SOURCE: "Suddenly, Family Stories Are Selling Like Pulp Fiction," in USA Today, April 16, 1997.

[In the following essay, Minzesheimer comments on the trend toward memoir writing and discusses both public and critical response to books including Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss.]

If Angela McCourt were still alive, her son Frank says, he couldn't have published Angela's Ashes, the memoir of childhood squalor that won him a Pulitzer Prize last week.

"My mother wouldn't have liked the book," McCourt says. "It was too revealing. She was ashamed of our past. Now we're ashamed of being ashamed."

Kathryn Harrison's father is still alive. But when she's asked about her memoir, The Kiss, about father-daughter incest, she replies, "All's fair in love and war." She pauses. "Or nothing is fair."

Both books are best sellers, leading a burst of first-person writing that's turning the phrase "a memoir" into...