When I recently reorganized my books I was astonished to see how many fit into the biography/memoir category... and leaning heavily toward the memoir side of that distribution. Despite being somewhat in the "too many memoirs on the dance floor!" camp, I still read a lot of them -- and have a few I think can stand up against books from any other genre. Long story short (and not to dig up this topic again) perhaps I and we are better off pointing out what we think authors of memoirs (or their publishers) do right, than to broad-stroke shelve the whole genre.
I appreciated STRETCH for its transparency, but for that purposes I must spoil a little (just in this paragraph): While author Neal Pollack began practicing yoga on his own, he eventually got deep enough into it that he began taking assignments from Yoga Journal which, he freely admits, got him into pricey conferences and festivals to help him cope with his all-consuming and somewhat expensive new hobby. (All without touching the Lululemon wire, which... is not a subject for this blog anyway so forget I mentioned it.) At one point he starts to open this subject as a serious dilemma -- the one teacher he wants to study with is conducting a pricey overseas workshop, where will he get the money?! -- and then quite fairly admits that he had gotten his advance for STRETCH already, and sunk that into workshop fees. Meta-memoir? Try truth.
It also tackled the subject of yoga as/in religious experience in a light, breezy format. Granted, I expected that having heard Pollack read an excerpt in September, but it didn't really hit that "And now we're going to get really serious" chapter, as I feared it would. Kind of also want to go to yoga class... but definitely to read Pollack's other books.
2 comments:
This is interesting to me, because, without really thinking about it, I had come to associate this type of memoir solely with female authors. Coincidentally, I have been considering getting into yoga for a while, so this book is interesting to me.
I don't know that this book would actively convince you, but it may tip the balance.
He does touch on the gender disparity a little bit, but mostly in the vein of "I was feeling awkward enough doing this, it can't get much worse."
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