Tag: Memoirs

Lisa Whittington-Hill suggests there’s a distinct gender bias in celebrity memoirs. Where female celebrities are expected to expose all, male writers get to write about whatever they want.

After his parents pushed him out of their home, a teenager descended into the drug-fueled counterculture of the 1970s American West.

“One-eighth of all natural pregnancies begin as twins,” Leah Dieterich writes in her memoir, “but early in pregnancy, one twin becomes less viable and is compressed against the wall of the uterus or absorbed by the other twin.” This concept of a vanishing twin, a term coined in the year of Dieterich’s birth, frames the […]

In my teens I was upset that I was too young to go out with any of the boys in my favorite bands. Now they’re all with women who weren’t even born when I had that thought.

Meaghan O’Connell on the joy, the triumph, and the prison of breastfeeding.

Given a journal while hospitalized, Terese Marie Mailhot writes her way through generations of trauma.

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.

Jillian Lauren on the challenges of holding nothing back as a writer—about her time in a harem, her life as a sex worker, and the fallout from her family’s response to her memoirs.

A central agony in these books is alienation—not only the pain of abuse, or heartbreak, or evaporation, but the pain of having your pain appropriated. The books themselves reclaim the hurt for their authors, and whatever their literary merit, they offer at least some catharsis for the reader, who can always relate. Rock songs make […]

When Piper optioned her book to Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, a number of people were asked to sign over something called “life rights.” In short: Some version of our lives could be depicted on the show, and we each agreed not to sue its creators if, for example, the character based on one […]