![]() ![]() ![]() In a 10-year period, some of America's best writing about childhood, families, secrets, and survival was born - Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted (1993), Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Colored People (1994), Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart (1994), and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes (1996), just to name a few. ![]() Suddenly, it was okay to call your folks what they were - drunks, molesters, emotional abusers, or simply suffocatingly old-fashioned. The memoir bloomed in 1988 with Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior - or maybe the next year when Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life came out. Or maybe talk shows, TV court, and real-life cop videos got us hooked on seeing someone else suffer up close. Maybe the memoir is the more artistic sibling of the decade's self-help books that taught us the dances of anger, forgiveness, and love. The Decade of Truth - that's what readers and people who love to categorize the things we read will call the 1990s, when writers excavated their souls and readers came running to see what strange new creature might be pulled from the wreckage. ![]()
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