Search Results for: memoir

Without You I’m Nothing

Longreads Pick

Molotkow takes a closer look at the memoirs of rock stars’ ex-lovers—from Cynthia Lennon to Angie Bowie. “‘The truth is that if I’d known as a teenager what falling for John Lennon would lead to,’ read ‘John’’s final lines, ‘I would have turned round right then and walked away.’ Aside from the living death of losing her husband abruptly and in public, Cynthia never recovered the life she could have had without him.”

Source: The Believer
Published: Jul 2, 2014
Length: 24 minutes (6,135 words)

'Friendship': The Full First Chapter from Emily Gould's New Novel

Emily Gould | Friendship | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | July 2014 | 8 minutes (1,893 words)

 

Below is the opening chapter of Friendship, the new novel by Emily Gould, who we’ve featured often on Longreads in the past. Thanks to Gould and FSG for sharing it with the Longreads community. You can purchase the full book from WORD Bookstores

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Yes, All Women Part II: A Reading List of Stories Written By Women

My last Yes, All Women reading list was a hit with the Longreads community, so here’s part two. Enjoy 20 pieces by fantastic women writers.

1. “When You’re Unemployed.” (Jessica Goldstein, The Hairpin, June 2014)

“The first thing to go is the caring…You develop a routine: changing out of sleeping leggings and into daytime leggings.”

2. “No Country for Old Pervs.” (Molly Lambert, Blvrb, June 2014)

Dov Charney, Terry Richardson…and the Iraq War? The 2000s were rough.

3. “For Writers with Full-Time Jobs: On the Work/Other Work Balance.” (Megan Burbank, Luna Luna Mag, June 2014)

Seven helpful tips for living practically and creatively. I’m particularly fond of “use your commute.”

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'Orange is the New Black' is Back: A Reading List on the Representation of Prison

Now that we’ve all had a chance to finish watching Orange is the New Black (who am I kidding — we all binge watched it in a day or two, right?), I thought I’d share four pieces that clarify and critique the way prison is represented on the show. The first two pieces cover season one, for all you newbies out there. The second two address the most recent season.

1. “Five Formerly Incarcerated Women on Prison, Relationships, and Orange is the New Black.” (Kat Stoeffel, The Cut, August 2013)

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On Watching a Person Deteriorate

In the Guardian, an adaptation of The Iceberg, a memoir by Marion Coutts about her husband’s last months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor. She writes: “There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part.”

13 April 2010

The operation went well. Tom is sitting up, talking, eating, reading. He looks extremely good. All praise to the surgeon.

Tom is home within 10 days but straight away there are fresh difficulties. He has trouble saying the name of the hospital or the name of the friend who came yesterday. He calls me to the study where he is looking up something in the thesaurus. The word is disaster. “They can’t have got rid of it!” he says. “Maddening!” As he has spelled it distaster, he cannot find it. Physically there is a lot of strain. Weakness and muscle failure is starting to sting him and creep again around the joints, fingers and calves and in parts of his arms. This is steroids at their warring work.

Tom is speaking to me less. The way his intellect is made manifest through language is being destroyed. Great chunks of speech are collapsing. Holes are appearing. Avenues crumble and sudden roadblocks halt the journey from one part of consciousness to the other. He strings words together like ropes across voids. He never panics. What would it be like if he did?

Read the story

Photo: Joris Louwes

The Obliteration of a Person

Longreads Pick

Marion Coutts recalls the last months of her husband, art critic Tom Lubbock, after he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Excerpted from Coutt’s memoir The Iceberg:

Fast forward to February. The future has arrived early. Tom has a severe fit in the small hours of the morning. He had gone away by himself to get some writing done in a house by the sea and was due home today. It is evening, he is back with us, lying down quietly upstairs. He can talk after a fashion, read a little but he can’t write. He is estranged from himself.

Spring. There is going to be destruction: the obliteration of a person, his intellect, his experience and his agency. I am to watch it. This is my part. It is now March. In one week, Tom will have another scan. This is the one to fear. There have not been so many fits, but outside them complexity is multiplying and thousands of lesser confusions also occur. Words slip out, switches are stumbled over and substitutions made.

Source: The Guardian
Published: Jun 14, 2014
Length: 15 minutes (3,806 words)

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

Longreads Pick

The first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community.

Source: Longreads
Published: Jun 10, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,779 words)

The Magical Stranger: A Son’s Journey Into His Father’s Life

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words)

Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community. Read more…

Project Wizard

Longreads Pick

Richard Nixon’s brazen plan to redeem himself after Watergate:

Now Nixon’s preoccupation, even obsession, after being forced from office was to become a respected figure. It wasn’t for him to live out the rest of his life in disgrace. He was determined to become someone people listened to—a senior statesman, a sage. And the best way to be considered a sage, Nixon understood, was to establish one’s credentials as an expert in foreign policy, a man known to world leaders. Domestic policy didn’t cut it the same way: Lectures and articles on education or the environment didn’t attract the Brahmins and the business leaders Nixon wanted to attract, didn’t occupy nearly as much space on the stage. No splashy trips.

In accordance with the Wizard plan, the former president first would write another memoir (because statesmen wrote memoirs), both to make money and to give his own version of events. Money wasn’t a new preoccupation but now Nixon feared expensive trials (until the pardon) and had just paid a heap in back taxes rather than risk impeachmment on the matter. Nixon’s book sold astonishingly well. To get some questions behind him and make still more money, Nixon also struck a lucrative deal for a series of interviews with the British talk-show host David Frost, which aired in 1977. Nixon was paid a whopping $600,000 for signing and was to earn from each sale of the interviews, an odd arrangement. On Watergate, which the deal held to one of the four sessions, Nixon wasn’t nearly as revealing as the play and movie Frost/Nixon had it, but interest in him was sufficiently strong and he said just enough—“I let down my country”—to draw great interest and line his pockets.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: May 15, 2014
Length: 11 minutes (2,919 words)

Jesus Land: Our Longreads Member Pick

Longreads Pick

For this week’s Longreads Member Pick, we’re excited to share the opening chapter of Jesus Land, the bestselling 2012 memoir by Julia Scheeres about her strict Christian upbringing in Indiana, her relationship with her adopted brother David, and the stint they did in a Christian reform school together in the Dominican Republic. Our thanks to Scheeres and Counterpoint Press for sharing this story with the Longreads community. 

Source: Longreads
Published: May 20, 2014
Length: 20 minutes (5,152 words)