Tag: memoir

Jill Talbot on secret messages between mother and daughter.

Blake Butler writes movingly about his late wife, poet Molly Brodak.

It’s against the law to examine someone without their consent — but one ER doctor’s colleagues do it anyway.

Emily Gould reconsiders the likelihood of women’s first-person writing bringing about change.

“We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.” 

Today’s memoirists and personal essay writers owe a debt of gratitude to the Prozac Nation author for rewriting an inhibiting rule.

“She was always afraid of my voice. That was the defining factor of our relationship — fear of what I would say and write and do. She’s afraid of … the narrative that I possess.”

A family’s losses after Hurricane Sandy didn’t come in the usual order or with the usual speed.

Jaquira Díaz witnesses her father’s rebellious fight for a better life, and her homeland’s fight for its place in the world.

“I wasn’t unified in my being. I wasn’t able to bring my whole self to the table,” says Cameron Dezen Hammon about her life as a worship leader for an evangelical megachurch.

Trying to form some connection to the father who abandoned him, an outdoorsman surfs the California beach where his father grew up, while looking for answers in the autobiography his father left behind.

In her debut memoir, Sarah Broom builds her “obsession” with her family home — destroyed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina — into a story of how families decide who they are, how they got here, and how they reconstruct themselves over and over again.

Chairs the world over have loved me, and I love them all back.

Bassey Ikpi discusses writing about mental illness. “I could count on the morning. It became the thing that existed without my input… without determining whether or not I was worthy of it.”

For a brief period in the 1960s, the Afro-Brazilian author of the memoir “Child of the Dark” was one of the most well-known writers in the world.

Amid badass women and endless stories, a young California writer comes of age in the orange groves as the Golden State comes into its own.

Amber Scorah talks about committing the one unforgiveable sin: believing, then not believing.

Of all the genes parents pass down and values they instill, how does one take hold so much stronger than the others?

A French-Iranian journalist writes a letter to her grandfather about the ten years she spent in Iran, trying to make sense of her identity and a country living very different public and private lives.

Mira Jacob talks about why she wrote a graphic memoir, and why she is tired of performing her pain in order to help white people understand racism.

Hearses, limousines, Detroit’s newest model — cars marked many milestones in Nancy Nichols’ life of heartache and family deception.

In an excerpt from her memoir, T Kira Madden recalls a harrowing adventure with her parents.

“I wasn’t interested in writing the definitive book on A Tribe Called Quest. I was trying to write the definitive book on a single arc of fandom.”

Pam Houston’s new memoir is an ode to her beloved ranch, but also deals directly with the harrowing moments of childhood abuse that her fictional characters have been living through for years.

“Our cultures are not dead and our civilizations have not been destroyed. Our present tense is evolving as rapidly and creatively as everyone else’s.”

Insomnia is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.

One woman finds insight into her father’s rage in the scientific concept of entropy.

Nic and his father David Sheff’s memoirs about grappling with Nic’s addiction are the basis for the new movie ‘Beautiful Boy.’ It was important to them that the movie communicate what addiction really is — an illness.

In hip-hop and skateboarding, one young man finds an outlet for his aggression.

“’I’m good,’ I told him. I didn’t tell him I was running eleven miles, playing two hours of ball, and eating eight hundred calories a day.”