Memoir
Story Stream
The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
Say ‘I Do’ to the Divorce Memoir March 12, 2025
Divorce writing may be the toughest thing a memoirist can do other than covering a war,” writes Mary Karr in The Art of Memoir. Yet the divorce memoir — and its shy cousin, the autofictional divorce novel — has experienced a resurgence over the past ...
Princes, Palaces, and Pasta March 11, 2025
He was the author of probably the most loved and admired novel ever written in Italian, but when Giuseppe Tomasi, Prince of Lampedusa, died in 1957 at 60, he thought his life as a writer had ended in failure.His only completed novel, Il Gattopardo (T...
The Communist Folk Singers Who Shaped Bob Dylan March 06, 2025
In 1960, a young Robert Zimmerman — who had begun to call himself “Bob Dylan” — journeyed from the icy flatlands of Minnesota to New Jersey on a pilgrimage. His destination: the bedside of his ailing idol, the legendary folk hero, Woody Guthrie. He w...
Between Spirituality and Literature March 06, 2025
Matthew Wickman’s Life to the Whole Being: The Spiritual Memoir of a Literature Professor is a remarkable book. On one level, it is a nuanced study of the relationship between spirituality and literature. It discusses inspiration and the limits of te...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
What Was 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?' February 28, 2025
I’ve got to start with the blurbs. When, 25 years ago this month, I first picked up a copy of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I immediately noticed that the back jacket sported the greatest collection of promotional quotes ev...
Don’t Call It a Comeback February 25, 2025
In the 12 years since releasing her best-selling novel Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has published prolifically but not primarily as a writer of literary fiction. Instead, she has ventured into other forms: memoir, children’s literature, femin...
Charles de Gaulle’s Legacy Offers Timely Lessons February 24, 2025
When Charles de Gaulle published the first volume of his war memoirs, in 1954, it looked like an acknowledgment that he no longer belonged to the present, but to history. His achievements during the Second World War were indeed historic. In June 1940...
A Divorce Memoir With No Lessons February 21, 2025
Modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf understood that we cannot depict life on the page precisely the way we experience it; she experimented with chronology and language to capture the subjectivity of human existence. Some writers might meet this ...
Vance Delivers a Historic Defense of Free Speech February 20, 2025
In “Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis,” J.D. Vance wrote, “I don’t believe in epiphanies. I don’t believe in transformative moments, as transformation is harder than a moment.”Despite that profound point, on Feb. 14, Vance ...
What’s The Point Of Bill Gates? February 18, 2025
I started reading Bill Gates’s new memoir Source Code the day after David Lynch died. In between learning about his pioneering BASIC coding language, I struggled to grasp what Laura Dern was saying in Inland Empire. In many respects, the two couldn’t...
A New, Unbearably Honest Kind of Writing February 10, 2025
Illness and literature have frequently been bedfellows. Tuberculosis, for example, shortened the life and influenced the work of authors as varied as Robert Louis Stevenson, Franz Kafka, and the Brontë sisters. We can’t know what In Search of Lost Ti...
The Books That Ruin Your Life February 04, 2025
Sarah Chihaya’s memoir Bibliophobia begins in a hospital when she is in the midst of a nervous breakdown, and she wastes no time telling us what caused it: “Reader, it was the books that did it.” For Chihaya, reading has always meant trouble: “Sadnes...
On Herzog's Memoirs January 13, 2025
The audiobook of Werner Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2023), is 13 hours, 42 minutes, and 41 seconds long. The listener might be pleased, as I was, to hear the filmmaker personally narrate it, milking every word like...
Elizabeth Strout’s Plunge Into Sentimentality January 10, 2025
Early in Tell Me Everything, Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, the retired teacher Olive Kitteridge reads all of the memoirs by Lucy Barton, a New York City writer who arrived in her coastal Maine town during the pandemic. At Olive’s request, an acqua...
30 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in 2025 January 09, 2025
A new year always brings some uncertainty, and that seems particularly true at the start of 2025. As America grapples with a new (yet familiar) political era, and the larger world faces challenges with few easy solutions, what better way to settle in...
On Tim Matheson's 'Damn Glad to Meet You' January 03, 2025
If you ever want to learn economics, just purchase books about entertainment and sports. It’s that simple. Considering antitrust alone, the whole profession could be put out of business by the memoirs and biographies written by actors and entertainme...
On (Not Quite) Making It January 02, 2025
In 1967, Norman Podhoretz, then the 34-year-old editor of Commentary, published a memoir, Making It, in which he confessed to a powerful drive for status, money, and other conventional forms of success. What’s more, he asserted that other New York in...
How Josh Brolin Wrote A Memoir As Wild As His Life December 03, 2024
Josh Brolin’s From Under The Truck is not exactly a celebrity autobiography, or a now-sober guy’s literary remembrance of wild times past, or a son’s memoir about loving and losing a difficult parent, although at points, depending on where you open t...
Bookselling Out October 17, 2024
My daughter and I were the only browsers in a small bookstore when a woman entered to ask how to find a nearby donut shop. “So I’m in the wrong place altogether,” she replied to the bookseller’s instructions. “Unless you’d like to buy a book,” said t...
Scent of a Man October 17, 2024
The huge solemnity of his eyes, grave and sober as a child’s but with a spark of ancient, euphoric irony back in there somewhere. The gangster-ish heaviness of his hands, dynastic hands, Godfather hands. The too-big head. The carved, impassive face t...
You Can Call Me Al October 14, 2024
I am not a fan of audio books. I prefer pages and ink. However, if you have any interest in Al Pacino’s new memoir, Sonny Boy, I urge you to listen to the actor read it himself. The text offers many pleasures, but it is also ragged and discursive, fu...
Even in Her Memoir, Melania Trump Remains a Mystery October 14, 2024
Back in 2012, some years before her husband, Donald Trump, was elected President of the United States, Melania Trump tweeted a picture of a beluga whale, its glistening white head emerging from the water, its toothy maw open in a half grin. “What is ...
Blind, but Not Mute October 14, 2024
Progressivism is a mental disorder—that, at any rate, is the verdict one is tempted to reach upon finishing Emily Witt’s striking new memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown.Witt is a reporter for The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn. Somehow, she is...
