Memoir Essays

When her husband asked for a divorce after 25 years of marriage, Rebecca Winn felt untethered physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The security she'd had in her marriage was suddenly replaced by an overwhelming sense of fear, hopelessness, and dread. She felt invisible and alone and was horrified to consider that her deepest longing - to know and be known by another person - might never be realized. But from this fear emerged a powerful desire to answer one of life's most profound questions: How can we ever know another person if we do not truly know ourselves?

Staring down the barrel of her 40th year, Samantha Irby is confronting the ways her life has changed since the days she could work a full 11 hour shift on 4 hours of sleep, change her shoes and put mascara on in the back of a moving cab and go from drinks to dinner to the club without a second thought. Recently, things are more 'Girls Gone Mild.'

Jill Kargman is a mother, wife, and writer living the life in New York City... a life that includes camping out in a one-bedroom apartment with some unfortunate (and furry) roommates, battling the Momzillas of Manhattan, and coming to terms with her desire for gay men. In this entertaining collection of observations, Kargman offers her unique, wickedly funny perspective as she zips around Manhattan with three kids in tow.

Kendra Allen’s first collection of essays—at its core—is a bunch of mad stories about things she never learned to let go of. Unifying personal narrative and cultural commentary, this collection grapples with the lessons that have been stored between parent and daughter. These parental relationships expose the conditioning that subconsciously informed her ideas on social issues such as colorism, feminism, war-induced PTSD, homophobia, marriage, and “the n-word,” among other things.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is at a crossroads. Traditional African/Black American cultures present the crossroads as a place of simultaneous difficulty and possibility. In contemporary times, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the phrase “intersectionality” to explain the unique position of Black women in America. In many ways, they are at a third crossroads: attempting to fit into notions of femininity and respectability primarily assigned to White women, while inventing improvisational strategies to combat oppression.

The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, “Civil Disobedience,” and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, 27 of today’s leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them.

First-hand reports of the most riveting anti-terror encounters in the wake of the 2016 surgical strikes, the men who hunted terrorists in a magical Kashmir forest where day turns to night, a pair of young Navy men who gave their all to save their entire submarine crew, the Air Force commando who wouldn't sleep until he had avenged his buddies, the tax babu who found his soul in a terrifying Special Forces assault on Pakistani terrorists, and many more. Their own stories, in their own words. Or of those who were with them in their final moments.

This is the third book in my Collected Didn't Work(s) series. This is all of the non-fiction I've written from 2000-2021. It includes essays, articles, and short memoirs. If you have read my books Ever Green Fly Fisher. The Nor Cal Crash Stories, or The Life I've Written you should be aware that much of the material in those books is in this collection as well.

In this lyrical collection of personal essays, Lynne Golodner shares vivid visits to far-flung locations and insights on human nature, relationships and the journey to the self. Inviting the listener into her ten-year foray into the world of Orthodox Judaism—and her subsequent decision to leave the strictures of religion—Golodner writes about marriage and motherhood, divorce and single parenthood, and finding love again. She writes about the compelling ways nature calms her racing mind and invites listeners to experience and explore the living world as a grounding connection.

Join former NBC newsman and Meet the Press moderator David Gregory as he probes various religious traditions to better understand his own faith and answer life's most important questions: Who do we want to be, and what do we believe?

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.

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.

Between Parentheses collects most of the newspaper columns and articles Bolano wrote during the last five years of his life, as well as the texts of some of his speeches and talks and a few scattered prologues. "Taken together," as the editor Ignacio Echevarra remarks in his introduction, they provide “a personal cartography of the writer: The closest thing, among all his writings, to a kind of fragmented 'autobiography.'"

Have you ever read a suspense novel so good you had to stop and think to yourself, "How did the author come up with this idea? Their characters? Is some of this story real?" For more than five years, Mark Rubinstein, physician, psychiatrist, and mystery and thriller writer, had the chance to ask the most well-known authors in the field just these kinds of questions in interviews for the Huffington Post. Collected here are interviews with 47 accomplished authors, including Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Meg Gardiner, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman, and Don Winslow.

How do you become a television writer? What does it take to create your own show? Did the writers of Lost really have a plan, or were they making it all up as they went? In a career spanning far longer than he cares to admit, Javier Grillo-Marxuach has not only written for some of your favorite (and not-so-favorite) shows.

Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward - he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them for a lifetime, overcoming distance and misunderstandings.

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.

We will teach you how to write creative nonfiction in seven easy steps. This guide is designed to provide you with all the tools you need in a concise, easy-to-understand format that will answer all your burning questions and get you on your way to successful nonfiction writing.

If you’re looking for a parenting audiobook, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is an audiobook about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years - a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift 20-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth).

Written by a marine scientist (and winner of French eloquence competitions), this work of narrative nonfiction blends Bill François’ personal story with that of sea creatures to create an original and exciting work. In poetic prose, he describes his unlikely journey from being a Parisian child, afraid of the water and crippled by self-consciousness, to an eloquent and self-assured young man with a passion for the ocean and all who inhabit it.