What Stories are Told and Heard
by jessf
I work in a bookstore. Having already enrolled in this course, I began to notice the amount of biographies and memoirs that went through my till this holiday season. There were a lot; the two most popular were I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education And Was Shot By The Taliban by Malala Yousafzai and An Astronaut’s Guide to Life by Chris Hadfield. The store had hundreds of copies of both of these books. They were placed in multiple locations throughout the store to ensure that customers would be able to find them. And, due to spots on talk shows, magazine blurbs, and traditional print advertisements describing their authors as “inspiring” and “extraordinary”, many people came in looking specifically for these books. These two life narratives were marketed as stories worth telling and worth reading and by purchasing the books the public appeared to agree this belief. Just like a Facebook status is affirmed and validated by the amount of comments posted in response, a life narrative in the physical form of a book is economically validated by the amount of copies it sells. The more copies that sold, the more were sent in to replenish the stock, the more the book was placed under the spotlight.
It brings to mind the idea of “filter bubbles” that Eli Pariser puts forth in his 2011 TED Talk “Beware online “filter bubbles”“. It is not only invisible, online algorithms that decide which stories take precedence. Stories are marginalized in a variety of ways, particularly through marketing. Although network broadcasters, television producers, publishers, and retailers do not create a personalized bubble in the same way that search engines and social media sites do, they attempt to supply us with what we want, which often means feeding us the same stories and stereotypes that we already consume. I would argue that there is a similar danger in this marketing as in the algorithm filter bubble that Pariser suggests. He suggests that algorithms do not have the same embedded ethics that broadcasters had at the onset of journalism. However, a look at the marketing machine that surrounds the release of a memoir begs the question if these embedded ethics have been pushed aside in favour of economic gain. (I may explore the question of ethics and commodification further in regards to the publishing of crowd-sourced life narratives, including PostSecret, Six-Word Memoir, and the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange .)
Economic power plays a role in which stories find an audience. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” describes how the ways stories are told and received is often a matter of power. She states, “How [stories] are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told are really dependent on power.” Like Pariser, she reminds her audience that there is a danger to only hearing one type of story or life. For Adichie that danger is the re-enforcement of stereotypes which are incomplete and “robs people of dignity.” We like to think of this time as an era in which all stories are told and heard. Facebook, Twitter, and Six-Word Memoir all market the idea that all our stories are worth sharing. However, in reality, many stories, memoirs, or life narratives are pushed to the margins through access and marketing, both online and in traditional print forms.
Jess,
Great post! I found your insights very evocative; it’s so easy to think, with the onset of social media, that there’s been a broadening of life narratives being told. But is this actually the case, or just what they, those in control of the economic side, want us to believe? Has the boom in memoir, which appears to be showcasing new and unique stories from marginalized voices, really just carefully selected to reiterate the same story over and over again?
I myself am a major in the creative writing program at UBC. Currently I am enrolled in a class called Careers in Creative Writing. From this class, I can offer a little insight into some of these questions.
I naively entered the class thinking what I’m sure every writer thinks; if you are a good enough writer, your work will be published. That’s it, end of discussion. However, as you’ve aptly pointed out, the book industry is an industry, and as such, needs to meet certain demands. My professor told us the first day that when it comes to the pile of manuscripts publishers receive, those whose authors have ‘connections’ find their way to the top of that pile fairly quick. In that way, the publishing world is biased. It affords more reading time (that is more amount of pages read of a manuscript) to stories of friends of friends, business partners of business partners, thus bettering their chances at getting published. However, when a publisher came into talk to us the other week, he did tell us that, on occasion, a piece at the bottom of the pile gets read, and is selected to be published based on it’s literary quality. It’s published simply because it was captivating.
So yes, it is easy to forget that life narratives are the product of a business. They will most certainly be chosen to fit the needs of the market. But that doesn’t mean that marginalized voices, if they tell their story well enough, won’t get published as well.
Thanks so much for your response and your insight into the publishing industry. I am very interested to see what insights we will find as a class as we complete our assigned reports and look in physical and online bookstores. I think we will both be able to build on thoughts that we’ve had here.