A story in the Globe and Mail, 365 days, gazillions of readers discusses a trend of books — mainly nonfiction — written and published using a year as a basis for the books’ topics, whatever those subjects might be. The story credits Peter Mayle’s 1989 travel memoir A Year in Provence as the starting point, and mentions Didion’s 2005 National Book Award winning, The Year of Magical Thinking. Among reasons given for why authors may be using the year as fundamental to the writing, was the more interesting idea of imposing a restriction as a form, similar to writing the sonnet (in poetry).
Rob Firing, publicity director of HarperCollins Canada [says], “restricting a book to a year gives it a more stable platform. And it restricts it to a form, like a sonnet. So you’re forced to work with rules.
“It gives these works some stability, a sense of importance, a sense of closure and a sense of event. It concentrates things.”
We measure our lives in years. In the case of a newborn who’s sick, everyone, doctors included, say that after the baby reaches one year, he’ll likely have “grown out of it.” A year is one cycle of the four seasons (unless you live here, in which case, make that two…). The year seems like a good designation for a book’s scope that will have resonance because of its nature — because it’s natural, familiar.
