Michael Cader, who tracks book deals for his electronic newsletter, Publishers Lunch, counts 295 memoirs signed by publishers last year, compared with 227 debut novels and 214 memoirs in 2006. Memoirs accounted for 12.5% of non-fiction deals, up from 10% in 2006 and 9% in 2005.

Citing two recent best sellers, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, a post-divorce travelogue, and Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle, about her bizarre parents, literary agent Amy Williams says memoirs share reality TV's voyeuristic appeal. Memoirs can "make us feel better about ourselves because whether we're honest about it or not, we all like feeling as if someone has it worse than we do, or behaved in a way we never would have," Williams says.

Agony sells, especially when touted as a true story. Of course, memoirs can be exaggerated or falsified. After acknowledging inaccuracies in his best-selling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces, James Frey is now writing a novel. "Frey gave all of us a black eye," says Janice Erlbaum, whose second memoir, Have You Found Her, is about volunteering at a homeless shelter where she once lived. In her first draft, "I went overboard trying to prove the story was true. I didn't want to leave anything out. In the end, I knew I was dealing with something stranger than fiction."