In an age of reality TV and personal blogs, an older form of personal confession — the memoir — is booming.

As a percentage of books and in absolute numbers, more memoirs than ever are being published. They are outpacing even debut novels.

Michael Cader, who tracks book deals for his electronic newsletter, "Publishers Lunch," counts 295 memoirs signed by publishers last year, compared with 227 debut novels and 214 memoirs in 2006.

Memoirs accounted for 12.5 percent of nonfiction deals, up from 10 percent in 2006 and 9 percent in 2005.

Citing two recent best-sellers, Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love," a post-divorce travelogue, and Jeannette Walls' "The Glass Castle," about her bizarre parents, literary agent Amy Williams says memoirs share reality TV's voyeuristic appeal.

Memoirs can "make us feel better about ourselves because whether we're honest about it or not, we all like feeling as if someone has it worse than we do, or behaved in a way we never would have," Williams says.

One memoir often leads to another and another.

Walls is writing another book about her family. Augusten Burroughs is following two best-sellers, "Running With Scissors" (dysfunctional childhood) and "Dry" (alcoholism), with "A Wolf at the Table," about his father, out April 29. Marya Hornbacher, who wrote "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia" in 1998, has a new memoir, "Madness: A Bipolar Life," out April 9.

Is there a memoir glut? "Eat, Pray, Love" has 4.8 million copies in print, but most memoirs sell modestly, with first printings under 30,000.

"There can never be too many if one is great," Scribner's Nan Graham says. "I've vowed never to do another memoir, then someone like Jeannette Walls comes along."

Memoirs resonate when they're "empowering and liberating. You can read about someone who has survived poverty or addiction or worse. It's a way to neutralize shame and stigma. And in the end, the stories are often hopeful and inspiring."