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, […]
Emily Dickinson wrote that “biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographed.” And, indeed, for a century and a half, the mystery of Emily Dickinson’s life has evaded many biographers. Her story has instead been hindered by countless myths and stereotypes. Emily the recluse. Emily the woman too shy to publish her work. […]
If you can get past the knot of generational descriptors, geographical locations, and time periods, you will be richly rewarded with a deeply moving, lyrical contemplation of family history, individual identity, and home—one that lingers in your mind long after the book is over.