At 42, Mary Karr is still small-boned and skinny. And — to my general discomfort — she is still willing to do some shit-kicking. “I’d rather take a whuppin’ than do one more goddamned interview,” Karr barks at me when I meet her in a New York hotel lobby, her dark eyes shooting out little cartoon sparks of pique. (Karr’s features are so compact and well-defined that she looks like an Al Hirschfeld sketch.) “I feel like I’ve been lashed to the mast,” she says, reeling off the list of appointments and appearances she’s already logged today. Karr leads me into the hotel’s restaurant, where her fianci, British publisher Peter Strauss, is waiting. Strauss’ presence partly explains why she’s upset: This lunch turns out to be the first chance they’ve had to see each other in several days. For 45 minutes, they chew their food and cast longing glances at one another. I trot out my questions, hoping not to have any steamed vegetables flung in my direction.

Karr is in demand right now for several reasons. For one thing, “The Liars’ Club,” published early in 1995, has come to be viewed as the book that jump-started the current memoir explosion. For another, Karr and her publishers are celebrating the fact that “The Liars’ Club” has been on paperback bestseller lists for almost exactly one year — the book has gone back for 17 printings, and there are close to 400,000 copies in print. “You’d think people would be sick of me,” Karr says. “I’m sick of myself.” Yet she seems genuinely surprised at the book’s ongoing success: “If you’ve been a poet for 20 years,” she says, “you don’t expect anybody to read anything you write.”

“The Liars’ Club” deserves its wide audience. Karr is a shrewd, plucky and deeply observant storyteller, and she expertly spins out the details of her family’s life in small-town Texas in the 1950s. Her mother was a kind of “Bohemian Scarlett O’Hara” whose wild streak (and seven marriages) shocked Karr’s neighbors; a devoted parent, she would also be subject to destructive rages and psychotic episodes. Her father was a brawling oil worker, a generally taciturn man who came most fully alive when he told stories, spinning out whoppers with a group of men called “The Liars’ Club.” Karr’s greatest achievement, though, is her ability to climb inside her own 8-year-old cranium. She evokes the landscape of a preadolescent mind with such exactitude — fights, fears, petty jealousies — that “The Liars’ Club” stands as one of the best books ever written about growing up female (or growing up, period) in America.

Karr escaped Texas at age 17, she has said, when she joined some surfers bound for California. She found her way to Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where she spent two years before dropping out to travel. Karr later attended Vermont’s Goddard Collage, where she studied with the writers Tobias Wolff and Frank Conroy, both of whom have been influential in her career. Karr married a fellow poet in 1983 — they had a son, Dev, now 11 — and divorced 10 years later. She has published two books of poetry, “The Devil’s Tour” and “Abacus.” She now lives with her son in upstate New York, and she teaches writing at Syracuse University.

As our interview progressed, Karr’s irritation gradually vanished. She talked about everything from the storm surrounding Kathryn Harrison’s memoir “The Kiss” to her reasons for beginning to write “The Liars’ Club” (“I literally needed the money”) to her recent work on “Cherry,” a forthcoming memoir of her teenage years. No vegetables were thrown.

“The Liars’ Club” was published two years ago, yet it’s already regarded as the Ur-text of this so-called “memoir explosion.” Are you surprised that this has become such a heated cultural battle?

Well, I think memoir started with St. Augustine — not with me, and not with Oprah. Memoir has an august, and inaugust, history. St. Augustine got drop-kicked for just using the first person pronoun at all. It was considered morally reprehensible. Memoir has long been what Geoffrey Wolff has called an “outsider’s art.” People want some sort of moral compass, and the subjective suddenly has power it hasn’t had before because all of the measures of how we are doing — the church, community life, religious or government leaders, certain kinds of values, family — no longer mean what they once did. There are other people who have written memoirs — Frank Conroy, Maya Angelou. Maxine Hong Kingston wrote a great memoir, “Woman Warrior.” I think I’m the current … (trails off). But I don’t know why they don’t call Richard Ford and bust his chops about all the Harlequin romances that are being published. Most of the memoirs are going to be bad, the way most novels are going to be bad, the way most articles are going to be bad, the way most poems are going to be bad. It’s hard to make something of quality.

You must feel like you’re being blamed for creating a monster.

Yeah, and I’m crying all the way to the bank. Toby Wolff did a great piece in the Times last Sunday where he said — talking about James Wolcott (who wrote a strongly negative review of Harrison “The Kiss” in The New Republic) — that Wolcott stood at the gates of literature as if to prevent any memoir from passing through. There is a history of genres or different forms (being discredited). A sonnet was seen as really low rent at one time among poets because it didn’t have the sweep of an epic — and it didn’t have the rhetorical power of an epistle. The notion that something would be a little lyrical song, or that a novel was made up — it was just fancy, sprung from someone’s head — was seen as morally reprehensible. It’s odd that when a new genre emerges as interesting, the only way people choose to take it on is on some moral ground based on the notion that art is mimetic. No one calls up Don DeLillo and says, “What things about Lee Harvey Oswald did you make up and which ones are absolutely true?” They are fully accepting of freedom in that form. But I guess with memoirists choosing to use novelistic devices, these are fair questions for readers to ask.

I read an interview in which you said that one or two of your father’s “Liars’ Club” stories in your book were, in fact, things you made up.

They are pure fiction. They are absolutely made up. But they are not represented as truth in the book. I sort of defend doing it that way. They are seen as bullshit, and represented as bullshit in the book. The interesting things people have said — you know, “Did your mother really shoot at your stepfather?” — I’ve responded like, “I wouldn’t make that up.” Then I’m all morally outraged. But what do I expect? You sign up to play football and then you complain you’ve been hit?

Are you surprised that Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss” — a book for which you provided a cover blurb — has sparked so much animosity?

I knew that people would go after her. Not for having (incest) happen to her, because at least since Freud we have known these things. Since Electra, since Oedipus we’ve known this stuff happens. That’s why it’s a big deal — it’s a big cultural taboo. Not for having it happen, but for writing about it and in Harrison’s case for not martyring herself, for not being more broken, for not taking more of the pose of the victim. I think to some extent she takes more responsibility for events than I personally felt she should. I still thought of her as a child with a parent who was taking advantage of her. To me the horribleness of the book is how it’s been marketed as a sexier story than it is. It’s not a sexy story. There are two sex scenes in it and even those are not hot, not sexy. I don’t think they are intended to be. I don’t think she wrote the book that way, so to some extent it’s a failure in marketing. Some guy sitting next to me at the PEN dinner last night, actually a pretty well-known journalist, was saying, “I don’t want to read about this.” And I said, “Have you read it?” And he said no. And I said, “Look, it’s not a sound bite. It’s not a cartoon strip. You are reacting to a sound bite and a cartoon strip. That’s what you find morally reprehensible.” That’s why she wrote a whole book about it — instead of a magazine article.

What about James Wolcott’s argument — that Harrison should have waited to publish it, if only for her children’s sake?

I think it’s a travesty. I picked on an old woman who was dying of cancer (her grandmother), Toby Wolff bombed someone’s ancestral village (in his Vietnam memoir “In Pharoah’s Army) … I don’t go to writers or memoirs for morally heroic behavior, I go to Mother Theresa and Desmond Tutu. I don’t think Harrison is in the business of holding herself up. In a country as libidinized as ours, where people commonly watch “Pulp Fiction” and are exposed to so many things, the sort of venom that has been pointed at her just seems out of proportion. I thought the Wolcott piece was a cheap shot, and I think a lot of the shots have been cheap. I think the marketing of the book has been cheap, and I don’t think it’s a cheap book. I read the book, and I found it moving. I found it very raw. This woman from the Times called me up, Doreen (Carvajall), and she was gunning for her from the beginning. She said, “Do you think this is true?” I said, “Well, I assume it’s true and I also kind of don’t give a shit. Why would you make it up if it weren’t true?” So she said, “Don’t you think it’s morally wrong for her to write about it?” And I said, “Well, is it morally wrong for you to write about it?” It’s OK for you to write about it as long as you are taking the moral high ground.

You know, I don’t know Kathryn Harrison. I’ve seen her with her children it so happens — she gave me a ride somewhere one time. She is a good mother. She is not somebody who pimp-slaps her kids up and down the block. And James Wolcott cannot fucking know what kind of mother she is from reading that book, any more than he can know what kind of mother I am, or what kind of father Tobias Wolff is. He cannot make ad hominem swipes, arguing in a deductive way about what you presume someone’s behavior to be in print, and not have it be just malicious. He could have argued about that book in all kinds of ways — about its failures as a book on aesthetic grounds. He could have argued about the marketing. I teach, so I see this all the time with students who think they know the moral ethicacy of someone’s position based on their race or their gender. They say that Michael Herr is writing about Vietnam from a “privileged” position. I’m like, “He’s a white guy, is that what that means? What do you know about his position? What do you know about his experience, or Maya Angelou’s, or Kathryn Harrison’s?” The other thing that Doreen said to me on the phone that I resented was that (Harrison) did it for the money. I said, “I did it for the fucking money.” We all do it for the money. You are doing it for the money. And Harrison had money, so … I don’t know. It’s that lack of attention to the text that bothers me. The idea that we are making these arguments presuming we know who these people are when you can make a really good argument about the text: “I don’t like this narrator in the text and here is why.” You can make an aesthetic argument without making it ad hominem.

Let’s move on to your book. One of the things I love most about “The Liars’ Club” is that you are such a scrappy little beast, even as an 8-year-old. Are you still someone with a “naturally bad temperament”?

I think I have a bad temper. I am impatient, unlike my fiancé here, who is a font of patience. I am naturally impatient. It’s why I live my life as a college professor instead of a stock broker. I am patient with my son — otherwise he wouldn’t have a pulse at the end of the day.

In the book, you often go to extreme — and quite comic — lengths to settle scores. You climb up a tree to fire a BB gun at a kid who’d hit you. Do you still have these kind of score-settling urges?

Absolutely. I go to lengths to settle scores. But it’s funny, I am more forgiving than any 8,000 people. I really am. Ironically enough, I am capable of having an outburst and saying “Fuck you, fuck you!” then (speaks softly) “God, I’m sorry.” But it’s hard for me to really scorch the earth. For instance, I’ve never been estranged from anyone in my family. I still have my best friend from the fourth grade. I corresponded with my grade school principal, who taught me how to play chess, until he died. Once I’m committed to someone as a friend, I think I’m really loyal. I have very fierce attachments.

Speaking of settling scores, one of the most remarkable scenes in “The Liars’ Club” is one in which you step out of the text and address this teenager — now an adult — who’d raped you decades before, when you were 7. You imagine him learning about your book, and what you have to say about him in it. Are you glad you did this? And have there been any ramifications?

It cheered me up — which was its main purpose, I guess. Do I think this guy is quaking in his boots? No, because actually this person would know me better than anybody who had read the text. I am not sneaky about it. I’m just sort of out there.

What’s it like going back to Texas now, after people have read “The Liars’ Club”?

I love it. I love the idiom. I love my mother and my sister. Peter and I were just down there in Texas. When you grow up someplace like where I grew up, people are not resentful about being written about in a book — they are kind of happy to have somebody write about them. I turned out to read, or to sign books, near my hometown at a library and there were like 500 people there. It was 102 degrees or something. I was very moved by it. Obviously that’s the most gratifying thing for anybody — to go home and have done good. The guy who I stole watermelons with when I was a kid, who is now the sheriff of this town, was there. People from my neighborhood, guys who drank with my father. It’s moving.

How often do you get back?

Twice a year. I talk on the phone a lot with my mother and my sister. Every day, or every other day. My sister comes up once or twice a year, we meet somewhere.

You showed your mother and your sister the text before it was published, I’ve heard. (Karr’s father died in 1985.) And they didn’t have any objections to anything in it. But what if they had had some problems with it? Would you have changed things? This must be a constant problem for memoirists.

I didn’t think they would have any problems with it. I know these people really well. I guess I had a fundamental faith. My bottom line on everybody I’m kin to, other than my grandmother, was that I really loved them. And I sort of assumed that the bottom line for a reader would be affection rather than scorn or outrage. Because I believe in the redemptive powers of love, and I believe that I’ve been redeemed by loving them and them by loving me — and hopefully the reader would have the same experience. I mean, my mother had a psychotic episode, and it was really scary. She drank a fifth of vodka at a pop, and behaved in ways that were unsettling for a little kid. But she was not cruel ever, really never. Almost never. Never to me.

For as much as you expose them in the book, you expose yourself a hundred times more.

Doing that as a kid is a much safer thing. I’m writing a book now about my adolescence, and partly about my adulthood. You have a different kind of responsibility as a character. People hold you to a higher standard. It’s easy to say that I looked like an asshole when I was 8 years old.

It must be an unsettling experience to keep meeting people who know so much about you while you know nothing about them.

I practice denial. I just pretend they don’t. I live in a town where people aren’t interested in me or my book. I coach Little League. I don’t seek it out. I am glad for every nickel I can make and everything I can do for my kid — to generate dollars for my kid and myself. But I basically don’t spend a lot of time talking about it. Someone will say, “I loved your book,” and I say, “Good for me,” and that’s basically the end of the conversation. I basically don’t have a lot to say about it.

You said earlier that, basically, we’re all in it for the money. Can you take me back to the earliest stages of your thinking about writing a memoir? What made you sit down and write this book?

I literally needed the money. I needed it really badly. My marriage had just ended; I didn’t have a car. I won something called the Whiting writer’s award and met Binky (Urban), my agent. She was Toby’s agent. She took a bunch of people to dinner after the Whiting. Toby was an old friend of mine. I hadn’t seen him in five years. I talked about writing this book, and she said, “Send me a proposal” and I blew it off. And six months later my marriage was breaking up. I had no money, no vehicle. You know, I owned my house, I was a college professor — it’s not like I was on the street. I don’t want to poor-mouth. But I needed a Toyota, I just needed a vehicle. So I wrote the proposal. I had tried to write “The Liars’ Club” as a novel a long time ago, back when my son was a baby, about ’88 or ’89.

Have you been back to poetry?

Yeah, I’m hoping to finish a book of poems.

What about fiction?

I don’t know. People keep asking me about that. I can’t imagine it, just because I don’t know much about it. I do read more novels now than I did before, because everyone keeps saying maybe I should do this. But I just don’t know much about fiction. A novel is a less forgiving form. It requires a kind of structural integrity that a memoir doesn’t.

So you agree with the people who say that the novel can simply do things that memoir cannot. Or vice-versa, I suppose.

Absolutely. Absolutely! I don’t think vice-versa. The only thing you can get from a memoir that you can’t get from a novel — and actually my undergraduate students taught me this. I said, “Why would you want a memoir class?” And they said an amazing thing that was counterintuitive to me — that it’s a kind of survival testimony. The fact that the person lives past the book, that the character goes on, is a kind of hopeful thing, a priori. It’s not the fact that it’s true that makes it better, it’s the sense that they went and got away from their parents, they reconciled who they were after this struggle, were able to go forward. It’s a kind of survival tale in a way. And a novel can’t get that — unless there is another “Call me Ishmael,” or “Call me Ishmael 2.”

One of the interesting things about “The Liars’ Club” is that you acknowledge other people’s opinions. You’re always popping out of the text to say something like, “If my sister could speak now, she’d say …”

Well, I felt that much obliged to. But those were actually the only points … I mean, my mother and my sister didn’t correct anything, which is hard to believe, isn’t it? I did this interview with a bunch of memoirists for Harper’s a couple of years ago, and none of them had corrections. Frank Conroy didn’t have any corrections, Geoffrey Wolff had only minor corrections — his mother’s father came from Ireland in this year not that year, that kind of thing. Maxine Hong Kingston, no corrections. It’s interesting, because if you’ve ever tried to tell a story at dinner … it’s odd that (these writers) aren’t corrected. I’m sure that people see things differently. I also know that people in our families know how we see things. I don’t think it’s a great surprise that my mother thinks I hated her mother.

I’ve heard that you had a very difficult time writing “The Liars’ Club.”

I would lie down on the floor and go to sleep after about an hour and a half’s work. Literally go to sleep like I had been driving all night. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I went to a shrink and said, “Am I repressing something, bah bah bah bah.” And she said, “Well, I think you are just really exhausted by it.” So I don’t know why. I think this is true for a lot of writers. I’ve talked to writers, and they get to a difficult place in the book emotionally — or something about it is hard — and they are sitting there for an hour and a half and it’s all they can do. It’s very effortful.

Has writing your new memoir, “Cherry,” been just as hard?

When I have time to do it, I just do it. If it’s bad I throw it out. I mean, I haven’t had time. I’ve got almost a book of poems and a start on this book, but I’m done teaching at the end of April and I’m going to take a year off.

Your mother seems like she was a real rarity in small-town Texas in the 1950s — someone who was cultured, who listened to Bessie Smith and read “Anna Karenina.” How much of a leg up did this give you?

It gave me every leg up in the world. When people say to me, “How did you survive?” I say, “Well I learned how to read, I had books all over the house. I had somebody who every time I wrote something thought it was like the cutest thing they ever saw.” It was a massive advantage. I was reading Shakespeare when I was a little kid. That was a great thing.

Do you ever wonder what would have become of your life had your mother not been so cultured, if you hadn’t become a writer?

That’s like asking me, “What would you be like without gravity?” I don’t know. I mean, it’s kind of hard to know, isn’t it? I would be married to some refinery worker pumping out babies in a trailer park, I guess. I don’t know. I’d be trying to get money for a bass boat.

The problem isn’t that “The Cliff Walk: A Memoir of a Lost Job and a Found Life” sounds like focus-group fodder: it’s that Snyder has created a persona for the book that bears only a faint resemblance to the guy who’s living his life.

Counting himself as “one of the millions of Americans to be laid off, passed over, down-sized, or just plain screwed out of a job,” Snyder describes how his brilliant academic career suddenly and inexplicably went off the rails five years ago when he lost a comfortable post in the English department at Colgate University. He applied unsuccessfully for positions at 90 other colleges, and eventually conquered the resulting anger and depression by taking on construction work that taught him the joys of honest, blue-collar labor.

Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham loves this tale. Lapham put an excerpt from Snyder’s manuscript on the cover of his magazine two years ago, and he blurbs the book, published by Little, Brown, as “a moral commentary on the smiling lies behind which our society conceals its not-so-noble truths.” The New York Times ran a recent Sunday Magazine article by Snyder, adapted from his book, headlined “Sorry, the Professional Class Is Full.” Accompanying the story was a full-page color portrait of the writer, whom the Times has described as looking “like Steve McQueen in his prime.” An author with movie-star looks exposing society’s smiling lies with a job-lost/life-found memoir? You couldn’t ask for more.

Actually, you could — more accuracy. Snyder, memoirist, presents himself as a prototypical striver, “a member in good standing of the class of managerial mercenaries” in constant pursuit of “more money, more security, more status,” etc., moving “from one promising job to the next.” He likens his pre-firing self to Willy Loman: “a salesman my whole life, selling myself to whoever I thought might make me more of a success.” Then the day of reckoning sails in on a pink slip. “I had lost my job and all my money and everything else that I’d always believed added up to the promise of a secure life … bad things were finally starting to happen to people like me who had it so good for so long.” And then on to his redemption among the sheet rock.

It’s a mea culpa that will gladden many an editor, and has. Too bad Snyder isn’t culpable. Far from having had it so good for so long, scampering up the rungs of academic achievement until he was shoved out an ivory-tower window, Snyder didn’t so much have a university teaching career as land a few gigs in college classrooms while eking out a living as a writer. “I had quit a good job at the University of Maine,” he writes in the book, “where I was completely happy, to take a job in the Department of English at Colgate University.” Not exactly. The position in Maine consisted of teaching creative writing as an instructor under a one-year, non-renewable contract in 1988-89, says Ulrich Wicks, chair of the English department. Calling Snyder’s account “a distortion,” Wicks says the writer “makes it sound as though he had a continuing job here, but he didn’t.”

Snyder didn’t have one in 1986-87, either. He filled in at his alma mater, Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, for a teacher who was on leave for a year, according to English Professor John Sweney, who was the department chair at the time. “He was here as a replacement,” says Sweney, who recalls Snyder as a good instructor and regrets that “there wasn’t any way that we could keep him on.”

Colgate certainly could have kept Snyder on after he arrived in the fall of 1989, but he failed to make it past the university’s third-year review process for tenure-track teachers. It’s a fate suffered by countless adjunct professors clawing after the scarce tenure slots scattered across the country. His failed peers often go into university administration, try to snag a temporary teaching post elsewhere, head into secondary education — anything, unlike Snyder’s all-or-nothing approach — to stay connected to the academic world. You don’t learn this in “The Cliff Walk,” though. Snyder presents his dismissal as a bolt out of the blue books, and says the regretful school offered to provide him with an official letter explaining that “the English department was already top-heavy with tenured professors.” In other words, sorry, the professional class is full. Colgate faculty and administrators are chary of discussing personnel decisions, particularly any having to do with confidential tenure matters, but spokesman Jim Leach does carefully note that 90 percent of participants pass the third-year review and that tenured positions have been awarded in the English department since Snyder’s departure. His firing, if you can call it that — the school keeps third-year washouts on for another full year so they can look for work — may have been a surprise to Snyder, but it couldn’t have been the shock he describes.

What stunned at least one of his former colleagues was Snyder’s description in the Times article of the sweet deal teachers enjoy at Colgate, where summer, spring and Christmas breaks “amounted to roughly 18 weeks of paid vacation per year.” “Part of the reason the man was fired was because he was thinking of it as 18 weeks of paid vacation instead of doing what the rest of us do, which is write,” says the former colleague. Indeed, after having written two unsuccessful novels and a nonfiction title for small publishers in the late 1980s, Snyder hadn’t published another book until “The Cliff Walk.”

All this wouldn’t be of much interest, of course, if it just amounted to yet another example of someone goosing a risumi and trying to put an attractive spin on getting fired. But something else seems to be at work here. “The Cliff Walk” wows media tastemakers because it has a plot that they never tire of retelling: a guy who bought into the American Dream is betrayed by the big bad Establishment and experiences an epiphany that opens his eyes to the country’s iniquities. And it’s the sort of story Snyder has wanted to tell for a long time. Describing himself to the compilers of “Contemporary Authors” (1989), he said: “My only aspiration as a writer is to drive a wedge against the world’s greed and indifference.”

That sentiment would be unthinkable for the character Snyder gives us in “The Cliff Walk,” a go-go academic who barely has time for his kids — somebody the real Snyder would find repellent, but a useful symbol when you’re a writer on a mission. During the media flurry surrounding publication of the book, you’re no more likely to hear the now-inconvenient “wedge” quote than you are to encounter the Snyder of just a couple of years ago, who was toting a couple of (still) unpublished novels around Manhattan and told the New York Times: “For a long time, friends of mine, other writers, kept telling me that I should write more cunningly, that I should pay attention to the market.” Clearly, the faux-Loman has decided attention must be paid.

Snyder, who did not answer requests for interviews for this story, embarked on a cross-country book tour a few weeks ago, taking off time from his work as a self-employed “caretaker and house painter,” as the book jacket describes him. He also had to take a break from his other job, a one-year position as an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Maine in Farmington. Turns out the professional class isn’t entirely full after all.

At first glance, their duties seem similar to the panelists on roundtable shows like “The McLaughlin Group.” Articulate, informed, opinionated, they’re there to engage in off-the-cuff discussions about whatever news stories and issues the day happens to bring. But the Contributors differ in many ways from TV’s traditional polemicists. For starters, they’re notably younger, fresher-looking and more ethnically diverse than the fleshy-faced, WASPy dyspeptics who dominate the roundtable shows. That’s a good thing, but the next difference isn’t: The Contributors are boring. Indeed, nary a one of them even comes close to rivaling McLaughlin’s florid, community-theater King Lear bombasticism, or William F. Buckley’s deadpan circumspection.

Oh, they have their moments. Eric Alterman seethes nicely. Staring glassily at the floor, barely opening his mouth as he speaks, he comes across as a volatile ventriloquist who’s decided the whole stupid fucking world is his dummy. Betsy Hart is blessed with a head full of facts and a wonderfully dismissive air of presumption. With her saucer eyes rolling and her big mouth twisting into 17 different shades of disdain, she’s like an Al Hirschfeld caricature of herself. Don Walter adds a note of pompous vanity and a dash of venom — on a recent show, he joked about wanting to slap Alterman — but in the end he seems too nervous about mussing his hair to really mix it up with anyone.

This sense of restraint extends to all the Contributors. It’s as if they feel reined in by MSNBC’s commitment to the Jon Katzian myth of new media rationalism to go at it like the old media blabbermouths do. So they mostly let each other have their say — but as with all TV roundtable shows, even the most articulate, well-informed of them can’t get beyond platitudes in the limited time allotted. On shows like “The McLaughlin Group,” the participants compensate for this lack of real information by providing a kind of squawking-head infotainment, but the Contributors deliver no such payoff. Every time tensions start to escalate among them, the segment invariably ends. And by the time they appear again, the momentum has been lost.

Unlike McLaughlin and his colleagues, however, the Contributors aren’t meant to carry the show. They seem to be peripheral on purpose, designed to provide one more decentralizing element to the proceedings. MSNBC’s midday show is a traditional news broadcast opened up and made accessible — “World News Tonight” mixed with “Oprah” and the Home Shopping Network. It’s the news as environment rather than content. To keep viewers hanging out in this environment, a sense of connection is crucial. Thus the constant petitions to participate: “It’s time to get connected,” reads the MSNBC promo spot. “Stay connected,” urges anchorperson Bridget Quinn, with the clear-eyed, soft-spoken sincerity of a really persuasive life insurance agent. E-mail addresses and an 800 number flash on the screen almost as often as the MSNBC logo.

It’s mostly a well-choreographed sham, of course. If all of MSNBC’s viewers shed their habitual cathode quiescence and actually tried to get connected, the company’s switchboards and servers would be overwhelmed in a matter of minutes. As it is, only a few of the viewers who do try to get connected actually do. I say this from glum experience — for weeks I tried to connect myself. News kept breaking, the anchors kept soliciting viewer response, and I kept dialing and e-mailing, eager to share my opinions: The Heaven’s Gate Internet link? If the Web’s so persuasive, how come more companies aren’t advertising on it? Liquor advertising on TV? Not until someone develops a special Mr. Jenkins-chip. But connection eluded me. My e-mails never appeared, and no one ever responded to them. Only once did I manage to crack the busy signal and get voice mail.

It was in the wake of such disappointments that I began to realize the true role of the Contributors. They were my surrogates — people with opinions, hanging out and watching the show from the wings, occasionally getting a chance to express themselves on some subject. That explains why they’re not all members of the media. (In addition to several journalists, there are also lawyers and investment bankers and political strategists amongst them.) That’s why they’re often asked to speak about topics about which they know virtually nothing. Asked for her opinion on who might win the Oscar for best actress, one hapless Contributor was forced to confess, “I don’t know, I haven’t seen any of the movies.” Just like I would have done!

In light of this new perspective, I gave up on the 800 number and the e-mail address and began to send messages directly to the Contributors. As my official stand-ins, it was their duty to respond to me. And besides, what else do they have to do when they’re not on? The show is shot live; they have to be in the studio somewhere, waiting around for their next segment. Why not answer their e-mail?

So I wrote to Rick Stengel about the TV liquor ad controversy. His main gig is at Time — surely he would have an opinion on a development that could divert crucial advertising revenue from the magazine industry. And I wrote to Kimberle Crenshaw, a law professor with the odd habit of using the word “delicious” to describe everything from movies to economic policy: Was she on a diet, I wondered? Then I wrote to Eric Alterman, asking for tips about how I could land a gig as a Contributor. With all the free time I have and my collection of colorful hand gestures, I’m a natural for the part.

Alas, none of them have responded either.

But that’s all right. Just knowing they’re there for me is enough. The way I look at it, they’re sort of like saints — people who were once like me, who have since ascended to a privileged intermediary place in the grand media cosmology, petitioning the highest media gods on my behalf. My e-mails to them are like prayers, and no response is necessary: I believe in the evidence of things not seen. It’s a particularly Catholic form of interactivity, and I think that’s a good thing. More often than not, TV erodes our moral values. It’s nice to see it exercising them for a change.

Or are they? One of the interesting things about Tuesday night’s panel discussion called “The Memoir Explosion” at the Society for Ethical Culture on New York’s Upper West Side, was how low the energy level was. The evening wasn’t a sell-out, as had been predicted, and when the heavy-hitting panelists — Frank Conroy, Kathryn Harrison, Thomas Mallon, Mona Simpson, Frank McCourt and James Atlas — strode onto the stage, there was an uncomfortable silence. Nobody clapped. People looked around and thought to themselves: Maybe this memoir battle really is just an insider’s phenomenon, the equivalent of a snowstorm raging inside a Random House editor’s paperweight.

Moderator Frank Conroy, author of the classic memoir “Stop-Time,” began the evening on an ambivalent note. “If you are confused [about this issue], you could not be more confused than we are,” he said. “I don’t think we are going to solve anything tonight,” he added, before noting that he tends to agree with E.L. Doctorow’s assertion that, in the end, “it’s all narrative.” Conroy, who is a rambling and rather unengaging speaker — he soon proved to be an even flakier moderator — then turned to the other panelists for opening arguments.

First up was Thomas Mallon, the novelist (“Dewey Defeats Truman”) and GQ book critic who’s also written a study of diaries titled “A Book of One’s Own.” Mallon drew some laughs with his confession that he’d had “the kind of happy childhood that is so damaging to a writer.” And while the other panelists would try all evening to stake out some cozy middle ground between fiction and memoir, Mallon offered a cogent and contrarian opinion — that novels can do things that memoirs simply cannot. “My bias is for the novel,” he said. “It has a capacity that memoir doesn’t. The novel can have a kind of Big Truth, while the memoir contains only individual truth.” He went on to say that “character is overrated as an element in novels,” and that novels are about “ultimate questions,” not just the people in them. “Our novels have grown interior,” he said.

Next was the woman at the eye of the storm, Kathryn Harrison, a black-clad, brooding and apparently nervous presence. (It probably didn’t help her mood that photographers in the front row kept training their zoom lenses on her and squeezing off rat-a-tat rounds of camera fire.) “I would draw less of a distinction [between fiction and memoir] than Tom,” Harrison said. “He is more in his novels than he says. I wrote a book that was set 300 years ago, and I was still writing about myself.” The real pleasure of writing fiction, Harrison said, is “the ability to change the outcome of the story.” Before concluding, she added a fillip about narcissism. “I keep going back to the original story of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own surface image,” Harrison said. “The best writing, whether it is a novel or memoir, destroys that image — the comfortable image, the beautiful image on top. It explores the dark water beneath it.”

Frank McCourt, fresh from his Pulitzer Prize for “Angela’s Ashes,” followed Harrison with a charming and chatty — if more or less off-topic — monologue about his teaching days. He concluded, in his lyrical Irish brogue, by saying that he didn’t really understand what the fuss was all about. “When we have nothing to do, we create problems,” he said. Mona Simpson, whose novels have combined elements of memoir, pretty much agreed with McCourt. She did, however, tick off a list of great novels that she is grateful weren’t written as memoirs, including “Anna Karenina,” and she offered a warning to potential memoirists: “Just because something happens in life, that doesn’t mean that, for a reader, it happens on the page.”

The final panelist was James Atlas, the author of a famously “forthcoming” Saul Bellow biography and the man who edited the New York Times Sunday Magazine’s special issue on the memoir last year. Atlas, as bow-tied and chipmunkish as ever, said he was “stunned by the rapidity with which something becomes a trend” these days. He then took a swat at some of Harrison’s more vituperative critics (he mentioned Wolcott and Yardley) by dragging out a moldy old chestnut: “No child ever thought, I want to grow up to be a literary critic.” Atlas concluded with the observation that “there will always be memoirs that make you regret what the teachers always told you: Write what you know.”

Frank Conroy then took the microphone again and mused about how “true” a memoir actually has to be. Atlas opined that readers tend to get an “emotional jolt” at the word memoir. “They feel like they are getting the straight truth. If books that present themselves as memoirs are perceived as being made up, that jolt will disappear.” This would spell, Atlas said, the end of the memoir boomlet. At this point Conroy popped back in to add, for what felt like the fifth time, that good writing is all that matters. “If Frank McCourt had had a rich, privileged happy childhood, he would have written just as good a book [as 'Angela's Ashes'],” Conroy said. It was a comment that caused many in the audience to shake their heads in disagreement. (They shook their heads again when McCourt made the sorry suggestion that if only Hemingway had written a cathartic tell-all memoir, he wouldn’t have blown his own head off.)

Conroy had no questions up his sleeve, and the conversation ground to a halt. Atlas — who looked a little peeved that he hadn’t been asked to moderate — picked up the slack by posing a question to Harrison: “What can you accomplish in your nonfiction that you can’t in your fiction?” It was the question the crowd had been waiting for. The cameras rat-a-tatted some more.

In case you missed “Dateline,” here’s Harrison: “I wrote ‘The Kiss,’ in many ways, as a response to my own first novel, which was held to be autobiographical,” she said. “The woman in the story, Isabel, has an affair with her father. But Isabel was younger than I was at the time, she was more passive, sweeter, more of a victim. When I finished that book, I wanted to disown it. I felt I’d betrayed my own history. I’d been dishonest in a way that’s been inordinately painful to me over the years.” When Harrison began her fourth novel a few years ago, she says, she realized that “it wasn’t any good — because this other matter kept intruding. It ceased to be an inspiration; it became a stumbling block. So I went back to the subject that inspired my first novel with the intention of owning this story that I’d disowned before.”

She paused dramatically before saying: “It wasn’t a decision — it was a helpless act.”

The evening soon trailed off into an almost surreally lame series of audience questions — many of them were on the level of “How do I find an agent?” — which Conroy seemed unable or unwilling to cut short. And when someone finally asked whether memoirists should worry about embarrassing or humiliating family members with their books, Conroy drew groans with his chortling answer: “My mother read my memoir and died three months later!” (Harrison’s response to this question: “All’s fair in love and war in this case … or maybe nothing’s fair.”)

A final questioner wondered whether Harrison was as proud of “The Kiss” as she is of her novels.

“Yes,” Harrison said. “I think it’s all right.”

It all started with the stunning success of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s “Prozac Nation” (Doubleday, 1994), a bestselling memoir that chronicled the author’s troubles with depression and indiscriminate fellatio dispensation. Since then, we’ve faced a glut of confessionals that leave no taboo untapped: from alcoholism (Caroline Knapp’s “Drinking: A Love Story”) to teenage delinquency (Jill Ciment’s “Half a
Life”) to adult incest (Kathryn Harrison’s “The Kiss”). It’s all about ugly behaviors in pretty packages, bound in ribbons of sexual tension — and it’s all anyone I know in books is talking about.

The iconography of the Bad Girl is nothing new. From Carole Baker making mincemeat of her thumb in “Baby Doll” to the sullen party teens in current fashion advertising, the combination of beauty, youth and tragedy is irresistible. Everyone loves a perky-titted wreck, and mistakes are endearing in the unseasoned. If a young woman assumes a tattered-hem, hardscrabble stance, I usually suck it up like a sick little milkshake. I want to bind her bleeding wrists, trounce her perpetrators, raid her closet and, of course, hear her secrets. I’m glad that female writers are artfully revealing that young womanhood can be a pretty gruesome business, and doing so without the conventional posture of defeat or moral repentance.

Publishing wags and armchair critics harrumph that these writers are producing nothing more than carefully orchestrated burlesque shows — a double crime of market-savvy and exhibitionism. Feh, I say, particularly on the latter charge. To criticize an artist for being an exhibitionist is like criticizing a bird for having wings; it’s pointless to damn the design.

The problem is there’s just too damn much of this stuff. I want to be sisterly and supportive, but already I’m oversaturated. As ever more troubled women spleen their way across the page, the genre seems less edgily refreshing and more like a precocious 3-year-old pulling her dress up over her head again and again to show her bloomers to the dinner guests. Widget & Grommit Publishers presents the release of Tragic Teenage Fuckdoll Memoir #27753b? Oh joy.

This spate of memoirs has also generated rumblings of distaste among my female writer friends. Not because we’re so damn pure — most of us were jettisoned from the “girls you take home to meet Mom” list years ago, and have bared soul and flesh as writers and may well do so again. Our collective gripe is that the trend seems to have upped the ante for entree into the literary big time: tell-all to sell-all — or forget it. But what if you don’t want to build your future on your checkered past? What if you’re one of the three people left on the planet who believes there’s more power in a persona built on mystery than on wholesale revelation? It’s hard to not feel deep-gut twinges when Jane Random-Freelancer gets a six-figure deal based on an article she wrote about, say, giving a hand job to her sadistic Comp Lit professor her freshman year at Brown, while you’re filing birdseed reviews for Wren Weekly and worrying about the bills. Months later, you’re still piddling away in near-obscurity, and she’s looking bookishly wanton and consumptive in her author photo in “Hot Type.”

Well, why shouldn’t a hungry writer make hay of her bawdy youthful mishaps? After all, controversy makes a mighty fine calling card. One reason is that you may never really know whether your writing is popular for its literary merit or just its prurient appeal. That creates all sorts of subtle neuroses, especially in a young writer. There’s also something inherently creepy about turning your own life into a car crash for the literate rubbernecker. Not to mention the fact that coming out with a tell-all early in your career is like coming onstage screaming. What the hell do you do for an encore?

And of course, there’s the bothersome youth-’n'-beauty angle. Beauty was never a liability in a writer, but these days, especially for women, it seems more like a necessity. No longer is writing the last vestige of the famously lumpen, a welcoming haven for the pithy wart hog. Now writers are considering collagen and facing age-panic at 35. Imagine if it had always been this way: “Eudora’s prose is solid; pity she doesn’t have a more market-friendly look.” “Truman’s latest is totally creamy, but get him off the fois gras, willya?” I mean, really. If I can’t get wrinkles and a fat ass, you can keep your publishing revolution.

Like all literary frenzies, this, too, shall pass. But not before some poor sucker, like the unsuspecting victim of a publishing industry pyramid scam, gets her tell-all to market too late and spills her guts right into the remainders bin. Seems to me life as a writer is hard enough without the cheapening effect of being swept into a cattle-call of human misery, however gifted and comely the company. Doubtless, however, others will rush to join the herd. Meanwhile, my friends and I are sitting uneasily on the sidelines, our lives in our laps, waiting to see what comes next.