Diane Johnson opens her breakthrough biography, The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, with a challenge to the reader as to why we don’t know about her subject: Many People have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table . . . everybody remembers his remarks. . . . […]
What would you do if you were sixteen and lost most of your eyesight? If, within weeks, you could no longer drive, read the high school blackboard, pick out the coolest music, or recognize your date’s face? Would you consider your options? Or would you fall into a pattern without making any conscious decision at […]
In a recent interview on the NPR show Fresh Air, a ninety-five-year-old Mel Brooks told Terry Gross that while he didn’t know what the meaning of life was, he did know that comedy was his “delicious refuge from the world.” Gross quotes from Brooks’s new memoir, in which he writes: “Even though it seems foolish […]
There is something quite private about annotating a book. Without thought to publication, writing in the margins is an act of confidence; there is the possibility of glibness, or pretention, or completely banal questions that we wouldn’t typically offer up in public. We are able to argue with every page of Plato, if we so […]
Daniel Sherrell’s epistolary climate memoir, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, begins with an act of self-immolation. We learn that in 2018 a man named David Buckel set himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, stating in his suicide letter that his was “an early death by fossil fuel.” In relaying […]
The Spirit Cabinet Anthemion Her grandparents had spoken “a foreign tongue,” she recalled, but she couldn’t say which one. When I pressed for more, my grandmother would grow glum and dour, as if she were resisting prosecution. I took a picture of her the last day I visited her apartment. Her cat is in the […]
The term “lyric essay” has been with us for nearly thirty years, and while it may well be that we still can’t agree on what it is, here to save us from the irksome I know it when I see it is the new, illuminating anthology of lyric essays A Harp in the Stars. Part […]
Megan Baxter’s Farm Girl is more than a memoir of a woman working on a Vermont farm—the place she fell in love with and began working at when she was fifteen. It’s also the author’s journey as she grapples with who she is and where she belongs, and how she learns to separate herself from […]
Following the multiple-award-winning success of Obit, Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, contemplates heartache, memory, and identity in epistolary form. These letters—addressed to unnamed family members, educators, friends, even to silence—may appear to be one-way communications, but the reader is carbon copied as confidant and silent recipient, enjoined to consider her […]
Women have always walked. Walking is in our “molecular memories,” Annabel Abbs insists in her new book Windswept, “carved indelibly into our DNA.” For thousands of years, women in hunter-gatherer societies walked as many as ten miles a day. And, once agriculture bound women to specific portions of land, women still walked to survive. Water, […]