TORONTO - With a staggering list of celebrities and average Joes expected to put their lives to paper in 2012, it's clear the memoir craze shows no signs of waning.
Neil Young, Pete Townshend, Carole King, Courtney Love, Rod Stewart and Gregg Allman are just a few of the would-be authors readying their stories for publication in the new year. Lesser-known figures set to spin autobiographical tales include CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi, former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant, eco-filmmaker Rob Stewart and former St. Francis Xavier University instructor Leslie Shimotakahara.
Publishing experts say the genre remains immensely popular because memoirs are easy to market and appeal to frazzled readers seeking to make sense of their lives.
"I think people nowadays are assailed on all fronts," says Penguin's Diane Turbide, who edited Toronto author Marina Nemat's harrowing memoir "The Prisoner of Tehran," a recent selection for CBC's "Canada Reads."
"They're busy, they're overwhelmed by the pace of life, by information. They can't make out the shape, or the path, or the arc of their own life. Everything is a blur... I think people are looking for some kind of narrative thread, some kind of plot that makes sense that doesn't feel so formless."
On tap from Penguin in 2012 is Ghomeshi's "1982," set in the year the radio host was 14 and living with his Iranian parents in Thornhill, Ont.; Bryant's "28 Seconds," about the former politician's deadly encounter with a Toronto cyclist; and "A Reporter's Journey from Refugee Camp to the Arab Spring" by CBC foreign correspondent (and former Canadian Press reporter) Nahlah Ayed.
Random House, meanwhile, says it's excited about the upcoming "Save the Humans," by "Sharkwater" movie-maker Stewart; "The End of Your Life Book Club" by Will Schwalbe, about a reading project the author undertook with his ailing mother; and a memoir from legendary author Salman Rushdie under the Knopf imprint.
Of course, it's anyone's guess if those titles will make a splash like some of the "game-changing" memoirs of the last two decades. "The Liars' Club" -- Mary Karr's 1995 account of her tumultuous Texas childhood -- is often cited as a book that fuelled the explosion of the genre. Others mention Kathryn Harrison's 1997 book "The Kiss," about the author's incestuous affair with her father. And who can forget James Frey's public tussle with Oprah Winfrey over the veracity of his 2003 tome "A Million Little Pieces"?
Indeed, memoir is now such a sprawling genre that it has splintered into various sub-categories.
Celebrity memoirs, usually ghost-written, often function as little more than a promotional tool. And social media has spawned its own form of memoir, including Justin Halpern's "S--- My Dad Says." There's even discussion about the difference between memoir and autobiography.
Anne Collins of Random House Canada says she views autobiographies as a soup-to-nuts account of a life: "I really do think that memoir is a piece (of a person's story)," she says.
Sam Hiyate, president of literary agency the Rights Factory, says in the U.K. there is a whole category called "miz mems" or "misery memoirs."
"We don't have that category here," notes Hiyate. "In North America, we tend to like our memoirs with an optimistic, upbeat ending with hope if not complete happiness, or redemption."
"Year of Magical Thinking" author Joan Didion, who won a National Book Award for her 2005 meditation on her husband's death -- suggests memoirs have become so ubiquitous as to render the label somewhat meaningless. She pushed her publisher to categorize her recent book, "Blue Nights," as something else, but was told it wasn't possible.
"One of the reasons I didn't want to call this a memoir is I've never been clear on what a memoir is," she says.
Whatever the definition, Hiyate has a very practical theory as to why such books do well. Memoirs, he says, are easier to market than novels, because they have a hook that can drive media coverage.
"Twenty years ago if somebody had some kind of confessional story about all the good and bad in their lives and the secrets, it might have been scandalous but it might not have been all that interesting to people," he says.
"But what happened with somebody like Oprah and all those daytime talk shows is that people would come and start telling you these stories and they were gripping because they were telling you secrets ... it became part of popular culture."
That was certainly true of Frey, who was famously pilloried by Winfrey after she learned he'd fabricated portions of his book. The incident, of course, touched off a debate about the veracity of memoirs, a topic that remains a potential minefield for publishers.
"We think about that," said Doug Pepper of McClelland and Stewart. "We've been dealing with that on a couple of things actually where I said: 'Just hold on a second, are we sure?' Like, this person seems really credible and has really good credentials, but how do we know?"
"And you can have it fact-checked and lawyered, but when it comes right down to it you have to trust the author."
Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides speculates that memoirs have become so popular because readers are seeking "truth." He's skeptical, however, about whether they are getting it.
"Readers want something to be true and they think if it's a memoir it is true, but actually a memoir isn't any more true than a novel," says the author, who has been repeatedly asked whether his latest work of fiction, "The Marriage Plot," is autobiographical.
"I'm not saying you can't tell the truth about your life in a memoir, but they didn't used to be written the way they are now."
Didion, meanwhile, theorizes that readers have become "besotted by the idea of memoir" because they no longer know how to properly read fiction.
"They were reading it in a much more literal way than fiction really demands to be read," she said. "I think when people learn again how to read fiction there will be a return to fiction."
Hiyate agrees that readers have may have lost their appetite for literary fiction, and doesn't see the memoir trend levelling off anytime soon. Sounding like a character in a pitch meeting out of Robert Altman's 1992 film "The Player," he spouts his equation for a successful memoir: a central relationship, plus an outside element.
He reels off several books he has worked on as examples: David Gilmour's 2008 "Film Club" (father + son + movies), Kathryn Borel's 2009 "Corked" (daughter + father + wine) and Ben Errett's "Jew and Improved" (romantic partners + Judaism).
"That's my formula," he says with a laugh. "You can broadcast it, it's worked for all my books."
Hiyate says one upcoming title that makes use of the formula is Shimotakara's "The Reading List" (Variety Crossing).
"It's the story of a writer who ends up moving back to her family," he explained. "Every chapter is based on a classic book that she gives (her father) to read ... what's brilliant about the story is that she finds a way to use it to reference parts of her life that relate to that book."
Readers, in turn, continue to relate to memoirs, and will no doubt continue to snap up such titles in 2012. Collins says the reason they'll do so isn't a big mystery.
"I don't think it's a real deep puzzle why we're drawn to memoir," she said. "I think everyone is hugely curious about how other people manage to live."