Grateful survivors have written modest memoirs published by small presses or not at all.
In October, Ballantine Books will publish Animal Magnetism: My Life with Creatures Great and Small, a memoir in which she discusses in depth for the first time her life-sustaining relationships with animals and the important life lessons she's learned from them throughout the years.
A small-town memoir replete with crime must seem a publicist's dream.
It is also, in small doses, a memoir, a rumination on art and a philosophy of how to live well.
Fnally, Small Memories, A Memoir by José Saramago (Harvill Secker), a mosaic of memories from this great writer's life.
There is a touching description in his childhood memoir, Small Memories, of how his grandparents in Azinhaga would take ailing piglets into their warm bed, since the whole family depended on their survival.
On the chest are the words "White Boy," typical Naison provocation until you see, in much smaller letters, "a memoir".
Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Paddy Ashdown and a host of others have contributed to a small library of memoirs of life in government and opposition.
In the last five years the two have written a small library of memoirs centered on Nic's battle with substance use, with two by Nic (now 31, and sober) and the 2008 best seller by his father, "Beautiful Boy".
"Just as you have thousands of novels that are not good, that did not achieve literature," she said, "so in the same way you have a small number of memoirs that have a rich life and that achieve literature.
