Serial Memoirs

I'll read pretty much any memoir, because I find it interesting to see how people take the raw and meaningless material of their lives and slap into narrative shape. However, I think we should call a moratorium on serial memoirizing. Too often a writer puts out a really excellent, juicy memoir (like Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss, which is about her affair with her father (!)), and then, once she's established herself as a memoirist, follows it up with one or more lesser books that cover very similar ground (Harrison's The Mother Knot). These follow-up memoirs tend to toss together lots of unrelated material in a fragmented fashion, and almost always include therapy scenes, in which we are forced to watch the writer healing from the traumas of the other books. Okay, I'm banning therapy scenes, too.

How about this: from now on everyone (even those of us with nice parents and no drug problems) gets exactly one memoir. After that, you have to move on to other people.