Search Results for: memoir

Hallowed Ground: Patti Smith on Visiting the Prison of Jean Genet’s Dreams

We were entering a military zone and hit a checkpoint. The driver’s identity card was inspected and after an interminable stretch of silence we were ordered to get out of the car. Two officers searched the front and back seats, finding a switchblade with a broken spring in the glove box. That can’t be so bad, I thought, but as they knocked on the trunk our driver became markedly agitated. Dead chickens? Maybe drugs. They circled around the car, and then asked him for the keys. He threw them in a shallow ravine and bolted but was swiftly wrestled to the ground. I glanced sidelong at Fred. He betrayed no emotion and I followed his lead.

They opened the trunk. Inside was a man who looked to be in his early 30s curled up like a slug in a rusting conch shell. He seemed terrified as they poked him with a rifle and ordered him to get out. We were all herded to the police headquarters, put in separate rooms, and interrogated in French. The commander arrived, and we were brought before him. He was barrel-chested with dark, sad eyes and a thick mustache that dominated his careworn face. Fred quickly took stock of things. I slipped into the role of compliant female, for in this obscure annex of the Foreign Legion it was definitely a man’s world. I watched silently as the human contraband, stripped and shackled, was led away. Fred was ordered into the commander’s office. He turned and looked at me. Stay calm was the message telegraphed from his pale blue eyes.

-From Vogue‘s excerpt of M Train, Patti Smith’s new memoir, in which she and her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, make a pilgrimage to the remains of the French penal colony in northwest French Guiana where Jean Genet longed to be imprisoned, which he wrote about in The Thief’s Journal. Smith collected stones there, to bring to Genet.

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Appropriate for a Seven-Year-Old Child

Photo: Marlo Mack

Marlo Mack’s podcast How To Be a Girl is a sensitive and honest exploration of the joys, fears, and struggles of raising of a transgender child. Earlier this year, Marlo and her seven-year-old daughter M (both pseudonyms) met transgender actress Laverne Cox (“Orange Is the New Black”). The story and photos of that meeting had a brief flare of online virality. In a recent episode of the podcast, Marlo (who also blogs at gendermom) talked about what happened after that meeting, as M began to understand that the world can be a difficult, even dangerous, place for transgender people like her. Below is a transcribed excerpt of that podcast. Read more…

Second Chances After Fifty: Jeanette Winterson, in ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’

Photo by Chris Boland

Today (October 2, 2015) I turn fifty. This is officially the first age that has freaked me out. Fifty? How can I be fifty? Fifty is how old grandparents are, or how old my grandparents were when I was born, anyway. And I haven’t even been a parent. Fifty is how old Maggie Estep was when she died, tragically, suddenly. I haven’t yet done enough with my life, haven’t done enough of the writing and publishing and other things I’ve meant to do.

You can imagine, then, how comforting it was–and perfectly timed, just before my birthday–to come upon these lines in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson’s excellent 2012 memoir of coming to understand herself after breaking free from her religious fanatic adoptive mother, embracing her sexuality, and meeting her birth mother:

“I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”

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My Unsentimental Education

Debra Monroe | My Unsentimental Education, The University of Georgia Press | Oct. 2015 | 14 minutes (3,487 words)

A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe left to earn a degree, then another, and another, vaulting into academia but never completely leaving her past behind. Her memoir My Unsentimental Education was published today, and our thanks to the University of Georgia Press for allowing us to reprint the chapter below. Two previous excerpts from the book have been long-listed for The Best American Essays (2011 and 2015), and an early excerpt also appeared on Longreads in 2013.  

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Patti Smith Returns with ‘M Train’

The Guardian has published an excerpt of Patti Smith’s upcoming memoir cum travelogue, M TrainI’ve had the privilege to read the entire book—I enjoyed it so much I promptly bought tickets to see Smith read at George Washington University. M Train is the diary of a genius; it slips from colloquial to brilliant, and back again, within a paragraph:

I should get out of here, I am thinking, out of the city. But where would I go that I would not drag my seemingly incurable lethargy along with me, like the worn canvas sack of an angst-driven teenage hockey player?

It is intimidating, yet full of small, relatable moments: Smith binge-watches detective shows, drinks endless cups of coffee, and fangirls over her favorite authors:

Yesterday’s poets are today’s detectives. They spend a life sniffing out the hundredth line, wrapping up a case, and limping exhausted into the sunset. They entertain and sustain me. Linden and Holder in The Killing. Law & Order’s Goren and Eames. CSI’s Horatio Caine. I walk with them, adopt their ways, suffer their failures, and consider their movements long after an episode ends, whether in real time or rerun.

As for me, I started to carry my galley wherever I went. It is smudged with pencil and debris from the bottom of my bookbag. I will not lend my copy to anyone, but I encourage everyone to read it.

As if it had followed me from Berlin a heavy mist descended on Monmouth Street. From my small terrace I caught the moment when drapes of cloud dropped upon the ground. I had never seen such a thing and lamented I was without film for my camera. On the other hand I was able to experience the moment completely unburdened. I put on my overcoat and turned and said goodbye to my room. Downstairs I had black coffee, kippers, and brown toast in the breakfast room. My car was waiting. My driver was wearing sunglasses.

The mist grew heavier, a full-blown fog, enveloping all we passed. What if it suddenly lifted and everything was gone? The column of Lord Nelson, the Kensington Gardens, the looming Ferris wheel by the river, and the forest on the heath. All disappearing into the silvered atmosphere of an interminable fairy tale. The journey to the airport seemed endless. The outlines of bare trees faintly visible like an illustration from an English storybook.

M Train is available October 6.

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Eve’s Hollywood

Longreads Pick

An excerpt from the memoirs of Eve Babitz, a scandalous scenester of ’60s and ’70s Los Angeles.

Author: Eve Babitz
Published: Sep 21, 2015
Length: 12 minutes (3,009 words)

On Graywolf Press and the Lyric Essay

Photo: Pixabay

Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major cultural force.” But what exactly is a lyric essay?

The term lyric essay was popularized in the ’90s by the writer John D’Agata (a Graywolf author) to describe a hybrid form of nonfiction that accommodates verse, memoir, and criticism. But its origins go back at least as far as Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, journalist-critics whose work is magnetically personal. Its present-day progeny is more diverse and more direct, answering to a very modern hunger for well-worded social arguments rooted in identity and experience. It’s a rapidly expanding niche, where Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay can turn painful confessions into powerful exhortations while — in a different mode — Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti can make universal claims out of private stories. On this shifting ground, Graywolf’s poet-critics are punching above every weight class.

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How Mary Karr Teaches Her Students About Memory

Longreads Pick

A short excerpt from The Art of Memoir.

Author: Mary Karr
Published: Sep 15, 2015

‘Too Strong for That’: Margo Jefferson on Depression as Taboo in Affluent Black America

But one white female privilege had always been withheld from the girls of Negroland. Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline. Because our people had endured horrors and prevailed, even triumphed, their descendants should be too strong and too proud for such behavior. We were to be ladies, responsible Negro women, and indomitable Black Women. We were not to be depressed or unduly high-strung; we were not to have nervous collapses. We had a legacy. We were too strong for that.

I craved the right to turn my face to the wall, to create a death commensurate with bourgeois achievement, political awareness, and aesthetically compelling feminine despair. My first forays in this direction were petty. I conducted my own small battle of the books, purging my library of stalwart, valorous titles by black women and replacing them, whenever possible, with morbid, truculent ones by my sisters. Out with This Child’s Gonna Live, up with There’s Nothing I Own That I Want. Good-bye, My Lord, What a Morning, by Marian Anderson; hello, Everything and Nothing by Dorothy Dandridge. As for Mari Evans’s iconic sixties poem: I am a black woman…I tore it out of my black poets’ anthology and set fire to it in the bathroom sink.

I found literary idols in Adrienne Kennedy, Nella Larsen, and Ntozake Shange, writers who’d dared to locate a sanctioned, forbidden space between white vulnerability and black invincibility.

-From The Cut‘s excerpt of Negroland, Pulitzer Prize winner Margo Jefferson’s new memoir, about the expectations imposed upon her while growing up in what she calls “Negro America, where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty.”

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Women and Their Relationship with Alcohol: A Reading List

Longreads Pick

You’ll read work by memoirists, poets and scholars. As Michelle Dean writes, addiction stories may include moments of sentiment and cliche, but they’re no less true. In fact, cliche is tantamount to survival. Seven stories, each with their own twist (no pun intended).

Source: Longreads
Published: Sep 13, 2015