Tag: memoirs
A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing
When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly chronicled both ends of her long life in a series of nine memoirs. The first of these, “Instead of a Letter,” was published in 1963 and recently rereleased in the U.S. as part of the NYRB Classics series; it recounts her jolly, upper-class English childhood on the family estate of Ditchingham, in Norfolk. The last book that she wrote, “Alive, Alive Oh!,” came together
Portrait of the Artist as an Office Drone
In the opening pages of “Private Equity,” a memoir about working in high finance in the early twenty-tens, the author, Carrie Sun, is asked in a job interview why she wants to be a personal assistant to the founder of an investment firm. Sun, who at the time is twenty-nine years old, has been recruited by a headhunter through LinkedIn, where her profile displays a dual degree in math and finance from M.I.T., completed in just three years; steady career
Growing Up in the House of Freud
Of course, much of this seems mind-boggling in retrospect. Along with the obvious questions these experiments now raise—Why was DESTROY MOTHER considered more aggressive than FUCK MOMMY? Don’t these messages register equal doses of hostile misogyny?—there’s the more serious issue of attributing disorders like stuttering and schizophrenia to psychodynamic rather than biochemical, neurologic, and genetic causes. And did these strange conclusions justify exacerbating symptoms in patients, even if the effects were mild and transient?
Of course, as a kid
Remembering My Hijacking | The New Yorker
We were flying from Tel Aviv to New York on a September day in 1970. I had turned twelve in June, and my sister Catherine would turn fourteen in December. We were flying alone because our mother lived in Israel and our father lived in America. We boarded at six o’clock in the morning, but instead of landing in New York that evening, we ended up as hostages in a desert in Jordan. Our plane was one among several hijacked
Best Celebrity Memoirs of 2022: Matthew Perry and More
Read all about it! Matthew Perry, Jennette McCurdy and more stars didn’t hold back in their debut memoirs this year.
The Friends alum released Friends, Lovers & The Big Terrible Thing in November, chronicling his life’s highs and lows from his experience on the beloved sitcom, his past high-profile relationships and a battle with addiction. Perry opened up about his sobriety journey, which led to multiple rehab stays through the years.
“People would be surprised to know that I
In Robert Lowells „Memoirs“, „Mental Illness“, „Creative Friends“ und „A Takedown of Dad“.
Lowell verehrte den Vater seiner Mutter, einen gutaussehenden, verschlagenen, selbstgemachten Mann mit „Elchschultern“, ein halb eingemottetes Kriegsschiff, weil „er alles war, was ich jemals sein wollte: der böse Junge, das Sorgenkind, der Commodore seines Haushalts.“
Sein eigener Vater hingegen war eine ständige Enttäuschung. „Memoirs“ enthält eine der systematischsten Aufnahmen eines Vaters in der amerikanischen Literatur. Lowells Vater war ein Mummler; er sah schlecht aus in Kleidern; er bekam eine Glatze; er konnte einen Braten nicht richtig tranchieren; er glich, wenn
The Second (and Third) Battle of Lexington
In my tenth year, in 1970, my family—my mom, my dad, my seven-year-old brother Tom, and I—moved to the American suburbs. More precisely, we moved to the town of Lexington, Massachusetts, a community of thirty thousand people a dozen miles northwest of Boston. Our house, which cost thirty thousand dollars, was like a child’s drawing of a suburban home: a square block with a door and a window on the ground floor, and two windows on the story above, one
Nine Books That Accidentally Became Memoirs
Creative nonfiction can take many forms, be it a meandering lyric essay or longform narrative journalism, and its practitioners don’t always agree on how creative one can be with the truth. When a writer does decide to adhere to fact, they have at their disposal two main subjects—the self and everything outside the self. But even when nonfiction writers plan to turn their gaze outward, what they discover can have a tricky way of bringing them back to themselves. Exploring
Ghosts at the Liquor Store
There’s a ditch at the end of our driveway that consistently swallowed vehicles heading home after parties at our house. My siblings and I would help drunk adults push wobbly cars out of that ditch and back up onto the road. Seeing them off on their drunken way home. We never considered the hazards. Everyone we knew drank. Everyone drove, and the ditch, streetside, late at night, was an exciting place to be: dishevelled clothes, jealous brawls, dirty songs at
Making Love in the Land of Oil Rigs
In 2015, Tabitha Lasley, a former freelance magazine journalist, arrived in Aberdeen, Scotland, the United Kingdom’s oil capital, having spent four years on a novel about rig workers with nothing to show for it. (Her laptop was stolen from the apartment in London that she shared with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, whom she left when he did not sympathize with her loss.) “Sea State,” the result of her second try, was written out of the desire to “see what men