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COPYRIGHT 2006 Daily News
Byline: Michele Ingrassia
Jan. 30--Once upon a time, writers ate too much, drank too much, went on exotic adventures -- and then wrote about it.
Now, the juicy memoir has given way to gimmick-lit: Spend a year saying yes to every guy who asks you out. Spend a year not shopping. Or make every recipe in Julia Childs' "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." Now write about it.
These books are the literary equivalent of reality shows -- think "Survivor" and "The Bachelor," says Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University.
"The reality show is a totally contrived, totally invented universe -- none of these people would be in that bachelor pad or on that island if it weren't for the show," he says. "And it introduced a new mutation into the culture, which is this experimental way of telling a story. And in many ways, that is reality."
Of course, participatory journalism wasn't born yesterday. It's at least as old as "Black Like Me," John Howard Griffin's 1959 tale of posing as a black man in the Deep South, and as frisky as "Paper Lion," George Plimpton's book about his month scrimmaging with the Detroit Lions.
Which isn't to suggest that these sliver-of-life books...
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