by Kelly Pickerill
If you’ve ever wondered what we at Lemuria do behind those old DOS computers all day, I’m going to let you in on some behind-the-scenes bookstore secrets. Once the Christmas rush is over, through the doldrums of summer (come in the store, people!), we take the books off the shelves, look them up, see what’s sold and what’s not, return some, and move others.
The cool thing about that is we sometimes think up new ways of grouping the books. This time, I’m working with memoir. Memoir’s not a new category by any means, but it is one that Lemuria’s done without for quite a while. We had a 
biography section years ago, I’m told, but it eventually got distributed throughout the store, so Faulkner bios got shelved with Faulkner’s books in southern fiction, so the Churchill biography was able to be with the British history books, so the Patton biography was placed in World War II.
But what about the memoir? What about those biographies that, though they aren’t about remarkable figures in history, nevertheless speak to everyman by either carving out a fascinating though little-known life, or fascinatingly carving out an ordinary one?
Well, now they have a place. (It’s in the psychology and business nook behind the front desk.) And just to prove how much we needed this grouping of like-minded books, now I’ll show you how much we love ‘em.
Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr both came to Lemuria in the past year. They were brilliant! Here are Lisa and Norma on Jeannette, and Billie on Mary Karr. We’ve had visits from Andre Dubus III and Mark Richard (click here for Lisa’s blog), and though their memoirs still live in the fiction room with their novels, you may find a copy or two in the memoir section. Rodney Crowell and our own Teresa Nicholas — the new section is six shelves and growing! Come in to get a peek at someone else’s dirty laundry, find out about that ill-fated relationship, read that story of hope despite the worst odds.
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