alone (1976)
Hoops (1983)
Stotan (1986)
The Executioner (1982)
See Dave Run (1978)
Night Kites (1986)
The Moves Make the Man (1985)
The Changeover (1984)
Beauty (1978)
The Ruby in the Smoke (1987)
Killing Mr. Griffin (1978)

Norma Fox Mazer has been publishing YA fiction since the early seventies, too much to list.
Richard Peck, M. E. Kerr, Chris Crutcher, Walter Dean Myers, Susan Beth Pfeffer, Robin McKinley, etc. etc., all publishing for older teens before 1990.

I think the definition of who counts as the YA audience is part of the question (though not part of Rodger's initial question). The books you mention, Gina, are ones I read in middle school. Is middle school YA? Hmm. It's a tough one. A lot that's labeled YA has some content I wouldn't give a 6th grader (unless I knew them well and knew they could handle it). I think in my youth, I turned to adult books after middle school because I always read "up". Thus, I missed some books like Forever because I was too young for the content when I was in middle school (at least my mother thought so), but by the time I reached high school, I thought of Judy Blume and other authors deemed "children's authors" beneath me. I read VC Andrews in high school instead (far more scandalous, unbeknownst to my poor, sheltering mother)!

Gina: of those that I read, I read in junior high school. Add to that VC Andrews who was a summer camp staple between seventh and ninth grades (do they REALLY count as adult books?). Maybe I was just a book snob (it wouldn't surprise me), but also as ttelloow said I wouldn't have been caught dead with a Judy Blume by high school: those were kids books.

And you're right, that is sad. There are lots of wonderful YA novels, and who knows what I missed by reading them at 12 instead of at fifteen. But I may as well have been seen reading Dick and Jane in public (actually, Dick and Jane would have had some ironic value: a kids book would have just been lame).

Maybe a lasting effect of Harry Potter is that it made it okay for kids (albeit older, teenage kids) to read kids books.

I agree that an analysis of word count would be a better way to make a comparison, but I don't know where to find that information. SVH books (except for the "Specials") were short but it's hard to compare them to GG because the trim sizes are so different.

Traditionally, it has been received wisdom that a) kids don't like long books and b) kids don't want to read about characters younger than themselves, and I'm glad to see both prejudices being challenged by kid readers. But I wonder if Anon above is onto something with his/her query about books overexplaining themselves, a characteristic that is as responsible as anything else for the length of Rowling's books.

I wonder if the seeming lack of YA material in the past isn't augmented somewhat by the superabundance of it today, when it has become a much more targeted market. The books might have been there, but that doesn't mean they were necessarily being readily pressed upon the consciousness of teens.

I'm about thirty, and because today I'm interested in literature for young people I'm going back and finding tons that I missed as a teen. When I actually was a teen, however, I was reading adult books. I read those books largely in secret at first, because I was reading the famous "dirty" books like 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Lolita.' I didn't even think of how "challenging" they were. (I don't claim this to be the norm, but we shouldn't forget that teens are often secretive, after all, and are perhaps reading things we don't see.)

Which leads me to wonder at the idea of what makes a book "challenging" at all. I'm not sure the endurance of reading 500 or 700 pages is really the kind of challenge we ought to laud. Our culture has historically been all too impressed by "largeness." Largeness isn't inherently bad, but of course it isn't inherently good either. (A teen who reads "Moby Dick" might impress me because its content is difficult, not simply because they "made it through.") Obviously a short story of a few pages might be far more complex and present far greater rewards than a huge novel.

I think saying, "At least they're reading a lot!" just because our literacy rate is poor is a rather pessimistic attitude. I wonder if our very notion of what "literacy" means isn't also impoverished.

It seems there are types of "challenging" that are appropriate for young readers and types that are inappropriate. For example, reading a big book is good (it's viscerally impressive). Reading an emotionally challenging book is a mixed bag (they win awards--and get banned!). Meanwhile, a brief experimental work (I know, I know--what does that even mean any more?) wouldn't really work on any level, because aside from being difficult to market it's challenging on a more fundamentally cerebral level (or that's the supposition, at least).

I'm reminded of the French adult authors who emerged in the 1980s, such as Marie Redonnet and Jean-Philippe Toussaint. In 100 pages they create these brilliant little worlds. These worlds largely come from a use of language and imagery that is often baffling and difficult (no, they don't explain things). Why not such books for young readers? Moreover, why not such books for the writers of books for young people (meaning, the writers ought to challenge themselves in other ways also).

Didn't Borges say something about pretending you already had the big book and writing about it briefly? I'm not going to argue with the man.

Jason M.

You wouldn't be able to source that Borges comment, would you? I could really use it.

Anon 1:22

It's in the prologue to "The Garden of Forking Paths." Round about page 15 in "Ficcones." I don't have the book in front of me, so I can't cite it properly.

I guess while I'm writing I'd also like to ask, couldn't a similar conversation be held about films for young people? I mean, whatever happened to "White Mane," "The Red Balloon," "Paddle to the Sea?" Short, masterful, magical films that just kind of showed you a story and was done? No pandering, ironic references, or flashiness. Sigh!

Jason,
Ponyo!
Not so heavy handed with the environmentalism, thank goodness.

Thank you for the Borges info. I've got it on the library list.

Roger,
As you said, traditionally kids don't like long books, but then again, traditionally long books were harder to read than short ones. Now we have the literary equivalent of the mile deep bag of potato chips.

Anon 1:22

Christine TB, and "liquid amber"/ "liquid onyx" added to that word count too!!

I agree with the comments on book design. I have noticed that often reissues of books such as Howl's Moving Castle are given bigger fonts and wider page margins than before to produce nice fat volumes.

I don't know why, but I get the creeping sensation that there's a Master's thesis lurking somwhere in all this . . .

I've been reading The Dark is Rising with my son and am struck by how small the print and leading, and how narrow the margins are. I think that it's not so much that publishers want to pump up the page counts artificially, as that publishers see the value of longer books in the marketplace and are more aware that spending money on the higher paper costs for longer books can result in considerable profit.

I'm so happy that there is room in the market now to publish these longer books. With that said, however, I do think this allows for a good deal of flabby writing. I'm always struck, when rereading backlist, by how much some authors could do with relatively few words. Treasure Island, for instance, is a masterpiece of economy. Cormier, Katherine Paterson at her best....

Seems to have already disappeared.

What's rude is my PW Daily email stating that Michael Jackson books are languishing and the booksellers cannot make a dime off of his death.

Well, now we know who Roberta Silman is: http://robertasilman.com/

I like that she's married to a guy named Robert. That's love! And she's written a children's book, so she's one of our own.

I'll be looking forward to Hoffman's mea culpa, but I'll be disappointed if she doesn't blame her tweet on booze or the Internet itself.

In the Times she does one of those "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" tap-dances.

That link didn't work-sorry! This should be better...
http://gawker.com/5303534/look-whos-snarking-now-novelist-uses-twitter-to-trash-critic

I often tell students not to put anything on a blog they would be ashamed for their mother to read ...

So who is Alice Hoffman?

I am not adding to the pile-ons all over cyberspace which I find equally offensive as the actions of Alice Hoffman.

I want to say that I find this topic timely to our discussions here. The real kicker would be that her book does well since it got so much off the chart publicity. People might get curious who would not have before and the public does enjoy bad news :)

I view this a major lesson of cyber and professional etiquette. This also includes the pile-ons. I'm sure she is humiliated and if the comment section rumors are true about her divahood, hopefully this is THE wake up call.

I will be thinking about this (and feeling sad about it) for the rest of this night.

I especially love it when Silman, being interviewed about Hoffman's twittering, said "...she called me a moron, which my children are going to love." Nothing like being dissed on Twitter to destroy your parental authority.

I'm saying straight up that I am a Hoffman fan and want to repeat my comment over on Edward Champion's place...

The point of Hoffman's poorly tweeted message was that Silman divulged too much information in the review (like a book report). I have recently purchased the book and now know that one of the main characters dies and this motivates the plot.

First, there's no place in a review for exposing specific plot UNLESS the reviewer spells out SPOILER AHEAD. Secondly, there is a difference between amateur reviewers (like myself) and professional reviews. Silman's review, whether glowing or critical, was unprofessional.

I think Hoffman made it immaturely personal and the real point was lost. I still like her books and I'll still read it, but I will be more cautious if I ever spot a Silman review again.

Tasses,

I think a lot of people will agree about spoilers, but Hoffman published Silman's phone number online and urged her Twitter followers to call her. That's not just unprofessional; that's harassment.

Just read an interview with Silman in the LA Times. She said she's only gotten nine email messages as a result -- all apologizing for Hoffman's behavior. She hasn't gotten any phone calls because Hoffman got her phone number wrong.

Can't help but picture the person who might own that phone number; depict the colorful character of your choice in your head and then picture them saying to callers, "Alice who? Who gave you this number?" Or something far less repeatable...

Tasses, I'm not buying that argument and I don't think for a second that Hoffman would have advanced it had the review been more laudatory. One person's spoiler is another person's information.

I don't understand people who complain about "spoilers" in professional reviews. It's part of this whole world-must-revolve-around-my-personal-comfort mindset. I would find the words SPOILER ALERT!!!!! in a the midst of a professional review to be incredibly amateurish.

If you are so sensitive that knowing what happens in a book or movie would destroy your enjoyment of it, then don't read the reviews until after you read the book or seen the movie. Don't expect people you don't know to take care of you.

sorry, that should be "after you HAVE read the book..."

As I opined in an earlier thread, the bottom line in the use of spoiler warnings is a display of respect: respect for the material being discussed, respect for the author whose hard work is being frivolously abused by the premature disclosure of carefully planned key elements, and respect for your fellow readers. I am sorry if Anonymous 1:00 finds such respect to be too tiresome to be bothered with. I would be willing to wager that Anon. 1:00 is not a reader of murder mysteries.

Lyle Blake Smythers

Roger, I won't speculate whether Hoffman would have gone as nuts had the review been more positive. I'm simply saying that spoilers have no place in a professional review. It's only information if you are reading a critical analysis. If you are reading a review of a story in order to decide if you want to buy/read said story, spoilers serve only to SPOIL the fun.

I'm certainly not defending Hoffman's ridiculous actions (as I said on my own humble blog). I'm saying that reviewers, especially paid professionals, should be held to a higher standard and Silman's review (which I read BEFORE the novel and which totally spoiled the story for me) wasn't up to my idea of what a professional reviewer should do.

Thanks for the discussion opportunity :-)

Upfront: I love Hoffman's work. Big fan here. I have never met her in person and if I do, I will be careful not to divulge my phone number. Just in case.

Another upfront: All authors would love to write such twitters or tweets or other rebuttals to critics of all persuasions. We don't. And we don't because it makes us look like divas, el stupidos, and can only backfire. As it did

Note: many authors will tell you they don't read reviews, good or bad. Don't believe them. We are professional liars, after all.

Jane

Since I haven't read the book being reviewed (I loved Hoffman's Illumination Night but that's all I've read of her adult books, and I don't think her YAs are very good) I don't know if what the reviewer gave away was a "spoiler." I suspect people have different definitions of that word--for some, it's the revelation of a carefully prepared surprise (there's a good one in Lisa See's new Shanghai Girls,) but for others it can be anything and everything. And what should a mystery reviewer do if the revelation of the villain is lame and unprepared for? Should the review say just say (and only that), thus not providing any evidence for her point, or is the reviewer obliged to explain her reasoning, which might entail giving up some details of the msytery? I'm in the camp that says skip the reviews if you've already decided to read something.

I really don't like the blurring of public and private that seems inevitable with these devices. I recently read a book by a very popular author who outsells me by about a billion to one. I told a friend that I thought the book was awful--everything about it, plot, characterization, writing. It was the very stuff the word "pedestrian" was invented for. Some authors might say they would never criticize another's work that way, and Jane Yolen probably knows they are liars. But we make our childish, petulant, jealous comments Privately. Twitter seems like a terrible conduit to carry all our private thoughts out to the public. I wonder if Hoffman thought she was addressing friends and was as horrified at the way it traveled as I would be if my own friend sat at a table at ALA and retailed my opinion of er, um's, work.

I'm happy to get a review - good or bad. At least someone took the time to read my work. Appreciate it!

"This" like Facebook is blocked here at Dalton. Sigh. Will have to wait to view when I get home. (Would it be within the Newbery age-range, I wonder?)

Monica, they're publishing a Sex and the City spinoff for kids. I don't know how this kind of trend-chasing works--SATC was the hot thing years ago and the movie has already disappeared. What kids will care?

What took HC so long? I would have thought this would have been in the works months ago. Next: a clothing line.

In the realm of things that make me sick...
My kids went to a Bat Mitzvah last year for a girl named Lexi, and the theme of her party was Lex and the City.
Oy!

Can we "Just say no" like the sex ed commercials?

OMG! Agree! My TWENTY something friends think of that as an "old lady" movie (I'm 43.) Plus, don't they already have this? It's called Gossip Girl and it's awesome.

I always thought series like The Gossip Girl and The A-list were influenced by SATC--upperclass young women, materialism, urban settings, drinking and partying. So Bushnell may be too late. I wonder if teen readers won't see a YA SATC as adult castoffs.

Oh, Lookie here! Gawker Media make me smile somewhere every day!
http://jezebel.com/5051810/hackers-take-a-page-from-candace-bushnells-new-ya-novel-the-carrie-diaries

Save it. I'm waiting for the board books.

I don't know if I blame America - I blame the American people for their complete loss of virtue and sense of personal responsibility.

From the Times piece: “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

Indeed! I think we’re all sick of gray and brown portrayals of complicated events.

Also I loved the idea of her chatting up the Black Panthers at Starbucks. Another grande soy carmel macchiato latte, Huey?

I find it totally hilarious that "Beautiful Boy" is sold at Starbucks. As a Starbucks addict myself (okay, go ahead and throw stones, but remember, I live in Iowa. Starbucks IS the best coffee here), I laugh every time I see that jumping boy on the cover.

Re: the memoir issue. I have a simple solution: Let's just call autobiographical literature what it's always been: fiction. It's easy. There's no such thing as "truth," at least as Americans would describe "truth," in autobiography.

(My dissertation was on autobiographical literature written by 18th century Russian aristocrats in French. No truth there either.)

I love the cheerful reader comment that now she can write a true story about being ratted out by her sister.

oh yeah, Anon., there is definitely a story there. I hope we hear from the sister soon.

In lieu of this morning's news, take a look at the profile of Seltzer/Jones in last Thursday's Home section of the Times. There you will read such gems as

"The house smelled of black-eyed peas, which were stewing with pork neck bones — a dish from the repertory of her foster mother, known as “Big Mom,” whose shoe box of recipes she inherited."

I'm sure there's already been commentary on this elsewhere, but it's interesting that both stories involve the appropriation of another racial/ethnic background... and that in both cases this seems related, somehow, to the romanticization of suffering. (Along with a whole slew of other prejudiced assumptions.)

Maybe it's true that we'd like a dose of the miraculous to help digest stories of horror and violence. But maybe we also have a fundamental wish to misunderstand horror and violence in the first place...

Ruth

We have a wish for the supposedly ennobling effects of suffering and injustice, and perhaps also for the romance of confession. All this without having to go through the actual trials, of course!

I am addicted to books and I don't care where I get my fix! I wish more parents were addicted to books and what a better America for our children we would have!

A.D.

In reference to the book Beautiful Boy, it seems a great fit to me to have a book about drug addiction become very present and out there in the world for all to see.
As someone who went looking for factual and/or memoir material for this author to reference during his family's time of need, I can honestly say that there is very little out there that was helpful to him.
My hope is that his book, and that of his son, offer some relief and hope for those many others in the same, or similar predicaments.

Hurrah for Kelly's "simple solution." OF COURSE autobiography is fiction! Why hasn't this been known all along?

Doesn't conventional wisdom state that it's easier to sell publishers on memoir than it is on fiction? When the authors are caught, they try to put as good and profound a spin on the situation as they can, but with some of them I have to wonder if they weren't just trying to use the system to get published any way they could. Some of these people may not be identifying with other groups, may not be romanticizing anything. They're just trying to get away with something.

Have you noticed how many more comments posts get when they allow for the expression of outrage and indignation?

I've been having a related argument with my roommates lately, about truth and fact. I don't think that something needs to be "factual" to be True, that something need not be Non-Fiction to be True. They would disagree-- or at least, they don't understand.

Fiction, at least in my neck of the University Woods, is for those who don't want to read about REAL things, for the dreamers. Everyone else reads history, or biographies, or autobiographies, economics, memoirs, etc, as if this adds a level of true gravity and seriousness to their perspective.

People tell and believe all kinds of stories for all kinds of reasons, and we always have to bring forward our best judgment. The first issue of Notes from the Hornbook refers to Maurice Sendak's tale of a woman who read Where the Wild Things Are over and over to a screaming child, and when asked why, said the book won the Caldecott. I believe Sendak said that, but, with no disrespect to the genius, I don't believe that happened, at least not quite in that way. It makes a great story, and I'd retell it myself, but only with raised eyebrows.

People certainly do polish their best anecdotes--it's really fun to read Marilyn Horne's and Beverly Sills' respective accounts of their mutual appearance at La Scala!

Here's another one! (It's Kathy O'Beirne's 2005 memoir, Kathy's Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2008/03/05/ftmag105.xml