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Now to today’s essay.
Something strange happened the decade I made my entry into the book world ( the 1990s)
Previously journalism had favoured discretion and objectivity. The author was outside of the story. There was the highly personal journalism found in the music press, influenced by the New Journalism pionered by Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thomson and others in America. But in the mainstream UK newspapers, the old paradigm of ‘objectivity’; largely stuck. ‘Personal’ columns, if they appeared at all, mainly appeared in the ‘women’s pages’
In the 90’s everything changed - partly as the result of the success of a number of remarkable and very frank memoirs. They included Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch’, Blake Morrison’s ‘And When Did You Lost See Your Father’ and Mary Karr’s ‘The Liar’s Club’ . My own, ‘The Scent of Dried Roses’, about the suicide of my mother and my struggles with depression, appeared in 1996 and won the PEN Award for Autobiography ( It is now a Penguin Modern Classic)
This shift in publishing was reflected in a shift in journalism. The personal was suddenly the popular. A great crowd of writers were commissioned by newspapers to fess up about their private life.
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