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Composer and East Village legend Philip Glass has sold a memoir, to Norton's Liveright & Company. Word on the street has it that the text is extremely repetitive but amazingly modulated. (Alternate joke: his studio staff is just going to run around the office and pick up a bunch of scraps he's left behind and stitch them into a complete manuscript. (Well? God bless!)) No but seriously, love you, Mr. Glass!

Wow, the delightful Grace Coddington, the creative director at Vogue, has turned back time to 1996 or 2004 or somewhere in there and allegedly sold a memoir to Random House for the low seven figures: the Observer is saying $1.2 million. Now this is a book I would read! (Like, when they send me the galley. I'm not saying I'd buy it.) This is a book that perhaps, maybe, you would read—loving, as you do, Condé Nast intriguers and swinging London in the 60s and various accounts of eccentricity. And, but, well... did she even kill anyone and/or become a prostitute? (I mean... perhaps she did! And/or will before her book deadline!) But this is Sarah Palin book money—the kind of money even Palin won't get again, after her second book wildly underperformed her first, except of course until she becomes First Lady President of America, USA, and we give her all of everyone's book money.

Inexplicable east coast elite media obsession and former assistant Jon-Jon Goulian—"another of the season's publishing darlings"! "the cross-dressing literary sensation"! "a kind of mascot for the city’s literary A-list"! says the New York Times, in three different articles, apart from his memoir's two reviews in the paper—is apparently a $700,000 bust for Random House. "The book has sold 957 copies in its first month, according to sources with access to Nielsen BookScan, which monitors 50 to 75 percent of total sales. Insiders say Random House would have to move about 200,000 copies to see a profit. The hardcover was ranked at a lowly No. 116,210 on Amazon yesterday," says today's Page Six. And then the publishing industry abruptly stood up as one and decided to stop overspending on ridiculous advances for things that make no sense! Nope, you guessed it: totally kidding about that.

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"[T]here are good reasons to embark on a memoir: the world and the self collide in a particular way that only you, or mostly you, can narrate; you would like a preemptive grab at controlling the discourse. For instance: Are you Winston Churchill? Are you Nixon in China? Are you Pat Nixon in China? Did you compose Nixon in China? (Its composer, John Adams, has in fact written an engaging memoir.) Are you connected to a fascinating and underexplored chapter in history in any manner whatever? Are you a professional storyteller with a beautiful prose style and some autobiography begging for reportage? Are you a trenchant thinker with incisive analytical powers? Do you have a social cause you would like to advocate strenuously? And if none of the above, are you Brigitte Bardot?" READ MORE

In the most-recent New York Times Book Review came an attack on the memoir. Well, technically it was an attack on the memoir written by anyone outside the circle of the “memoir-eligible.” It goes: "There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir," and then proceeds to savage three recent memoirs. The author, Neil Genzlinger, yearned for a now-distant day, when “unremarkable lives went unremarked upon, the way God intended." READ MORE

This morning the New York Times hinted that Dick Cheney was still working on his memoir, even while he decides whether to get a heart transplant. Well, that makes sense: because while it was originally slated for this spring, we've learned that Dick Cheney's memoir will now not arrive until August 30th of this year. Cheney will find himself in good company. Other books from the Simon and Schuster imprint, Threshold Editions, to be released this year include, in July, Pamela Geller's The Post-American Presidency, which "critically examines the Obama administration’s ominous and revealing moves against our basic freedoms, particularly as he seizes control of the three engines of the American economy." Also Laura Ingraham's The Obama Diaries, and Jack Cashill's Deconstructing Obama, which asks: "What if Barack Obama's life story is more myth than fact?" Yes, what if?