Tag: memoir

A professor returns to the California military base where she grew up to make sense of her family’s role developing weapons for the US government.

Memoir is always a betrayal. When writing about life in queer subcultures, the harm of honesty can feel even greater.

A white woman came up to my mother, leaned in close and said, “We whites have to stick together against the Asian invasion.” My mother was ecstatic. “She liked me! They like me here!”

A new father with early-stage MS sets out to understand the interiors of his daughter’s mind, and his own.

Morgan Jerkins tackles the time-worn question of how far is too far to go in revealing yourself in first-person writing.

The first biography of Edward Abbey in a generation is closer to a memoir about friendship between two crusty desert rats.

A survivor of childhood sexual abuse now in recovery, Larry Ruhl finds himself adrift in the age of hookup apps.

Geologists on a mission to vindicate their theory of a lost mountain range discover something even more significant buried beneath the ice.

Nicole Chung contemplates loss, adoption, and working on a book her late father won’t get to see.

On the eve of her marriage, an adventurous young woman tests how free she really wants to be.

Fourteen years after her memoir about about her father’s death was released, novelist Aminatta Forna still deals with after-effects, both good and bad.

While teaching English to communist party officials in post-war Laos, Kathryn Kefauver Goldberg reflects on silence and the legacy of trauma.

The poet and one-time presidential candidate isn’t the least bit surprised by the state of our union.

To help demystify dying, Cory Taylor answers questions about what it’s like to have a terminal illness.

In an excerpt from her memoir, Carolyn Murnick tries to piece together the stabbing murder of her childhood friend.

A 1992 murder of a young boy unravels a journalist’s dark family secrets.

In the New Yorker, Naomi Fry writes about Cat Marnell’s new memoir in a piece that’s part review, part analysis of women’s addiction stories.

Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper describes how she fell in love with words and offers a peek into the complex process of making dictionaries.

At Broadly, Gabby Bess — a writer who has depression — interviews life-long sufferer Daphne Merkin, and reviews Merkin’s new memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression.

This week, read stories by Mark MacKinnon, Rachel Cusk, Carmen Maria Machado, Suketu Mehta, and an excerpt from Bill Hayes.

BuzzFeed has a touching, intimate excerpt of Insomniac City: New York, Oliver and Me, Bill Hayes’s memoir of his relationship with late neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks. 10-13-16 I, soaking in the bath, O on the toilet, talking, talking about what he’s been thinking and writing — short personal pieces, for a memoir perhaps. He […]

An exclusive excerpt from the new memoir by Christine Hyung-Oak Lee.

At The Weeklings, Khirad Siddiqui reflects on wearing a hijab at age 13, as a young woman in Plano, Texas. She discovered “affirmation and reassurance” in the writings of Malcolm X, an American Muslim who too felt that his “peers failed to understand him as a complete and multifaceted human being.”

When an American exchange student discovered that the Germans never lose anything.

What if your last name is just the word that comes after your first name?

Motivated by seller’s regret and nostalgia, a journalist goes in search of the vinyl of his youth. And not just copies of albums he loved—he wants the exact records he owned and sold.

“Editing is a fugue state; the time self-erases.”

So here was my father, in this white apartment with textured walls and thick carpeting, and the scant amount of furniture and paintings he’d brought from Redmond, looking like interlopers, like imposters, neither here nor there. And we’re sitting in this living room and I have no idea who he is and he says, “So […]

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 […]

“I wanted him to understand my life—that I’d been caught in the local pattern and found the safest way forward, but if I’d lived somewhere else I’d be someone else and still could.”