Memoirs based on extremely limited experience

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At least his study on Opus Dei was based on more comprehensive fieldwork.

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this is a silly premise.

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= how I spent my vacation, basically

(there are a tremendous number of excellent memoirs written over the incidents of one year, i gotta say)

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you're starting to stretch the definition of memoir

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I hate the do-something-for-a-year-and-write-about-it school of nonfiction. Seems like people do this when they know they want to be a writer, but don't have any real ideas. AJ Jacobs is the most guilty of this. He also was a guest quizmaster at my weekly pub quiz a few months ago and really sucked.

yeah, thoreau was such a hack

A fine writer and thinker can produce a good book on almost anything, and also it depends on the experience - a year in a P.O.W. camp or a year sailing around the world on a hand-made raft is likely to yield more than a year as a struggling writer, all other things being equal.

I guess I'm just annoyed by the laziness of some of the more recent ideas - I remember there being one about a year ago by a guy who tried to read a book per week for a year and failed!

And the original example is irritating because it's pretty well known that it takes at least a couple of years to get one's teaching legs, and it ought to take as least as long to earn the right to critique a system.

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i recieved this for Christmas but haven't cracked it yet:

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"Apparently there's these things called "jobs" that poor people have to have. I find this quite ghastly and can only assume that the Thatcher government has deprived these people of the multimillion pound inheritances that everyone in Britain has"

so that is the UK version of "nickel and dimed"?

KATIE PRICE AKA JORDAN HAS PUBLISHED *TWO* AUTOBIOGRAPHIES AND IS WORKING ON A THIRD

Surely the end is nigh?

I hate the do-something-for-a-year-and-write-about-it school of nonfiction.

This is like every time a blogger gets a book deal

and the french version, probably a bit more hardcore

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I don't think this guy has done a book yet but I'm sure he will:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/01/18/work_life_a_little_bit_of_everything/

I heard the piece on NPR today - it irked me in particular because trying a bunch of different jobs for a week each is exactly the OPPOSITE of what our generation needs to learn to do.

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I heard the piece on NPR today - it irked me in particular because trying a bunch of different jobs for a week each is exactly the OPPOSITE of what our generation needs to learn to do.

-- Hurting 2, Sunday, January 20, 2008 11:28 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

oh grampa

I don't think Wigan Pier is really a memoir - have not read it though.

xpost But seriously what can you really learn about a job in a week? Every job I've ever had seemed either fascinating or awful in the first week and if I didn't quit after a week my perception inevitably changed.

Is Down and Out in Paris and London a memoir? Seems to read like one if I remember correctly

first part is kind of a memoir, second part is a reflection thereon.

iirc down and out is fictionalized?

the immortal class

dude was a messenger for 9 months before writing the book i think?