Mark Winegardner, a novelist and professor at the University, said that aspiring writers should read 200 to 300 books for every one that they plan to write. The novelist Stephen King has written, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time (or tools) to write.” Through poor writing, the memoirist is only aping the form and their subject. This only adds to the endless proliferation of these books which, in dealing with serious human issues through bland, cliched, uninspired writing, serve only to trivialize those issues, and to make them, in the ocean of half-hearted descriptions, all the more difficult to understand and relate to.
