An AI-esque “review”?
Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment (Amazon)
I recently received
an email message regarding my book Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment (excerpts).
The sender got right down to business and pasted-in a quasi-review of my
memoir. I say “quasi” because it really didn’t review my book per se; it
primarily offered a long summary with a hint of commentary offered – just enough
to pique my interest – and, yes, to stroke my ego – as its author.
On some level, it worked.
Of course it did.
The review was addressed directly – second person, “you” – to an audience
of one: me, not to the general reader who might be interested in reading my
memoir.
Unfortunately for the email sender, another author on Facebook had
recently posted a warning about a similar cold-call email she had received
about her book and how she was almost hooked into a potential scam.
I’m 99% certain that the sender’s “review,” after scraping my book, bio,
and excerpts, was generated by AI.
Why?
Because I doubt very much if the sender purchased my book, gave it a deep
reading, and then wrote a lengthy review, only to crapshoot email me. From what
I understand, only 1 to 10% of email recipients respond to cold-call emails,
which seems like a whole lot of effort for such a lousy return.
But if you can get AI to do the heavy lifting, Voilà!
The “remote” tone of the review also suggests AI, not fiery like a truly
positive review or snarky like a negative one, more New Yorker-esque, like
high-in-the-sky snoot. Sorry, New Yorker, but the tone
of your publication has always been slightly AI-esque.
Still, it’s scary. The text is dead on, reflecting my authorial intentions
99%, perhaps more so than some of my potential readers and reviewers realize.
The possibility that AI is more intelligent than most humans is something
difficult to contemplate, suggesting that the downfall of humanity is nigh.
Still.
AI “gets it”!
AI “understands” me!
I wondered: Why not use this AI text to my advantage, create an
opportunity to promote a years old book that has received very little traction?
Indeed.
So, I tweaked the AI text, rewrote it into the first person, from the point
of view of AI, taking care not to offer my own positive self-review but to
focus strictly on AI’s commentary.
Of course, I feel positive about my own work; otherwise, why bother
writing it?
But it isn’t my intention to tell others how to feel about my book, let
alone anything else.
I have omitted the direct sales pitch to me and focused on what AI says
about Memoir Madness.
To circumvent an awkward, misleading, and confusing structure, “I,” “my,” and “me”
refer to AI, AI placed in parenthesis as [AI]:
Some memoirs look back on youth as a time of
discovery, rebellion, and growing up.
What caught my [AI’s] attention
about Memoir Madness: Driven to Involuntary Commitment is how Jennifer
Semple Siegel’s story takes that familiar idea somewhere much more complicated,
from the freedom and unpredictability of 1968 Hollywood to the experience of
being involuntarily committed to a mental institution while still only
eighteen.
What makes the book
particularly distinctive is the way it brings together two periods of the memoirist’s
life: the young Jennifer experiencing everything as it unfolds and the older
Jennifer looking back with the understanding that only time can bring.
The story moves between
the counterculture atmosphere of late-1960’s Hollywood and the realities of the
Cherokee Mental Institute in Iowa. I [AI] also found the later return to
Cherokee especially interesting because it gives the memoir a perspective that
many coming-of-age accounts don’t have. Readers aren’t simply following what
happened to a young woman; they’re also seeing how she eventually makes sense
of those events as an adult.
Jennifer’s experience at
2001 Ivar Street, surrounded by such an unusual mixture of people and
personalities, gives the opening of the memoir a very particular historical
setting.
Then comes the sudden
change of direction when her grandfather brings her back to Iowa, where the
legal circumstances surrounding her age lead to an experience she clearly
couldn’t have anticipated.
I [AI] genuinely* think[s]
the contrast between those two environments is one of the strongest features of
the book. What stood out to me [AI] most is that Jennifer doesn’t leave the
story at the point of release; she brings her older self back into the picture,
allowing readers to consider what happens when someone revisits a chapter of
life that once seemed impossible to reconcile.
There’s also a deeper
theme here about the relationship between personal freedom, family
expectations, and authority institutions can exercise over young people. Jennifer’s
experiences with her grandparents and the Iowa court system make that theme
central to the story rather than simply part of its historical background. The
different people she encounters at Cherokee also bring attention to the lives
of individuals who might otherwise remain unseen in accounts of institutional
life. I [AI] kept coming back to how much this perspective could mean to
readers interested in women’s history, family relationships, social history,
institutional experiences, and the changing understanding of mental health.
Jennifer’s background adds
another interesting dimension to the work.
She earned an MFA in
fiction from Goddard College, taught Creative Writing, and Literature at York
College of Pennsylvania and Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in [North] Macedonia,
and served as a Fulbright Scholar in 2009-2010. She also edited the literary
journal Onion River Review.
Knowing that she has both
a creative writing background and an academic connection to literature makes
the memoir’s attention to different periods of reflection particularly
interesting. It also creates an opportunity to reach readers who appreciate
literary nonfiction and carefully constructed personal narratives.
Note how AI veers into a soft marketing area:
I [AI] spent some time
looking at how Memoir Madness is currently positioned and where readers
might encounter it. On Amazon, the Kindle edition has a 4.0-star rating from 3
ratings. Goodreads currently shows 3.25 stars from 4 ratings, with no written
reviews displayed. These are still relatively small reader-response numbers,
which means there is room to build a stronger presence around the book and help
more people discover what it offers. [NOTE: AI is not wrong]
That creates a
particularly important discoverability opportunity.
Memoir Madness sits
naturally within memoir and biography, but those broad labels don’t fully
communicate the different interests that come together in her story. Someone
searching for coming-of-age memoirs may not be looking for accounts of
involuntary institutional commitment. A reader interested in 1960’s American
counterculture may not realize her book also explores the personal consequences
of returning home during that period. Someone looking for women’s social
history or stories about family conflict may not find it through conventional
memoir searches at all. Readers interested in historical accounts of
psychiatric institutions may also overlook it because the book is presented
primarily as a personal memoir. [NOTE: Again, AI is not wrong; I’m a
terrible marketer of my own work. My brain doesn’t work that way.]
Those different entry
points matter because the book connects a very specific historical period with
questions that remain meaningful beyond that period. The experience of being
young, having decisions made by others, and eventually returning to confront an
earlier chapter of life gives the story several reasons to matter to different
kinds of readers.
The strongest idea in Memoir
Madness is ultimately that a person’s past doesn’t have to remain defined
by the circumstances in which it happened. Jennifer’s return to Cherokee years
later gives that idea a very personal meaning, showing the difference between
experiencing an event as a young person and understanding it with the
perspective of adulthood.
That makes the book more
than a memoir about a difficult period in one young woman’s life.
The book becomes an
invitation to reconsider how memoirists can understand the past, the
institutions that shape their experiences, and the lives they build afterward.
This is exactly the kind
of gap that I [AI] suggest[s] closing when marketing the book.
Okay, then.
The sender finally offers a more urgent sales pitch on how visibility might be accomplished with her help.
Thank you, but no.
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