Brooke Warner, my book's editor, was recently interviewed by Mediabistro.com. You have to be a paying member to read the whole piece but here's a tiny selection from it that mentions my book:
You've edited many memoirs, including Lea Aschkenas's Es Cuba: Life and Love on an Illegal Island and Sarah Katherine Lewis's Indecent: How I Make It and Fake It as a Girl for Hire. Some of them, like Spike Gillespie's Pissed Off: On Women and Anger and Ariel Meadow Stallings's Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides, use memoir as their starting point to explore larger cultural issues. What makes a given memoir right for Seal? Are any topics off-limits (such as ones you've already covered)?
Seal does a lot of hybrid memoirs. All of these books you list are memoirs, and yet Es Cuba is a travel book, Indecent is about sex work, Pissed Off is about anger, and Offbeat Bride is a nontraditional how-to book. You're right on when you say that memoir is the launching point. It's more than that, though, because it's generally the thread that carries the entire book. The reason we have so many of these types of books is because we publish women's issues and we are fans of sustained narrative (and believe that many women readers are, too). We do not do prescriptive books, so the hybrid genre is a way for us to provide something deeper — a lesson, insight, relating — to our readers without bullet points and ten-step strategies.
