Truth is stranger than fiction

While I certainly don't suffer from this malady, some people (like this Telegraph writer) find themselves turning away from novels and moving towards history. Biography certainly is an overlooked category by young people... you'd think that we'd start to realize that biopics come from somewhere.
Of course, that isn't entirely right... young people might not be reading biographies but we are reading a lot of autobiographical work... or memoir work that is slightly altered to be fiction (admitted from the start, like Stephen Elliott, or forced into the admission, like James Frey). Lots of writers these days are using the short-story memoir genre to their advantage -- look at David Sedaris.