What If?

Lorrie Moore

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History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life
by Jill Bialosky
Atria, 252 pp., $24.00

The Long Goodbye
by Meghan O’Rourke
Riverhead, 306 pp., $25.95

Dear Marcus: Speaking to the Man Who Shot Me
by Jerry McGill
iUniverse, 116 pp., $13.95 (paper)

That many young people are already writing their memoirs is no longer a funny thing to say but an actual cultural condition. Book buyers have nudged publishers in this direction: we love to read memoirs. Why shouldn’t we? At a dinner party is not the fiction, which consists predominantly and unfortunately of abbreviated film plots, protracted jokes, and urban myths, less mesmerizing than the real-life tales? It would be heartless not to be interested in memoirs.

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