Giles Harvey: The Rise of the Failure Memoir: The New Yorker "A man of genius makes no mistakes," Stephen Dedalus says in "Ulysses." His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery. Maybe so; but what about the man of mere talent? What are his mistakes the portals of? A growing batch of memoirs by literary screw-ups and also-rans suggests that mistakes - the bigger and more luridly described the better - might be a portal to the success, or, at the very least, the solvency, that eluded their authors the first time around. The formula is simple: when all else fails, write about your failure. "It took a long time for me to admit that I had failed," Benjamin Anastas admits in the opening sentence of his new memoir, "Too Good to Be True" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The delay is understandable. In 1998, at the tenderish age of twenty-eight, Anastas published his début novel with Dial. "An Underachiever's Diary" didn't electrify the culture (it has since been described as "the most underappreciated book of the 1990s"), but it was well reviewed and sold, as they say in the publishing business, "respectably" (i.e., it didn't lose money). Three years later, Farrar, Straus & Giroux ("It was not just a publisher in my eyes; it was more like the Promised Land") brought out his sophomore effort, "The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor's Disappearance." Again, the reviews were good, the sales modest. Confident that a solid career lay before him, Anastas quit his day job to write full time. . . .