Memoir Archive

Rupert Everett: Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins - According to their blurbs, show-biz memoirs are all wise, witty and candid --- and you don’t discover they’re none of those things until you’re ten pages in. But “Red Carpets

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Last Interview, and Other Conversations - Her father came to America from Russia when he was 13. He went to night school to learn English. He never had any formal education except Hebrew school in any

Ruth Reichl: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir - Food matters. As M.F.K. Fisher said, “There is a communion of more than our bodies when we share food.” Gourmet Magazine mattered. For decades, it was a stuffy collection of recipes

Saving Ben: A Father’s Story of Autism - At 5, Ben was still wearing diapers and masturbating like mad. At 21, he functions. Oh, yeah, he got saved. This was not a scenario anyone would have predicted when Ben

Screw Everyone: Sleeping My Way to Monogamy - I can be so slow. For quite a while now, when I've found myself in the car on Saturday afternoon. I listen to alt rock on WFUV until the sports

Season of Life: A Football Star, a Boy, a Journey to Manhood - This is the ritual for Gilman School football players before each game: Coach Joe Ehrmann: "What is our job as coaches?" Players: "To love us." Ehrmann: "What is your job?" Players: "To love one another." Creepy, huh? At

She Matters: A Life in Friendships - It used to bug me how, at a certain point at parties, half a dozen of the most interesting women would get up and stroll to the ladies room. Their reason,

Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put on My Pajamas, and Found Happiness - “Slow love” is a good description of the way I’ve come to know Dominique Browning. After decades of a nodding acquaintance when we worked at glossy magazines, we started reading

Snow Day Reading - The Kindle was made for Snow Days. Many will work from home today, and all praise to those good souls. But at some point even the obsessively dedicated will be

Stephen Hawking: Brief Answers to the Big Questions - Stephen Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death. He died on March 14, 2018, the 199th anniversary of Einstein’s birth. In the 76 years of his life,

Stephen King: On Writing - SUPPORTING BUTLER: Head Butler no longer gets a commission on your Amazon purchases. So the only way you can contribute to Head Butler’s bottom line is to become a patron

Steve Martin: Born Standing Up - The “wild and crazy” guy. The goofball in the white suit, banjo optional. The comic with an arrow through his head. “King Tut”. That goofball is now 77. You open Steve

Stevie Van Zandt: Unrequited Infatuations: A Memoir - "February 8, 1964, there was not one single rock 'n' roll band in the country," Stevie Van Zandt writes in his memoir. "February 9, the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan

Stitches: A memoir - We can all tell stories of bummer childhoods, but try and top this. David Small grew up in a house of non-verbal strangers. His mother was a woman of few words

Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry - Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers, the author of 19 books, a poet for whom an appearance in The New Yorker is not a life

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me - It’s a spectacular irony that Go Set a Watchman and “Between the World and Me” were published on the same day. One upends half a century of admiration for Atticus

Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets - Dick Cavett is, for me, like that cliché about the 1960s: If you remember him, you weren’t there. I know I wasn’t --- he launched his first talk show on

Talkin’ Big - I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Tom Dittmer has written the best memoir I’ve read this year. And the weird thing is: I know Tom, we’ve spent a little

Tammy Duckworth: Every Day Is a Gift - In the rarefied world of celebrity ghostwriters, Lisa Dickey is the gold standard. She has worked on 20 books, and ten have become New York Times bestsellers. She wrote her

Tara Westover: Educated - If you haven’t read “Educated,” I feel better --- I’ve been thinking I’m about the last literate person in America to read it. It was published in April 2018. It’s been