Let me be the last—the absolute dead last—to point out that we're in the midst of a memoir craze. My favorite form of procrastination used to be computer solitaire, but now I prefer to chat on the phone with my writing friends and discuss the ongoing boom in autobiographical literature. We speculate like housing developers prognosticating on the real estate market. Will the bubble pop? Will prices continue to rise? Will market trends ever again veer toward literary fiction?

For those weary of the memoir boom, take comfort in the support of your forefathers: Faulkner wished "to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books." When Maupassant refused to have his portrait appear in a series of paintings of famous writers, his comment was that "a man's private life and his face do not belong in public." And Flaubert once said, "The artist must make posterity believe he never lived."

The artist must make posterity believe he never lived?

While the literary purist may find comfort or, at the very least, a kind of implicit support in the words of Flaubert and company, he'll also find that the joke is on him. One hundred and fifty years after Flaubert lived, and seventy-seven years after the publication of Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, the publishing industry increasingly resembles the façade of Hollywood, a world where only certain kinds of artists get their names on the marquee. To boot, before acquiring a book, publishers have already begun to factor in the potential media persona of a publishable author. In her report for the National Arts Journalism Program, Best and Worst of Times: The Changing Business of Trade Books, 1975–2002, Gayle Feldman, a veteran of the publishing industry since 1976 and a recent contributor to Publishers Weekly, wrote that "whether publishers like to admit it or not, an author's telegenicity, promotability, and age enter increasingly into the acquisition equation, particularly for new authors whose careers need to be ‘made.'"

Though Feldman herself doesn't make the argument, the connection to the memoir trend can be directly drawn from her observation: For new authors concerned with their hoped-for star magnetism, memoir becomes the publishing world's version of reality television. The best way to sell one's story is to sell one's story. Laura Albert and Geoffrey Knoop—the Martha and George who "conceived" JT LeRoy—did just that, creating a character whose grim life experience held such prurient appeal that even some of our most celebrated writers and editors couldn't resist the package.

The pressure emerging writers face to sell themselves is compounded by the depression of literary fiction in the market today. It is stressed over and over again, at literary conferences and in MFA programs, that publishers are no longer buying short story collections. As if that weren't troublesome enough, emerging writers today are often told that literary novels remain on the chopping block at most publishing houses. The message has led to a growing anxiety among young writers, many of whom now ask themselves, "How do I become a published writer?" rather than the time-honored question, "How do I become a better writer?"

The paradox that further intensifies this anxiety is that MFA programs are proliferating, rabbitlike, every year, graduating more and more would-be published authors. Furthermore, the numbers at several programs suggest that prose applications almost double those of poetry. So there are more and more prose writers (anxiously wondering how to get published) entering a marketplace that, increasingly, tosses traditional narrative fiction in favor of memoir.

To be fair, most writers (MFA-bound or not) have embraced or at least come to terms with the writing life—and the dedication to the art form it requires. Still, we aspiring writers are nothing if not tenacious, and ever more ambitious. While the names James Frey, Nasdijj, and JT LeRoy will surely go down as catchphrases for fabrication in the memoir genre, my growing fear is that those writers may only exist as the extreme cases among a generation (admittedly, my own generation) of writers who are tempted to dangerously and falsely exoticize their identities for the purpose of promoting themselves to agents and editors. As more and more emerging writers are warned—often before pen has even hit paper—of the difficulties they'll face with agents and publishing companies, more of them will inevitably be seduced into presenting themselves as rare birds (albeit supremely marketable ones).

These days, not only must the literary purist make posterity believe he did indeed live, but if he wants to find an agent, receive a decent advance, get published by a name house, and endear himself to a marketing and publicity team that will ensure a prime spot on the front table at Barnes & Noble, positioning his book to climb the sales ranks and thus securing a contract for his next book, he needs to make posterity believe—by writing it in his latest memoir—that he lived more dysfunctionally, more tragically, more multiculturally, more exotically than anyone else.

It's a pressure I've experienced firsthand (and the irony of leaning on personal experience to bolster my argument does not escape me.) Over a month ago, while visiting Seattle, I ran into an old friend with whom I had attended my MFA program. She and I hadn't been in touch over the last couple of years, so we caught up on people we both know: the woman who had finally sold her novel, the guy who had bagged it all for a law degree, and the two poets who had married each other. When we got around to chatting about our latest writing projects, she asked me, without mincing words, why my novel wasn't an autobiographically inspired story of a young Iranian-American woman.

"That's so big right now. You could get published—like that!" she said with a snap of her fingers.

Our conversation wasn't the first I'd had on this subject. About midway into my MFA degree, right on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I came to fully realize how my ethnicity and its appeal in the literary marketplace potentially threatens me as an emerging writer. As a first-generation American, the daughter of Iranian parents, I've been advised by peers, professors, two agents, and one editor to cash in on the latest boom in Middle Eastern literature, particularly in memoir-driven literature. In a way it makes sense. I can almost see the display at Barnes & Noble, where my book would be placed next to Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (Random House, 2003), Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (PublicAffairs, 2005), and Marjane Satrapi's truly remarkable graphic novel, Persepolis (Pantheon Books, 2003). The problem is that I can't in the least imagine the book I'd have to pen in order to be given a place in that company. Would it have lots of italicized foreign words interspersed throughout the prose? Would I open with a passage on veiled women and Persian rugs? None of my advisers has ever paused when I admit that my understanding of Iranian culture is mostly limited to my favorite Iranian foods. Additionally, my grasp of the Persian language is, at its very best, limited to casual conversation (with a particular emphasis on the dirty words my mother teaches me). In these moments I truly wonder if, to my colleagues, I am an Iranian first—all the evidence of my innate Westernness notwithstanding—and a writer second.

I have a feeling I'm not the only one.

When news broke this past spring that nineteen-year-old Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan had allegedly plagiarized passages for her novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (Little, Brown, 2006), my first reaction was one of pity.

Appropriation aside, the circus surrounding Viswanathan—which sprang up even before the allegations of plagiarism were made public—illustrates just how much the publishing industry takes its cues from the film industry. Here was an articulate, stunningly pretty young woman willing to produce a chick-lit novel based on her own experience of growing up as a "super-serious" Indian teenager in suburban America. In addition to her youth, smarts, and girl appeal, Viswanathan's ethnic background would have been enough to make any savvy editor—betting on Western culture's more recent embrace of all things Bollywood—salivate. Kaavya Viswanathan should have been a triple-count slam dunk.

True, beyond a writing talent she may or may not actually possess, Viswanathan never falsified anything about her identity. She is, in fact, young, a Harvard student (at least at the time of this writing), and Indian. What makes her story similar to the other literary hoaxes of 2006—and therefore connected to any discussion about memoir and autobiographical fiction—is that in her case, too, the book's publisher was selling the potential star quality of the writer more than the actual book: The "character" of the artist became the most important commodity, the art itself relegated to mere incident, a tedious yet necessary stepping-stone on the way to a much-touted authorial debut.

My pity for Viswanathan stems from a belief that she is not wholly responsible for the scandal. No doubt playing on the vanity of an incredibly young writer, it's quite probable that the more seasoned adults in her life (agents, editors, book packagers, and, perhaps, even parents) convinced Viswanathan that she could and should sell her story—and quickly!—for the sake of literature, her career, and multicultural teenagers the country over. While no one forced her to plagiarize (or, depending on which story you believe, unconsciously internalize) passages from Megan McCafferty's novels, the seduction of being a published author, one recognized for her exotic, youthful image, was, inarguably, a potent temptation.

Had Viswanathan never cheated, would her book have opened the door to a locust of young writers selling ethnic memoirs? And, since the message regarding the scandal surrounding her book is—as one of my undergraduate creative writing students at Oberlin aptly put it—that "plagiarism sucks," will we yet see a population of writers finding their way toward a book deal via their exotic personas and not through the writing itself? Had Nasdijj not been caught, would more writers—in the tradition of Forrest Carter—have appropriated Native American culture? Finally, despite Frey's exaggerated tendencies, will more writers get stuck on the idea of selling their images, selling some unique part of their stories, simply to get published, simply because memoirs are trendy?

The popularity of the memoir genre comes as no real surprise to anyone paying moderate attention. With the onslaught of reality television, day-time talk shows, and tabloid journalism, it's become clear that American culture is increasingly voyeuristic, intent upon knowing the lurid, private details of the life of almost anyone it comes across. Perhaps it's because we're just a bunch of gossips. Or perhaps it's because we feel a direct connection to an artist when we know that this film or that book relates events the artist personally experienced. As a friend, one immersed in his own work of (non-memoir-based) creative nonfiction, recently suggested to me, one of the reasons nonfiction is so popular right now is because readers want "to go on a journey with the author." This same friend also suggested that autobiographical fiction, like Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), is powerful as much for the fact that the author personally experienced the events as for the events themselves.

To be fair, there is some historical precedence for our proclivity toward voyeurism. Supposedly, prostitutes and libertines in eighteenth-century France penned the first memoirs. The "scandalous memoirs," as they were called, described in striking detail the exploits of the sexual underworld. Regularly and widely distributed, the leaflets enjoyed great popularity, due almost entirely to their attention to naughty gossip. In our own culture, there is a significant and weighty history behind the genre. African American biographies developed from slave narratives; Helen Keller wrote about living with neither sight nor hearing ability; military leaders recorded their war exploits. More recently, memoirs like James McBride's The Color of Water (Riverhead Books, 1996) describe the experience of growing up in a biracial family; Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (Knopf, 2002) tells of the author's virtual escape from the patriarchal dominance of an eastern Montana ranch. Whether lurid or poignant, triumphant or tragic, memoir, in its purest form, enables a writer to uncover those aspects of our culture that have eluded us.

Trouble occurs when writers cave in to the seduction of the memoir market, viewing it as a jumping-off point, a vehicle to market themselves as up-and-coming authors (exotic by virtue of heritage or experience, or both). Do emerging writers have a choice? Would we, my friend in Seattle and I and all our peers, have logged hours crouched over the keyboard if we had been told that, unless we were willing to create a mythology around ourselves and write about that, we wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell of being published?

Well, probably. That was the risk we took, the risk we continue to take. At some point or another, every emerging writer comes to the realization that time is finite, that writing may never "earn" its place in our lives, that the novel we've spent the last year on may need to be written all over again, that we might have to go back to school, that maybe we don't want these risks after all. Nevertheless, current marketing trends that stress the importance of the writer's star quality can seduce a writer into stretching the boundaries of his identity, allowing it to fit neatly into an attractive publishing niche. What's the fallout? Little by little, as editors become marketing experts and novels become memoirs, writers will increasingly become sales technicians, and the artists themselves, along with their art, will be lost to posterity.

Azita Osanloo received her MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula and is a regular contributor to the Missoula Independent. She has taught writing and literature at the University of Montana and Oberlin College and is currently at work on her first novel.