Memoir Essays

Uprooting ourselves and putting down roots elsewhere has become second nature. Americans are among the most mobile people on the planet, moving house an average of nine times in adulthood. Mobile Home explores one family's extreme and often international version of this common experience. Inspired by Megan Harlan's globe-wandering childhood, Mobile Home maps the emotional structures and metaphysical geographies of home.

Funny, poignant and reflective, The Weight of a Cherry Blossom is a fable of rootlessness and belonging in the modern world. It is equal parts a story of urban loneliness and self-discovery and of the healing powers of kinship and love. Revisiting the awkwardness of adolescence and the chaos of growing up, it looks the foibles of adulthood irreverently in the eye.

Centuries ago, sound theology and good fiction were friends and not strangers. Decades ago, authors strove not for self-expression and self-disclosure but for a mastery of craft and language and books that transformed the reader with wisdom and love. In more recent years, the old ideals have been exchanged for lesser ones. Few guides to writing, which tend to focus on mechanics, point of view, and plot, address the more important matters of meaning, depth, and heart. But it is the latter qualities that make a book a blessing and gift to both writer and reader.

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.

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.

In a letter to her six-year-old daughter, Julietta Singh ventures toward a tender vision of the future, lifting up children’s radical embrace of possibility as a model for how we might live. If we wish to survive the looming political and ecological crises of our day, Singh contends, we must break from the conventions we have inherited, and orient ourselves toward revolutionary paths that might yet set us free. The Breaks celebrates queer family-making, communal living, and Brown girlhood, complicating the US’ stark binaries.

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...

Michelle Obama is unlike any other First Lady in American History. From her first moments on the public stage, she has challenged traditional American notions about what it means to be beautiful, to be strong, to be fashion-conscious, to be healthy, to be First Mom, to be a caretaker and hostess, and to be partner to the most powerful man in the world. What is remarkable is that, at 52, she is just getting started.

Trying to crawl inside the television set to get her parents' attention, she got blocked by all the tubes and wires. So, she had to go the long way around to get herself onscreen. In a series of essays and stories, Chartoff explores her ambition, artistry, and love blunders in her hilarious, heartbreaking, and hopeful new memoir Odd Woman Out.

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu. More important is that he gave precedence to Persian over Urdu. Ghalib's voice presents us with a double bind, a linguistic paradox. Exploring his life, works and philosophy, this authoritative critical biography of Ghalib opens a window to many shades of India and the subcontinent's cultural and literary tradition.

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.

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 ...

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).

From columnist and critic Alana Massey, a collection of essays examining the intersection of the personal with pop culture through the lives of pivotal female figures - from Sylvia Plath to Britney Spears - in the spirit of Chuck Klosterman, with the heart of a true fan.

Un uomo si ferma di fronte alla scuola che ha frequentato a sedici anni e vede uscire il ragazzo che è stato, quello che ancora ha un futuro tutto da immaginare. L'uomo sa che quel ragazzo è solo, e il suo cammino non sarà facile. Vorrebbe poterlo aiutare, ma non gli è concesso. Può però radunare intorno a lui dei compagni di viaggio che lo guidino, che lo facciano sentire meno solo, perché i nostri destini individuali compongono, insieme, l'unica grande avventura della storia umana.

Flailing in jobs, failing at love, getting addicted and un-addicted to people, food, and drugs - I'll Tell You in Person is a disarmingly frank account of attempts at adulthood and all the less than perfect ways we get there. Chloe Caldwell has an unsparing knack for looking within and reporting back what's really there, rather than what she'd like you to see.

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.

Life on the Mississippi expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality. It remains the most vivid, boisterous, and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from 'the golden age' of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War.

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000 volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.