Good food for thought about why to write and how to read memoirs from the New Yorker's review of "Memoir: A History" featuring Freud, St. Augustine, Rousseau and other hoidy toidy references you'd expect from the NYer.

They don't mention that right now it's next to impossible to sell a memoir in a publishing market that insiders are calling 'brutal'. Or that in the post-Kiss & Running With Scissors environment, you either need to be pretty famous or have a giant meat hook to hang your book on.

But they do offer a bonus podcast about phony memoirs and the enduring popularity of the form.

As a book coach and writing consultant, I have worked on a number of proposals with authors and agents, and almost every one is different. They vary pretty widely with the particulars of the project. Nonetheless, some guidelines are useful, so here is a good model, courtesy of Judy Brown, journalist (LA Weekly), author (The Comedy Thesaurus) and editor (National Lampoon Books).

Of course the entire publishing industry is in such chaos and contraction right now that pretty much all bets - and rules - are off, so if this outline somehow doesn't serve to convey what's so great about your project... don't use it.

HUMOR BOOK PROPOSALS, IN SHORT

Each of the below sections can be a couple paragraphs, or a page (at most) in length (With the exception of your sample chapter, which might reflect an actual chapter’s length.)

These are guidelines, so don’t get too hung up on the particulars, and you can skip the least important aspects.

The most important sections: