Memoir Essays

“I am fat,” begins Judith Moore’s unflinching account of her life. As she describes her obsessions with food, struggles with self image and troubled relationships, she refuses to become an object of pity. Moore is the recipient of two NEA grants and a Guggenheim fellowship. Her previous book, also a memoir, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.

Acclaimed author of The Real Lolita and editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin), Sarah Weinman brings together an exemplary collection of recent true-crime tales. She culls together some of the most refreshing and exciting contemporary journalists and chroniclers of crime working today.

PHILANDERER – A ROGUE’S LIFE IN SPAIN is an entertaining account of the half of Gilbert Wolfe’s life which he has spent in Spain. In FINDING MY FEET our hero arrives in Alicante with money in his pocket and a taste for adventure after two years of flat-sharing and commuting in London. Weary of the daily grind, he plans to pursue his ongoing studies of the fairer sex and encounter that elusive happy medium between work and idleness. Keen to learn the language as quickly as possible in order to exercise his charms to good effect, the clever but inherently indolent Englishman is quick ...

A collection of 36 extraordinary stories originally told on stage, featuring work by writers, entertainers, thinkers, and community leaders. Spanning comedy and tragedy, Alien Nation brilliantly illuminates what it’s like to be an immigrant in America.

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. The start of a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, Letters to a Writer of Color will be a touchstone for aspiring and working writers and for curious readers everywhere.

Tania De Rozario was just twelve years old when she was gay-exorcised. Convinced that her boyish style and demeanor were a sign of something wicked, her mother and a pair of her church friends tried to “banish the evil” from Tania. That day, the young girl realized that monsters weren’t just found in horror tales. They could lurk anywhere—including your own family and community—and look just like you. Dinner on Monster Island is Tania’s memoir of her life and childhood in Singapore—where she discovered how difference is often perceived as deviant, damaged, disobedient, and sometimes, demonic.

From an astonishing blue jay to a lone humpback whale, from the back roads of her home town to the streets of Jerusalem and the Tower of London, debut author Faye Rapoport DesPres examines a modern life marked by a passion for the natural world, unexpected love, and shocking loss, and her search for a place she can finally call home in this beautifully-crafted memoir-in-essays. Readers who love the memoirs and personal essays of such rising contemporary writers as Cheryl Strayed, Joy Castro, and Kim Dana Kupperman, will appreciate Faye's observational eye, her passion for the natural world ...

Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the region's past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabova's maternal family. As she journeys to her grandmother's place of origin, Kassabova encounters a historic crossroads.

Of all the essentials for survival: oxygen, water, sleep, and food, only food is a vast treasure trove of memory and of sensory experience. Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral.

From her well-remembered New Yorker essays about the financial demands of big-city ambition and the ethereal, strangely old-fashioned allure of cyber relationships to her dazzlingly hilarious riff in Harper's about musical passions that give way to middle-brow paraphernalia, Daum delves into the center of things while closely examining the detritus that spills out along the way. With precision and well-balanced irony, Daum implicates herself as readily as she does the targets that fascinate and horrify her.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

In sixteen essays published over the past decade, acclaimed novelist Elisa Albert considers everything from the creative process to reproductive justice, ambition to Ani DiFranco, Judaism to the ethos of punk, all in the midst of making a home in the strange city of Albany, New York.

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?

The international sensation that illuminates the experiences women are supposed to hide - from addiction, anger, sexual assault, and infertility to joy, sensuality, and love. In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life - those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self.

Dear Diary, It Got Weird Again The Works of Mr. Joe This isn’t a diary. It’s a legacy stitched from the strange, the sincere, and the sentences that refused to stay quiet. Inside are fragments that became foundations—moments of insight, humor, heartbreak, and clarity gathered over years and held together by a single thread: the need to make meaning in a world that doesn’t always offer it freely. This collection speaks to those who feel everything a little too deeply, think a little too sideways, and laugh in the middle of their most serious questions. It’s for anyone who’s ever ...

Building off her wildly popular viral essays “Losing My Ambition” and “The Mindfuck of Mid-Life,” Amil Niazi explores what life looks like “post-ambition.” With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how it intersects with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of Millennials. And—most importantly—now that she is done with ambition: what happens next?

The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed.