All the girls loved me cause my Tuffskins had creases

I'm ambivalent about the growing popularity of memoirs. The good ones, I find, are simply spectacular. Amos Oz's A Tale of Love and Darkness heads the recent list in this group. Every year, one or two of the better books I read are memoirs - like this one from last year. And of course war memoirs can be stunning - Michael Herr's Dispatches is in the small group of books I would take to the desert island and there are any number of other good ones. Yet I can't help thinking that not everyone's life is interesting enough to merit book-length treatment, and I know that the recent surge in memoir writing and reading does not reflect the more interesting lives we lead today. A more philosophical poster might speculate on the link between today's increasingly solipsistic society and the uptick in memoirs, but not I.

A less hypocritical poster might read fewer of them, too, but what fun would that be? In the last month I've read two worthwhile samples. The first, Sean Wilsey's "Oh, the Glory of it All" suffers a bit from Dave Eggers-ish self-indulgence (although no one self-indulges like Eggers does), but is rescued by the author's fine writing (another similarity to Eggers) and a series of crazy tales of a historically awful stepmother. Worth reading, certainly.

Worth buying - tomorrow - is Jeannette Walls' story of a hardscrabble childhood "The Glass Castle." Words - or at least my words - are inadequate to describe the deprivations of Walls' upbringing (although she is up to the task). Harrowing and very, very good.