You, too, can be me!

How men write about themselves

This is the 295th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button:

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

---

We noticed last year that virtually every planner available in the Canadian market has generic or American holidays and content, so we made a new one. Welcome to The Canadian Planner 2026:

Plan your days on the world's only uniquely Canadian planner! Stay Organized, informed, and Canadian every day of the year.

This elegant, thoughtfully designed planner is an indispensable companion for staying on top of your busy life and celebrating where you're from. With two days per page, a clean layout, and generous space for appointments, notes, and to-dos, it keeps you focused and productive. Sprinkled throughout are:

• key national observances

• public holidays and civic reminders

• famous birthdays and historical notes

• major arts and culture and sports events

• natural and astronomical occasions, weather highs and lows, and even bird migration and fruit seasons.

Beautifully packaged in faux leather with silver foil accents and a ribbon marker, the Canadian Planner is the perfect way to stay organized and connected to all things Canadian.

It’s available in blue or black and sells for just $19.95. Order one here!

---

Anne Trubek began writing Notes from a Small Press on Substack a few months before I began SHuSH in the first half of 2019 and she’s been a rewarding read every since. Last week she half-joked that “every middle-class white woman over 55 is writing a memoir.” Most, she added, are working from a therapeutic framework, “writing as a way to process grief and trauma.”

Anne is not objecting to women writing memoirs, but she does wonder “who is writing other forms of nonfiction.” Her shop, Belt Press, publishes local history, urban guidebooks and anthologies, political essays, and only the occasional memoir. She likes to present a rough balance of male and female authors. That’s become increasingly difficult with women leaning so heavily to memoir. She’s had to reach out to authors with general nonfiction ideas to balance her numbers, and now she’s more or less giving up. In today’s world, she says, women are writing about themselves, men are writing about other things.

That’s an interesting observation.

I see where Anne is coming from. Sutherland House, too, has a nonfiction focus, and we, too, get most of our memoir submissions from women. We’ve published some, but our preference is for researched nonfiction, or “writing about other things.” We, too, find it difficult to maintain a gender balance in our authors.

That said, I don’t think it’s entirely true that men are less inclined than women to write about themselves. Much depends on where you look for evidence.

I checked the thirty books currently on the New York Times hard and softcover bestseller lists and found nine memoirs. Two were by women: Tara Westover’s Educated, Jeannette Walls The Glass Castle. Men accounted for six: Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights, Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, John Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened, Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, Robert Reich’s Coming Up Short. That jumps to seven if we include Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which the NYT classifies as a memoir. Advantage men.

More surprising to me is what while both of the her-moirs on that list qualify as therapeutic, they’re outnumbered by three therapeutic him-moirs. While men have long dabbled in therapeutics—Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, Augusten Burroughs’ Dry, and Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture were enormous hits—I’ve always considered them a female preserve. That doesn’t appear to be so.

Not only are men holding their own in therapeutic memoir, they’re dominating the field of heroic memoir. I expect a literary press like Belt doesn’t get pitched many of these. You can locate them in the sports, politics, and especially the business section of your local bookstore.

Unlike therapeutic memoirs, which are built on a narrative arc of suffering and healing, heroic memoirs focus on How I Did It.

One of the first in the genre was probably The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in which the author presents himself as a self-made man rising to greatness through industry, honesty, frugality, perseverance, etc. Ulysses Grant, P. T. Barnum, and John D. Rockefeller made significant contributions in the nineteenth century.

The contemporary era of the heroic memoir began with Lee Iococa: An Autobiography in 1984:

This is just the story about a kid from a good immigrant family who studied hard and worked hard, who had some big successes and some big disappointments, and who made out fine in the end because of the simple values he learned from his parents and teachers, and because he had the good luck to live in America…

Don’t be fooled by that last line. America, in the pages that follow, gets scant credit for Lee’s success. thea

A decade later, Sam Walton published Made in America. He perfected the popular tone of faux humility, professing to write almost under protest, only to placate the many friends, family, and associates begging him to do so, while simultaneously wrapping himself in the flag:

I’m going to try to tell this story the best I’m able to, as close to the way it all came about as I can, and I hope it will be almost as interesting and fun and exciting as it’s been for all of us, and that it can capture for you at least some of the spirit we’ve all felt in building this company …. As I do look back though, I realize that ours is a story about the kind of traditional principles that made America great in the first place. It is a story about entrepreneurship and risk and hard work, and knowing where you want to go and being willing to do what it takes to get there. It’s a story about believing in your idea even when some other folks don’t, and about sticking to your guns…

Today, you’re no one in business without a memoir. Mark Cuban’s How to Win at the Sport of Business, Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog, Stephen A. Schwarzman’s What It Takes, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal, James Dyson’s Invention, Richard Branson’s Losing My Virginity, Kevin O’Leary’s Cold Hard Truth, Michael Ovitz’s Who is Michael Ovitz? Howard Schultz’s Onward, Joe Coulombe’s Becoming Trader Joe, Michael Dell’s Play Nice but Win, Ted Rogers’s Relentless, Robert Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, John Malone’s Born To Be Wired, Jimmy Pattison’s An Autobiography—they’ve all got at least one. Under these are boatloads of memoirs from lesser tycoons, now aging out and convinced the public needs to know the story of their housing tracts or car dealerships; most publish with hybrid houses.

The titles of the heroics are alpha. The stories are monotonous: I’m a simple guy who by dint of hard work/right thinking/strong values enjoyed enormous success, and if you absorb these simple lessons from my life, you, too, can be rich/accomplished/famous/whatever.

A minority of these books are entertaining and informative, and a minority of the heroes did admirable work and cared about more than money. Too many, however, are long on authorial self-absorption and self-satisfaction. They abstain from the genuine self-examination, vulnerability, and emotion that power therapeutic memoirs. The heroes do meet challenges and suffer wounds along their journeys. There’s usually some crisis or breakdown or temporary failure, but unlike the therapeutic writers, these guys refuse to be defined by their lows. They take the hit, vow never to make that mistakes again, and move on. Whereas therapeutic authors tend to derive authority from their suffering, heroic authors draw theirs from wins. The former are always circling back to trauma; the latter are always bounding ahead to their next accomplishment, measured in the size of the deal. When one comes across instances of life-changing damage in the pages of a heroic memoir, it’s usually suffered by the other guy—the one without a book.

I’m picking on business dudes, but memoirs by athletes and politicians are much the same.

Literary quality is lower in heroics than in therapeutics. No one ever signed up for an MFA with the intention of producing this kind of book. Heroic authors aren’t trying to tell a new story, or an old story a new way; they mostly want the Lee Iacocca/Sam Walton treatment.

Their quality, I expect, is why heroics are not terribly visible in some sectors of the publishing community. The vast majority of what you find under the memoir tab at LitHub is therapeutic and female authored.

I’ve probably drawn too sharp a line between heroic and therapeutic memoirs. They overlap. Andrew Carnegie’s Autobiography and Tara Westover’s Educated are both self-making narratives of people who escape narrow circumstances and attribute their success to education and personal virtue. There are therapeutic memoirs that borrow from the heroic (all that honouring duty and facing fate with courage in the Kalanithi book), and heroics that contain extensive reflections on loss and grief (Shoe Dog). But the differences are significant enough to mark them as separate species: heroics are outward-facing, exemplary, triumphant; therapeutics are inward-facing, confessional, and meaning-making.

Returning to the notion that women write about themselves and men write about the world, the outward-facing nature and male authorship of the heroics might make this seem so. Heroic authors tend to be uninterested in the self, if the self is understood as the personal or interior life of the subject. They’re all about careers and the dents their authors make in the world.

But career equals self for most of the heroic authors. That’s how they see themselves. Their work is the ultimate expression of their beings. There’s not much of personal interest because cultivation of the self was never the object. That’s how we wind up with so many 300-page humble-brags.

If you read closely, the heroic authors aren’t terribly interested in the world, either. They’re fascinated by its occasional utility, the narrow parts of it that facilitate their endeavours. Few demonstrate a true range of interests or deep engagements with people, cultures, things beyond the scope of their enterprises. For all their apparent worldliness, they’re all about themselves.

I don’t know how we’d ever quantify this, but my sense is that if we did a comprehensive survey we’d find there are just as many men over 55 writing about their careers as their are women writing about their grief and trauma.

Fortunately, there are many others—mostly men, as Anne notes, but increasing numbers of women—who do write about the world.

---

New from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its newest edition, The 51st State Votes, by one of Canada’s most talented young journalists, Justin Ling. Here’s what it’s about:

In April, 2025, twenty-million Canadians cast ballots in an election defined by economic turmoil, a cost-of-living crisis, and threats of outright annexation by the United States. It was an election that, more than any vote in recent memory, split Canadians down the middle.

On one side were voters convinced that their own country had been broken by years of abuse and mismanagement—Canadians who no longer believed in the state's ability to do its job, let alone build big things, and never mind fight and win a trade war. On the other side were those motivated by the existential threat posed by a single man: Donald Trump.

Over thirty-five days of campaigning, Liberal leader Mark Carney and Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre criss-crossed the country speaking to those duelling anxieties. Journalist Justin Ling watched it all from up close, paying particular attention to how Canada’s 45th general election scrambled its priorities and put the country at the forefront of the global resistance to a mad American president.

Smart, witty, and superbly observed, The 51st State Votes is a gripping account of a campaign that promises to define Canada for the next century.

As a SHuSH reader, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge. To pre-order a single copy, go here.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

---

Thanks for reading. Please either:

---

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Kwame Fraser’s Kwame Eff, “economic democracy, political economy of Canadian arts and culture, etc.”

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Tim Carmody’s Amazon Chronicles: an eye on the monster.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”