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."

In a letter to the Washington Post, Golden says, "No storyteller or journalist is ever exact enough or an expert." He goes on to say, "It's worth bearing in mind that 'Hamlet' makes poor Danish history and that 'Lawrence of Arabia' grossly oversimplifies the politics and cultures of the Middle East."

The Post had previously run an article quoting experts who criticized the accuracy of costumes and dancing in the film. The new box office movie is based on Golden's novel and traces a girl's rise from poverty in a Japanese fishing village to life in high society as a geisha.

Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha moved from No. 8 to No. 5 on the Fiction Chart after selling 43,000 units last week. The movie adaptation, which went into limited release on Dec. 9, stars Chinese actresses Ziyi Zhang and Michelle Yeoh and will open nationwide Dec. 23. On Tuesday, the film adaptation received two Golden Globe nominations (Ziyi Zhang for Best Performance By An Actress In A Motion Picture–Drama and John Williams for Best Original Score–Motion Picture). "Geisha was written by an American-Jewish guy," producer Doug Wick told The Hollywood Reporter. "He wrote a book that was popular around the world but not well known in Japan. The story itself leapt past any national barriers."

"Rob and I started meeting for about six weeks," she told me. "I went to New York and we met on a daily basis. Essentially, the goal was to make an outline and out of that outline the film would or would not be green lit. So it was a very full outline. It was about 70 pages. It was essentially a screenplay without dialogue. We went to Japan after that. We went to Kyoto for two weeks to try and get a better grasp of this culture that was so foreign to both of us.

In writing "Geisha," Swicord said her approach wasn't the same as it had been on earlier screenplays for films like "Little Women" or "Practical Magic." "I wrote this in a different way than I've ever worked before," she pointed out, "because I was brought in after the director. Almost always with the films I worked on I work alone for a long time, having meetings with the producer, going through a kind of development process, sometimes meeting with the studio, but essentially I'm the only creative person on (the project), usually for a very long time. And then the director comes and there's this kind of interesting transition where the director tries to understand what it is that I'm trying to put forward and I'm trying to understand this director's vision of the project. And, frankly, that is an area where, often you see not just in my life, but in many writers' lives, where trouble begins -- where there is not a melding of visions. Sometimes the studio can be very surprised that the project that they've so carefully developed for such a long time will turn out very differently because that transition didn't happen with the director.

"In this case, this director, Rob Marshall, had a very clear vision of the film. He had a clear vision when I met him even though he didn't talk about it. When he and I started work, it became really apparent to me that he completely grasped the novel. He knew every single page of it. I've actually worked with directors who are directing an adaptation that I wrote who had never read the original novel. He knew every word that Arthur Golden had written. Mostly what we did together was I would put forward some ideas. He would describe images to me. We would put those things together in kind of an outline form and then I would sort of make recommendations about structure and the shape of a scene or whether I thought something was needed or not. It was a real collaboration. He listened to me. I listened to him."