Paul Monette | Open Road Media | 1992 | 4 minutes (797 words) Below is a brief excerpt from Open Road Media’s reissue of Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story, the National Book Award-winning autobiography by Paul Monette. Purchase the book here. *** Everybody else had a childhood, for one thing—where they were coaxed […]
memoir
Posted inQuotes
What Happened When We Discovered What Mattered
“Besides nearly killing me, college taught me several things. Namely, that external identity mattered. Being black mattered. It determined where to get off the Boston subway without receiving a baseball bat to the head. Being the biracial child of a single, white mother determined which whites would beg me, breezily to integrate certain spaces and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
‘It Is An Opportunity for Great Joy’: The Power of Narration & Medicine
Jalees Rehman | December 2012 | 8 minutes (1,957 words) Jalees Rehman is a cell biologist and physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who’s been featured on Longreads in the past. Below is an essay first posted at SciLogs, which he has allowed us to repost here for the Longreads community. * * * […]
Posted inNonfiction, Story
‘You’re in Trouble. Am I Right?’: My Unsentimental Education
Debra Monroe | 2012 | 20 minutes (5,101 words) Debra Monroe is the author of six books, including the memoir “My Unsentimental Education” which will appear in October 2015. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The American Scholar, Doubletake, The Morning News and The Southern Review, and she is frequently shortlisted for The […]
Posted inUncategorized
Longreads Member Pick: My Family Tree, in Black and White, by Dionne Ford
This week we’re excited to share “My Family Tree, in Black and White,” a new personal essay by Dionne Ford and More magazine. The below story comes from the magazine’s September issue, which is not yet online. Thanks to Ford and More for sharing it with the Longreads Member community! Read an excerpt here. Become a Longreads […]
Posted inUncategorized
Our Longreads Member Pick: Someone Could Get Hurt (Chapter 1), by Drew Magary
For this week’s Member Pick, we’re thrilled to share the first chapter of Drew Magary’s new memoir on fatherhood, Someone Could Get Hurt (Gotham Books). Magary, who writes for Deadspin and GQ, has been featured on Longreads many times in the past, and he explained how his latest book came together: I was in the middle of writing a second novel that would […]