The unexpected consequences of "reading more" (memoir related rant)
TLDR: When you read more, you can actually realize that much weaker books than yours have reached the trad publishing. It's painful to read a book you just can't like but it's very motivational and liberating to see weaker works had success.
Recently I've finished the manuscript of my debut memoir and am currently in the middle of the editing phase. Waiting for feedback from my beta readers and initiating paid critical read from editor(s) to understand the strongest and weakest points in my text, if it has real potential for trad publishing and what should be my top priorities to have real chance of winning an interest from an agent. It's not in English (not my native language) but I've found a very strong translator and have ambition to chase the English market. I know, it's a very ambitious goal but I have some reasons to shoot so high.
While all that is happening I am reading one of my comp books and IMO it is... really bad. I'm in the middle of it and I just can't feel any empathy towards the problems the main character faced in his life. For me they're really mostly minor privileged first world problems. There are so many things that I am just not interested to hear about, like...whining for a few pages how he had to go to high school with a uniform and...have some lessons he didn't like...what? How he had bad grades on his public exams when he was 15 and his mom said that's terrible. How he got drunk while teenager and his mom was very disappointed and mad. You serious my guy, those are such big traumas that hey deserve a place in a struggle-recovery memoir? He's going back and forth between childhood and present and IMO the childhood part is so weak I just can't like the guy. Often while he's writing from the perspective of the child/teenager it's just so transparent that he's integrating thoughts and details that are artificially there and not part of what actually probably happened, just not the way a child/teenager would think.