The MAY Newsletter: Somewhere between the collapse of attention spans, the rise of artificial intelligence, the return of world wars to the nightly news, and trying to remember why we walked into the kitchen, a curious thing has happened in publishing: older women have quietly reclaimed the memoir shelf.

Forgive me for not honouring my intention to send these notes monthly. Like many of you, I seem to have spent the first half of the year ricocheting between headlines about world wars and rising civil disobedience, economic anxiety, and rolling infrastructural collapse. I have the increasingly disorientating feeling that I’m ageing in the middle of a civilisation-wide software update we really didn’t ask for. Did we?

Somewhere between load-shedding schedules, unread articles, broken municipal promises, and trying to remember why I walked into my kitchen, winter has arrived and caught me in my bathing suit. Perhaps this is the true beginning of Generation Jones senility: not forgetting names, but forgetting entire seasons.

For those unfamiliar with the term, “Generation Jones” refers roughly to those born between 1954 and 1965, We’re the cohort wedged uneasily between the Baby Boomers and Generation X. We are the analogue children who became digital adults; old enough to remember encyclopaedias and Cold War drills, young enough to have survived social media with at least partial irony intact.

Which brings me to a line from Patti Smith that feels increasingly appropriate:

“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.”

That tension, between abandon and survival, memory and reinvention, may explain why memoirs by Generation Jones women have become some of the most commercially successful and emotionally resonant books of recent years.

One of the strongest publishing trends of the past year has been the continued success of memoirs and memoir-adjacent fiction written by women from this cohort. Unlike younger autofiction, which can sometimes feel emotionally performative or digitally mediated, many Generation Jones memoirs carry the weight of long hindsight.

Some of the most commercially visible and critically discussed memoirs of the past year included:

• Matriarch by Tina Knowles
• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
• Paper Girl by Beth Macy
• Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

Alongside these newer titles, readers and book clubs continued returning to established voices such as Annie Ernaux, Mary Karr, Patti Smith, and Susanna Kaysen.

For emerging authors, especially first-time memoirists, there are several lessons worth observing:
1. Readers are still hungry for authentic life writing.
2. Age is not a disadvantage.
3. Specificity creates universality.
4. Voice matters more than perfection.
5. The boundary between memoir and fiction continues to blur.

And so, cautiously, to the question of writing in the age of AI. Recently, in conversation with publishing CEO Jon Yaged on David Perell’s podcast, Yaged made a point that stayed with me: creativity is not an algorithm. It cannot be reduced entirely to pattern recognition, prediction, or automated synthesis.

That feels important. For all the justified panic around artificial intelligence, writing remains one of the last places where the outsider, the eccentric, the witness, the socially inconvenient observer, still possesses authority. Machines can imitate consensus frighteningly well. What they cannot fully replicate is the deeply human act of noticing. A memoir is accumulated noticing and remembering: Contradiction. Humiliation. Survival. Tone. Silence. Regret. Timing. Memory.

Never in our lifetime has the world changed this quickly, this continuously, or this noisily. We were born into rotary telephones and televised moon landings, came of age during the Cold War, survived the arrival of the internet, social media, permanent outrage, algorithmic identity, and now find ourselves struggling to distinguish human voice from machine mimicry.
No wonder so many of us have retreated to, or cling to, memoir. It’s a way of grounding ourselves in continuity and remembering that a lived life still carries evidentiary weight and that experience still matters.

Writing, real writing, remains one of the few territories that is still, stubbornly, ours.

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