Does Sad Sell?

That's the question recently posed by Rumpus about the glut of grief memoirs being published these days.

From the post...

There has been much discussion lately about an “onslaught” of grief memoirs. Perhaps I’m missing something, but I don’t see how 5 books, (including new works by Joyce Carol Oates, Meghan O’Rourke, and Francisco Goldman), in the course of the past 3 years qualifies as a blitz. Especially when the topic of these memoirs—death and grief—is the most universal of human experiences.

And yet, up until 2005, when Joan Didion published The Year of Magical Thinking, there were hardly any truly insightful books on the subject, something Didion discovered when she turned to reading for solace in the wake of her husband’s death. As did I. A reader and writer my whole life, I’ve always looked to books to make sense of the incomprehensible. After my husband died in the World Trade Center on September 11th, I searched for a novel or a memoir that captured the cataclysmic horror and bizarre events of grief, the details both great and small: Did other people in mourning suffer memory loss so great they’d walk out of the house without shoes? Was I the only person who found that alongside the unfathomable lows there were also depths of feeling I never could’ve appreciated before? Surely other writers, overcome by this most profound and utterly unexpected experience, had written about it in one form or another. But the only book I could find, with the exception of a couple of marginally useful self-help titles, was C.S Lewis’ A Grief Observed. An honest and beautiful portrayal of a widower’s grief, yes, but surely there are other perspectives out there? Other truths to be gleaned?

So how is it that 5 grief memoirs in three years get talked up as an abundance when at least 22 memoirs about addiction have been published in the same time span? Not to mention there have been at least 10 books featuring dogs released in the past year alone. Why is there greater interest (or perceived greater interest, I’ll get to that in a minute) in heroin addiction and daily life from a pit bull’s point of view than there is in our own mortality?