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I listened to her talk at Google on YouTube, which had a journalistic tone and was quite interesting. The part where she manages to show the kids Harry Potter o

I listened to her talk at Google on YouTube, which had a journalistic tone and was quite interesting. The part where she manages to show the kids Harry Potter over the objections of the censors and the evangelicals who want to show Narnia is amusing. If you look at the reviews of the book on GoodReads though, you get the idea that she spends a lot of it writing about how much she misses her boyfriend in NYC and other aspects of her personal experience not related to the subject. If it was to be a treated as journalism, those aspects would likely have been edited out, and probably not added in the first place. So, she did write something that was partially a memoir. Journalism is a bit more of a purist category, so memoir seems like the right choice for this book as it stands, however, it might have been better received if it were written as purely journalism.

mcphage 10y ago
If her publisher felt that what she wrote was veering too much into memoir territory, perhaps asking her editor to excise those segments would have been a better option than recategorizing it.
- jwebb99 10y ago
  Why? There's nothing wrong with an investigative journalism-memoir hybrid. The only reason to remove the memoir-ish aspects of her books is because some don't find the genre respectable or prestigious regardless of a book's merit.
  - macspoofing 10y ago
    >The only reason to remove the memoir-ish aspects of her books is because some don't find the genre respectable or prestigious regardless of a book's merit. Truth be told, I didn't realize a memoir was something not respectable.
- gwern 10y ago
  If her publisher thinks memoirs are more profitable, why on earth would they ask her to remove the memoir bits?