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.So instead I asked the woman if she liked the memoir."Oh yes," she said."Why?""It's so useful," she said without hesitation."That's all I needed to hear," I told her, because now I knew the answer to the judge's question: books were useful, they could produce a direct effect ― of course they could.Why else would people read them if they could not? But if that were the case, then why did my mother get rid of her books? Was it that some books were useful and some were not and weren't doing anyone any good and so why not get rid of them? Clearly my mother had read the wrong books.But I would not make that same mistake.I took my leave of the women (mostly) and the café and began wandering through the bookstore proper, making my way to the memoir section.It didn't take too long.The memoir section, it turned out, was the biggest section by far in the whole bookstore and was, in its own way, like the Soviet Union of literature, having mostly gobbled up the smaller, obsolete states of fiction and poetry.On the way there, I passed through the fiction section.I felt sorry for it immediately: it was so small, so neglected and poorly shelved, and I nearly bought a novel out of pity, but the only thing that caught my eye was something titled The Ordinary White Boy.I plucked it off the shelf.After all, I'd been an ordinary white boy once, before the killing and burning, and maybe I could be one again someday, and maybe this book could help me do it, even if it was a novel and not useful, generically speaking.On the back it said that the author was a newspaper reporter from upstate New York.I opened the novel, which began, "I was working as a newspaper reporter in upstate New York," and then I closed the book and put it back on the fiction shelf, which maybe wasn't all that different from the memoir shelf after all, and I decided never again to feel sorry for the fiction section, the way you stopped feeling sorry for Lithuania once it rolled over so easily and started speaking Russian so soon after being annexed.Anyway, I moved on to the memoir section.After browsing for a while, I knew why it had to be so big: who knew there was so much truth to be told, so much advice to give, so many lessons to teach and learn? Who knew that there were so many people with so many necessary things to say about themselves? I flipped through the sexual abuse memoirs, sexual conquest memoirs, sexual inadequacy memoirs, alternative sexual memoirs.I perused travel memoirs, ghostwritten professional athlete memoirs, remorseful hedonist rock star memoirs, twelve-step memoirs, memoirs about reading (A Reading Life: Book by Book).There were five memoirs by one author, a woman who had written a memoir about her troubled relationship with her famous fiction-writer father; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her mother; a memoir about her troubled relationship with her children; a memoir about her troubled relationship with the bottle; and finally a memoir about her more loving relationship with herself.There were several memoirs about the difficulty of writing memoirs, and even a handful of how-to-write-a-memoir memoirs: A Memoirist's Guide to Writing Your Memoir and the like.All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me ― without my even having to read them ― that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was.And then I found the memoir I was looking for, without even knowing that I was looking for it or that it even existed: A Guide to Who I Am and Who I Pretended to Be, written by Morgan Taylor, one of the bond analysts.Except according to the book he was now an ex-bond analyst.That was the first thing I found out about his life after prison (I sat right down on the floor and started reading the book, as though catching up with a long-lost friend): Morgan didn't go back to being a bond analyst."That life was dead to me now," he claimed in his memoir, without saying why it was dead or how it was ever especially alive in the first place.But in any case, instead of resuming his career as a bond analyst, he became what he called a "searcher." The first thing he did after he got out of prison was to go to South Carolina because he'd never been in South Carolina before and his inner voice said that he had to ― had to! ― visit all fifty states over the course of his lifetime.He also attended a game at every major league ballpark
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