Which Came First: Reading or Writing?

I think my brain is changing.

Not in a bad way, mind you. I’ve always been forgetful regarding things I don’t feel are important to me, but I’m not talking mechanics and function here. I’m talking preference.

Literary preference.

For as long as I had a job of sorts (starting way back in jr. high with babysitting gigs on school nights), I’ve had money (of sorts) and I’ve always spent part of my dinero on books. Fiction books in particular, romance novels in specific. Nothing else interested me. Maybe a blurb here or there on a nonfiction topic pertinent to my writing, or some aspect of natural science or American history or archaeology that floated my boat, but by & large, I was a romance fiction reader.

Last weekend while cleaning my writing room of old coffee mugs and empty plates, I took note of my TBR pile, (ok,~one of~ my TBR piles, the biggest one) and noticed something I probably should have realized sooner but didn’t: there wasn’t a single romance fiction book in there.

It was 100% memoir. Funny memoir, food memoir, observational memoir, sports memoir. The only place I found fiction was on my wall shelf, and those are books by author friends, not books I read (clarification: books I have read in the past).

I started thinking, as I always do when faced with odd observations. Over the last year or two, I’ve slowly but surely come to the conclusion that long pieces of fiction–meaning long pieces of fiction about one character–are not what my writing style excels at. I can finish a hundred short essays or memoir pieces in the time it would take me to sustain myself through writing half a novel (and I have six unpublished sitting downstairs to prove it). My brain just works best with short jaunts, not long journeys when it comes to stringing words together. Maybe it’s a result of the past few years when I’ve defined part of my writing self as a freelancer, maybe it’s a reality that’s been there all along (after all, I do have six unpublished novels sitting in the basement) and I just didn’t take time to notice.

The question I can’t get out of my mind is this…which came first? The preference of memoir writing or the interest in memoir reading? From the looks of my TBR pile, I’ve been buying these things for a while. When did my fiction to memoir brain shift? I must not even have been aware of it. Did I start buying memoirs because I loved to read them or because I discovered how much fun they are to write?

Maybe I should write a memoir about my TBR memoirs…

And now I’m curious. Do people’s (aka other writers’) reading/writing tastes & preferences change over time? Or am I more abnormal than originally thought?