Memoir Archive

The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother - As I write, there have been 200,000 Google entries about Amy Chua --- and her book has only been out for a few weeks! After all that blather, why should

The Bee Cottage Story: How I Made a Muddle of Things and Decorated My Way Back to Happines - I can’t remember how I became Frances Schultz’s online friend, because the process was so effortless it seemed we had always been sassing one another. And I can’t recall why it

The Best Little Boy in the World - Andrew Sullivan sobbed. (Big surprise.) On the street, we could hear cheers. And in our house, when the New York Senate made gay marriage legal in our state, there was

The Best Memoirs (Part 2) - I recently published a grab bag of The Best Memoirs (Part 1). Here is Part 2. It's even longer than Part 1. Fun Home The story, in outline, is about a

The Best Memoirs (Part One) - A few hours after I published an appreciation of Eudora Welty's memoir, One Writer's Beginnings, two readers wrote with the same question: I'm thinking of writing a memoir. Are there

The Dirty Life: Farming, Food, and Love - Ruth Fecych, one of New York's best book editors, handled a friend’s manuscript so deftly I asked her if we could possibly work together. Time passed. I was sure she

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" is a whip cracking just in front of my face, a cosmic wake-up call, a reminder of something I know well and say all

The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir - Sherry Turkle, Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, has spent decades studying the impact of digital technology on our lives and culture. She’s written groundbreaking

The End of the World As We Know It - Maybe you read The New York Times article about the badly wounded Iraq vet who tried to kill himself seventeen times after he came home. It

The Film Club - His grades started dropping in the ninth grade. In the tenth, they toppled. He switched to a private school. No difference. Jesse Gilmour just didn't give a damn. His

The Fran Lebowitz Reader - "Pretend It's a City" is a seven-part Netflix series Fran Lebowitz made with Martin Scorsese. It's Fran at her most lovable: mean, condescending, rude and judgmental. Friends who binge nothing

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead - November 1: “the day of the dead”. In the Mexican/Spanish tradition, it's the day when those who have passed on find an easier passage to visit the

The Great Pool Jump - Seriously long ago --- in 1970 --- I reviewed Feelgood: A trip in time and out for the Boston Globe. I can’t tell what knocked me out more, this astonishing

The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise - In 1974, when Pico Iyer was a teenager, he traveled to India, where his father was meeting with the Dalai Lama. There the boy and the most exalted monk in Buddhism

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss - There are men and women who write beautifully, every word inevitable, the paragraphs building into chapters, the chapters adding up to a great book, and we never suspect that their

The Horse Boy: A Father’s Quest to Heal His Son - Video The movie trailer To be the parent of an autistic child like Rowan Isaacson --- I can't imagine it. Life gets reduced to tantrums and the space between them.

The King of Halloween and Miss Firecracker Queen: A Daughter’s Tale of Family and Football - I get 20 books a week. I always read the first page. And then, sadly, another book goes into the Goodwill bag. This book arrived last week. This is how it

The Last Lecture - One of the staples of “the college experience” at many schools is the “last lecture” --- a beloved professor sums up a lifetime of scholarship and teaching

The Letters of Gustave Flaubert - The letters of Flaubert --- so beyond boring, right? Ever been in a doomed romance? Then read on.... "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," Gustave Flaubert said, and ever since readers have imagined

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid - Before sending the final draft of my novel into the publishing world, I asked one friend to read it. She flagged an important fact: the kids in my book have