For the Glory of Nobodies

When Jane Fonda's new book, My Life So Far, lands atop bestseller lists nationwide next week, after just one week in print, nobody is likely to be surprised. After all, it's hard to miss with a memoir by an Oscar-winning actress, fitness queen, former wife of a famous dissident, then of a media tycoon, a woman who remains a lightning rod wherever a certain American war is discussed. She's also, at 67, still beautiful. And let's face it, even the most anxious publishing exec couldn't help but be cheered by the news that an ex-Marine waited in line 90 minutes to get his book signed before spewing the obliging author with tobacco juice. Jane has the right stuff, and the celebrity memoir—I'm thinking Tatum O'Neal, Lauren Bacall, Michael J. Fox—are as close as we get in this industry to a sure thing.

But it's a far, far riskier and braver thing to publish what have come to be known as the "nobody memoirs," those recollections by more or less ordinary folks who just believe they have a story to tell. In recent years, there have been dozens and dozens of them, mostly forgettable. The successes—all delightfully unique—range from Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club to James Frey's A Million Little Pieces and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Coming along next month is another memoir of an unknown person, and it might be one of the best of the lot. Oh the Glory of It All by McSweeney's editor-at-large Sean Wilsey is a doorstop of a book that is described on the jacket as "memoir as bildungsroman as explosion." In less confusing language: it's a long, intricate, rueful and ultimately winning story of a poor little San Francisco rich boy.

What makes Wilsey's book so likable, and so likely to find success, is not his fame quotient, which falls somewhere between nil and reflected (his mother was a San Francisco society fixture and columnist, his father a wealthy businessman who'd slept with the likes of Danielle Steel). Wilsey is merely himself, albeit, as a McSweeney's vet, a "friend of Dave's" (which may or may not count for something.) His story is not as outrageous as, say, that of Augusten Burroughs in Running with Scissors nor as scandalous as Kathryn Harrison's daddy dalliance in The Kiss. But the story's relative normalcy—misunderstanding parents, albeit very rich ones, school troubles, medium-level new-ageness—is one of its better features. That, and the fact that Wilsey, even more than Eggers, has a compelling voice, and an approach that, though sometimes grating, always seems honest.

I say "seems" because I don't know for sure. I don't know Wilsey, and I have no idea if the stories he tells are true or not. Being little known outside his immediate circle, Wilsey theoretically could get away with saying just about anything without getting spat upon by a stranger. Perhaps that's the secret power of the "nobody memoir." On the one hand, because the narrator isn't famous, he can be less rigorous with the facts of his life, and tell a tale more creatively, in a fresher voice. Or perhaps it's necessity: while Jane Fonda (or her ghost writer) can simply recount names and dates, and people will pay for it, someone like Wilsey has to be both an entertaining writer and at least truthful enough to be believable.

How does a publisher know if a nobody memoir will sink or swim? He doesn't. "With noncelebrity memoirs, it seems like of every 30 you publish, one might work," says a longtime publishing executive. But Wilsey's story had to have something special: there were at least half a dozen houses interested in the proposal shopped by agent David McCormick back in 2000. (Ann Godoff, then at Random House, preempted for six figures immediately. By the time the book was written, she had moved to Penguin, and she'd taken Wilsey with her. ) Still, pieces in Vogue and the New Yorker and an announced first printing of 80,000 are no guarantee of success.

But my guess is that Sean Wilsey may well end up with a mega-bestseller, like his blurber Dave Eggers, or like that of another so-called nobody memoirist from the last century who, with a modest advance and a lower-than-Wilsey first printing, wrote lovingly about his own painful childhood. That writer? An unknown English teacher by the name of Frank McCourt.