I have no problems with D. Parvas’s disdain for “wasted youth” memoirs (Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Rolling Away: My Agony With Ecstasy), but I’ve a number of problems with Parvas’s plot-based prescription for the genre:

Yup. That’s all you gotta do for a book deal — pop some pills.

I could have sworn you had to actually do something impressive, like, say win a Nobel Prize (like physicist Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!) or at least have an extraordinary story to tell (like Jeannette Walls’ Glass Castle or Marjane Satrapi’s two-volume Persepolis)….

As one who reads for thoughts and language and rarely plot, I’d like to suggest that the boring and insignificant among us can sometimes write worthy memoirs, too. Edmund White’s Story of a Boy didn’t require Appalachia; Woolf’s diaries didn’t require Iran. More importantly: we deem A Bell Jar worthy reading despite its similarities in subject matter to Elizabeth Wurtzel’s much-loathed Prozac Nation.

By critiquing recent memoirs in terms of what their writers have or haven’t lived through, Parvas sets up the wrong axis for measuring autobiographies’ worth. If anything, Parvas’s preference for certain types (and amounts) of experience mirrors the same disinterest in the language and quality of a memoirist’s introspection that “wasted youth” memoirs 1) encourage and 2) are encouraged by.