It seems STRANGE to say so when there are tens of thousands of dollars changing hands, but the growth of the personal-history industry amounts to the fulfillment of what academic Paul Diehl once described as the "democratization of the memoir." If Frank McCourt was a nobody before he published Angela’s Ashes, at least he had designs to be a somebody. He knew he had a good story on his hands, and he knew he had the talent to write it well. The majority of Axelson-Berry and Bull’s clients are unabashedly ordinary, and they tell unabashedly mundane tales.

"I didn’t go out often," explains Doris Prowler Lebow (Axelson-Berry’s mother), in an as-told-to book titled simply Memoirs. "I took some gardening courses with Anne Hamburger, and some other classes ... I also knitted quite a bit ..." A little on the dry side, perhaps, but as far as Axelson-Berry’s concerned, such stories, while not notable (or quotable), deserve to be told. "Each person is a citadel," she says. "It’s not that everyone’s equal, it’s just that every person exists."

It’s fitting, perhaps, that in an age where a cereal box can be considered fine art, the life story of a woman who likes to knit can be considered literature — or at least a form of history. There is, after all, a school of thought contending that history is made not by a few shining stars, but by the constellations of ordinary folk who surround them. In a time when many historians are less interested in Napoleon than they are in the guy who tended his horses, why shouldn’t Charlie Bisbee, founder of the Bisbee Mill Museum, in Chesterfield, Massachusetts, have his say?

Still, there are those who see dark — or at least annoying — forces at work here. While Axelson-Berry believes that the writing of personal histories is an important step towards ridding America of what she calls its "cultural amnesia," columnist Stanley Crouch shudders at the "cultural narcissism" he sees underlying Americans’ penchant for writing about themselves. And Crouch is not alone in this view.

"It’s another sign of the lust for celebrity in our times," says cultural critic James Bowman. "If you can’t be famous in the traditional way — by doing something — then you adopt the trappings of fame. Whatever money can buy in the way of fame, people have tried to buy it. This kind of memoir seems, by definition, to be a thing that could be of no interest to anyone — except, perhaps, immediate family members."

But that, says Kitty Axelson-Berry, is precisely the point. So-called vanity presses publish clients’ books with little or no in-house editing and minimal design, and with vague promises of future literary fame and fortune — which rarely, if ever, materialize. By contrast, personal historians will not only write, edit, and design your book to your specifications, they'll make it clear from the get-go that the books they produce are meant to be heirlooms rather than potential bestsellers.

"There is a big difference," Axelson-Berry says. "Vanity presses lead people on. They feed on people’s notions of grandeur. I don’t do that. My clients are welcome to get more copies and send them out to publishers, but I discourage them from doing that."

And yet the occasional client will give the fame-and-fortune thing a whirl. "My book appeals to a much wider audience than I thought it would," says Steve Bernstein. "If someone wanted to pick it up, I’d be interested in talking to them." Another Modern Memoirs client, 83-year-old Charlie Bisbee, says his Roads Traveled — which documents his years spent in the Army and in state government — "will be on sale to the public." Then again, Bisbee has led a relatively full life. "The book," he says, "will have a chapter named ‘Me and Tip O’Neill.’"

There have BEEN a couple of high-profile personal histories published over the last year. Vintage Books recently reprinted the late Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham’s 1997 Personal History, to wide acclaim. And then, of course, there was Tom Brokaw’s much-ballyhooed An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation (Random House). Indeed, Brokaw’s book — a collection of 50 profiles of people who lived through World War II — made personal-history writing one of last year’s hot literary genres. But An Album of Memories doesn’t just serve to lend the field an air of legitimacy; it also provides us with a clue as to why these personal-history books are such big business right now.

The majority of people who hire personal historians are in their 70s and 80s. These are the men and women who — like Brokaw’s subjects — were around during World War II, the seminal event of the 20th century. They saw things. They did things. And they want to tell us about it. More important, their baby-boomer offspring are more than happy to pony up the cash to help them do so. As Axelson-Berry says, "We’re finding that we have this thirst to connect generations, to find out what our parents went through."

Not everyone considers this a good thing. Last April, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote a piece called "The Gabbiest Generation." In it, she lamented "how sad it is that the Unsung Generation has become the Singing Generation." She continued, "We encouraged our parents to stop being so modest and share their stories. Now they can’t stop gushing and celebrating themselves.... Not satisfied with one Me Generation, we made two. We felt guilty about not being more like them, strong and silent. So we made them more like us, gabby and navel-gazing." Dowd’s conclusion: "Boomers have done a bad, bad thing."

"Bullshit," says Richard Stone, author of The Healing Art of Storytelling: A Sacred Journey of Personal Discovery (Hyperion, 1996). "It’s a great quote, but I think it’s bullshit, frankly. I think we’re living at a time when people are taking more time to reflect on the meaning of their lives, the value of their life legacy. It’s interesting that this is coming at a time when our country has gone through this huge expansion, this huge surge in wealth. People have more money than they ever dreamed of having, and they’re not satisfied. They’re asking, ‘What of enduring value can I leave behind?’ I believe that’s something that has spurred this growing interest in personal histories. It’s meeting that need to look back and make sense of things, and then pass that on."

Not everyone who feels the urge to pass on his or her life experiences is a member of the World War II generation, however. Lowell resident Seng Ty, 33, is currently working on a book with Axelson-Berry that details his childhood under Pol Pot’s murderous regime in Cambodia. "I want people to learn what I went through," he says. "It’s very much about my life, the whole experience during the wars, genocide in Cambodia, how I escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand, and my coming to America."

Ty’s story, though, is not marked by a sense of triumph. "Most of my family died during the revolution," he says. "It is very painful writing this memoir. I try to remember every detail. If you read the book, I describe a lot about my mother. I was very close to her — she inspired me. Before she died she left me a message that I need to carry on. Even though my mother was not able to stay with me, her spirit is here." Writing his book, he says, "helped me in healing."

"Personal histories," agrees Richard Stone, "can be profoundly therapeutic." This was certainly the case for Lynda Sun Lee, who hired Axelson-Berry to do an as-told-to memoir of her elderly parents, Rusky and Rose Sun, who immigrated to the US from their native China in the 1960s. Sun Lee originally commissioned the book to preserve the cultural and familial memories of an increasingly "Americanized" family. But before long, she began to realize the project would provide unexpected benefits.

"My father basically had a lot of hang-ups," Sun Lee says. "A lot of things he’d been brooding over for many years. Kitty pushed him to think about things he hadn’t thought about before. She persuaded him to think differently about things, and for the first time he actually saw the positive side of his experiences. The process of writing this book had a positive influence on my parents in terms of self-reflection."

Rusky and Rose’s resulting memoir — Detours and Adaptations — cleared up a number of long-held grudges, including one infamous incident involving the family pet. "Growing up, we had this dog that we loved," Sun Lee recalls. "We came home from school one day and the dog was gone. We always thought our parents must be cold-hearted to have given away our dog without an explanation. In this book, I learned that my father actually had a lot of affection for that dog, that it’s something that to this day he feels bad about. I thought of my father as this cold-hearted, uncaring, calculating person, but what’s revealed through this book is that he’s not, he’s very sensitive."

At the same time, Sun Lee says, her father learned something about her. "We’ve never had a close relationship, and I wouldn’t say we do today, but I think he’s realized that I’m not this materialistic, selfish, Americanized girl, that there is a side of me that cares about our history and our culture. This has helped bring the family together."