memoir Archive

Death Memoirs and What They Impart to the Living

Author: | Categories: Critical Essays No comments
Recent memoirs on death and dying offer profound insights for the living, from Edwidge Danticat’s comprehensive new book, The Art of Death, to more intimate accounts of facing death first-hand, such as Nina Riggs’ The Bright Hour and Cory Taylor’s Dying: A Memoir.

The Narrative Conscience: An Interview With Connie May Fowler

Author: | Categories: Interviews No comments
Connie May Fowler’s new memoir, A Million Fragile Bones, is the story of finding home on a Florida sandbar, a migratory crossroads for monarchs, hummingbirds, purple martins, where “dragonflies stir the air with the metallic thrum of transparent wings.”

Review: THE RULES DO NOT APPLY by Ariel Levy

Author: | Categories: Book Reviews, Nonfiction No comments
A staff writer for The New Yorker, Ariel Levy describes her beat as “women who are too much.

The Limits and Freedoms of Literary Regionalism: Silence and the Self in Joan Didion’s Southern California Memoir

Author: | Categories: Reading, Series No comments
Joan Didion's 1979 book of essays The White Album is not only a road trip through the gridded streets and indecisive canyons of Los Angeles County, but also a meditation on Southern California as a setting for self-discovery.

Shirley Jackson, Madeleine L’Engle, and Motherhood

Author: | Categories: Reading No comments
I read much of Shirley Jackson’s memoir of raising four children, Life Among the Savages (1952), on a weekend when I was caring for three children. For a brief stretch—maybe five pages—we achieved a fragile equilibrium and they were all attached to me as I read.

Review: ABANDON ME by Melissa Febos

Author: | Categories: Book Reviews, Nonfiction No comments
Abandon me. The title is a straight-faced challenge. To her lover who she fears will. To two fathers who already have. To the reader who’s embarking on this story with her. Abandon me. Do the worst thing to me I can imagine. And I will save myself with story.

How Food Stars in Peter Mayle’s Memoir

Author: | Categories: Reading, Writing No comments
Being a lover of food and memoirs, I have a dream of living in a foreign country, especially in Europe, for a year and writing about its food customs.

Writing Fiction from Life

Author: | Categories: Writing No comments
Some writers that I know are at times so unsure of whether a story is theirs to tell that they will shelve a project for years at a time, waiting for some kind of permission to be granted, or for forgiveness, or for a death. But sometimes those things

The Beauty of Self-deprecation in Andrew Miller’s IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED

Author: | Categories: Book Reviews, Nonfiction No comments
Fasten your seat belts. Andrew Miller’s alternative lit style is about to take you on a bumpy ride. His memoir in essays, IF ONLY THE NAMES WERE CHANGED, vacillates between hyper-masculine and tender in terrain that traverses parental concerns about raising a daughter, drug and alcohol abuse, and how

Writing Trauma: Notes of Transcendence, #6—Memoir’s Ladder to Recovery

Author: | Categories: Series No comments
Through his words, the writer calls for change. He transforms traumatic experience from a state of helpless victimhood into one of empowered transcendence.