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Consider the queen of the self-help memoir, Gretchen Rubin.
The self-help memoir hybrid boasts certain clear advantages over its alternatives.
Now comes Eat Pray Love, a Julia Roberts vehicle (released on 24 September) based on the bestselling self-help memoir.
But it's time to christen a new subgenre: the self-help memoir, a kind of long-form personal narrative fused with life coaching.
The self-help memoir may owe something to a backlash against what Ben Yagoda, in his 2009 book "Memoir: A History," called "misery memoirs".
But rather than redemption, the self-help memoir culminates in improvement — fitting for a culture in which the most fashionable addictions are lattes and ellipticals.
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Thanks to such tact, self-help memoirs are less likely to incur wrath and lawsuits.
The difference today is that the lessons of self-help memoirs are more explicit, and more grounded in everyday life.
Whereas these hell-and-back accounts traded in total candor about dark secrets, the revelations in self-help memoirs are limited.
In 2003 Tharp published her second book, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, part self-help book, part memoir.
This, his second book ("The Ice Opinion," from 1994, was a wide-ranging soapbox on paper), is a goes-down-easy mélange of memoir, self-help and amateur criminology.
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com