Memoir Essays

The stark and inhospitable high-elevation landscape of Nevada’s Great Basin Desert may not be an obvious (or easy) place to settle down, but for self-professed desert rat Michael Branch it’s home. Of course, living in such an unforgiving landscape gives one many things to rant about. Fortunately for us, Branch—humorist, environmentalist, and author of Raising Wild—is a prodigious ranter.

This second collection of Debbie Young's lighthearted yet thoughtful columns for the Tetbury Advertiser record the author's thoughts during the tumultuous five-year period from 2016 through 2020 - the era of Brexit and of President Trump - when even in her quiet corner of the Cotswolds, it often seemed the world had gone mad. Charming the readers of this multiple-award-winning community magazine with her homespun philosophy, with playful wit and with vivid imagination, Debbie Young provides a sense of perspective about what really matters in life.

A life is made up of many shocks - the shock of birth, of death; the shock of love, of happiness; the shock of car crashes and finding yourself in a teenage body; the shock of surviving each of these shocks, and of what might bloom in their wake. In this incredibly beautiful book, Anna Beecher tells the story of her life through the shocks she has experienced.

'Indian-Australian' is not a one-size-fits-all descriptor. Given the depth and richness of diversity of the Indian subcontinent, it is fitting that its diaspora is similarly varied. Growing Up Indian in Australia reflects and celebrates this vibrant diversity. It features contributions from Australian-Indian writers, both established and emerging, who hail from a wide range of backgrounds, religions and experiences. This colorful, energetic anthology offers reflections on identity, culture, family, food and expectations, ultimately revealing deep truths about both Australian and Indian life.

Raised in Manhattan by her overly protective sex-therapist mother who wore "seven layers of shoulder pads" and her two doting grandparents, life in Wendy Spero's world has never been dull. As a child, she passed the time organizing impromptu "garage sales" on city sidewalks, sniffing fruit-scented magic markers to intoxication, parenting dozens of high-maintenance stuffed animals, and seeking out other "microthrills", which she writes about in this hilarious audiobook of odd but true stories.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then 13, to Paris Men's Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at "thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties," sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

The road to Major League Baseball goes through the minor leagues. Every year there are over 5,500 players trying to work their way to the top of the tiered minor league system. Very few people know what life is really like for these aspiring players - until now. This collection of stories from actual minor league players is a hilarious, heartbreaking, and honest account of the struggle to make it to the big leagues.

Boyhood in the 1960s and ‘70s was a time for exploration and mischief. Author Michael Tougias found more than his share of misadventures in the woods and on the water: some life-threatening, but others innocently hilarious. Over time - and after reading a multitude of adventure books - these experiences took shape in his quest to be a mountain man, owning a cabin in the forest and living off the land. Part of that dream would come true, but only after a family tragedy that shook his world and forced changes in his life.

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces", Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession, in his case, with examples as diverse as western films, comic books, the music of Talking Heads and Pink Floyd, and the New York City subway. Along the way, he shows how each of these "voyages out from himself" have led him home, home to his father's life as a painter, and to the source of his beginnings as a writer.

Toward the end of the Hundred Years War between France and England, as Merlin predicted, a great warrior emerged, uniting a beleaguered nation and leading it to improbable victories. It was said this warrior was a messenger of God. And it may have been, for a country was saved and a kingdom restored. This great leader of men, this messenger who united a nation, was a 17-year-old maiden named Joan.

Pop Song is a book about love and about falling in love - with a place, or a painting, or a person - and the joy and terror inherent in the experience of that love. Plumbing the well of culture for clues and patterns about love and loss - from Agnes Martin's abstract paintings to James Turrell's transcendent light works, and Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet to Frank Ocean's Blonde - Larissa Pham writes of her youthful attempts to find meaning in travel, sex, drugs, and art, before sensing that she might need to turn her gaze upon herself.

In April 1915 Dorothea Crewdson, a newly trained Red Cross nurse, and her best friend, Christie, received instructions to leave for Le Treport in Northern France. Filled with excitement at the prospect of her first paid job, Dorothea began writing a diary. 'Who knows how long we shall really be out here? Seems a good chance from all reports of the campaigns being ended before winter, but all is uncertain.'

This is the remarkable and tragic story of Oscar Wilde, legendary wit and conversationalist, author of perhaps the most perfect comedy in the English language, yet seemingly doomed by his own flawed temperament to suffer at the hands of a censorious and hypocritical society...

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature - age-old classics as well as his own - that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man - a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels.

Trailer-park owners never use the word “trailer” and certainly not the term “trailer park.” At some point in time, even the Mobile Home Park Owners Association (MHPOA for short) realized that the word “trailer” had a negative connotation. When was the last time you saw a “trailer park community” advertised on TV? “Trailer park” has come to represent, in the minds of most Americans, men in stained work shirts dotted with drippings of food fat and car excrement returning home to take out life’s shortcomings on the innocents in their lives—the ol’ lady, the dog, and ...

Since Andrew Hudgins was a child, he was a compulsive joke teller, so when he sat down to write about jokes, he found that he was writing about himself — what jokes taught him and mistaught him, how they often delighted him but occasionally made him nervous with their delight in chaos and sometimes anger. Because Hudgins’s father, a West Point graduate, served in the US Air Force, his family moved frequently; he learned to relate to other kids by telling jokes and watching how his classmates responded. And jokes opened him up to the serious, taboo subjects that his family didn’t talk about openly — religion, race, sex, and death. Hudgins tells and analyzes the jokes that explore the contradictions in the Baptist religion he was brought up in, the jokes that told him what his parents would not tell him about sex, and the racist jokes that his uncle loved, his father hated, and his mother, caught in the middle, was ambivalent about. This audiobook is both a memoir and a meditation on jokes and how they educated, delighted, and occasionally horrified him as he grew.

Edited by Krishna Ramanujan and Guillermo Rodríguez, Journeys offers access to Ramanujan's personal diaries and journals, providing a window into his creative process. It will include literary entries from his travels, his thoughts on writing, poetry drafts, and dreams. His diaries and journals served as fertile ground where he planted the seeds for much of his published work....