Ordinary People

I have lately (in the last several years) become a fan of memoirs by "regular" people who have interesting things to say that aren't necessarily heart- and gut-wrenching. That is, they aren't about some heroic struggle against insurmountable odds or some horrible illness. I've read about a woman who used to be a model and now runs a vintage clothing store, a woman whose life story and family history are told by the clothes in her closet, a young man who celebrates his wife who died much too soon and the music they shared, and a college student with a passion for kungfu that was strong enough to compel him to travel to China to study with Shaolin monks.

All of these books are proof that you certainly don't need to be famous to lead an interesting life. The fascination with famous people is their presumed distance from "the rest of us," but the interest in these memoirs by people who are not famous comes from the connection with someone who may have had interesting or unusual experiences but is nevertheless a whole lot like the person reading the book.

Many readers, myself included, look for "real" characters in the fiction that they read and criticize authors or works which do not deliver or don't live up to expectations. Well, the people in these memoirs are decidedly real, and the stories they tell certainly make for entertaining reading without having to be sensationalized tell-all confessions.