Memoir Essays

Sound interesting? Listen to Secret Societies and Subversive Movements and learn about the author's views on politics, history, and the occult.

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 ...

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless.

Life doesn’t come with a map—just scars, memories, and the occasional bad idea. In this raw and reflective collection of essays, a man looks back on the people who shaped him, the places that changed him, and the moments that wouldn’t let him go. From Bronx alleyways to Thai backstreets, through heartbreak, absurdity, and unexpected grace—these stories linger like smoke and stay like scars.

When you're born with a vagina and a set of boobs, life can be complicated. In this intoxicating collection of essays, writer and college senior Tatiana Pérez explores the complexities of womanhood. From struggling to love her body to putting up with bad sex - Tati writes about it all with shameless candor and a raunchy sense of humor that won't quit. Boys are welcome to listen along, but this one's #forthegirls.

Welcome to essayist Kimberly Harrington’s poetic and funny world of motherhood, womanhood, and humanhood, not necessarily in that order. It’s a place of loud parenting, fierce loving, too much social media, and occasional inner monologues where timeless debates are resolved such as Pro/Con: Caving to PTO Bake Sale Pressure (“Pro: Skim the crappiest brownies for myself. Con: They’re really crappy.”) With accessibility and wit, she captures the emotions around parenthood in artful and earnest ways.

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.

A wide range of women—actors, athletes, academics, CEOs, writers, small-business owners, birth workers, physicians, and activists—share their experiences of becoming mothers in this multifaceted, moving, and revealing collection.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

"Reporters love murders," Calvin Trillin writes in the introduction to Killings. "In a pinch, what the lawyers call 'wrongful death' will do, particularly if it's sudden." Killings, first published in 1984 and expanded for this edition, shows Trillin to be such a reporter, drawn time after time to tales of sudden death. But Trillin is attracted less by violence or police procedure than by the way the fabric of people's lives is suddenly exposed when someone comes to an untimely end.

My Year as a Rookie: How I almost became a cop, is the entertaining, insightful, true, real-life story of how writer James J. Caterino, well, almost became a cop. James J. Caterino is the author of True Stories, My Encounter with The Partridge Family, Cool Stuff, Laura and Laurie, and much more.

What made FDR a more successful leader during the Depression crisis than Hoover? Why was Eisenhower more effective as supreme commander during World War II than he was as president? Why was Grant one of the best presidents of his day, if not in all of American history? What drove Bobby Kennedy into the scrum of electoral politics? Find the surprising and revelatory answers to these questions and more in this collection of new essays by great historians.

Shenequa Golding doesn’t aim to speak for all Black women. We’re too vast, too vibrant, and too complicated. As an adult, Golding begins to own her boldness, but growing up, she found herself “kind of in the middle,” fluctuating between not being the fly kid or the overachiever. Her debut collection of essays, A Black Girl in the Middle taps into life’s wins and losses, representing the middle ground for Black girls and women.

"Nadie debería escribir después de los setenta y cinco años", había dicho un amigo. A los setenta y siete, bloqueado como escritor, Theodor Kallifatides toma la difícil decisión de vender el estudio de Estocolmo, donde trabajó diligentemente durante décadas, y retirarse. Incapaz de escribir y, sin embargo, incapaz de no escribir, viaja a su Grecia natal con la esperanza de redescubrir la fluidez perdida del lenguaje.En este bellísimo texto, Kallifatides explora la relación entre una vida con sentido y un trabajo con sentido, y cómo reconciliarse con el envejecimiento.

With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. Moment after moment, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.

As America's foremost public intellectual, Norman Mailer was a ubiquitous presence in our national life - on the airwaves and in print - for more than sixty years. With his supple mind and pugnacious persona, he engaged society more than any other writer of his generation. The trademark Mailer swagger is much in evidence in these pages as he holds forth on culture, ideology, politics, sex, gender, and celebrity, among other topics.

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.

Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they're old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us - her own - in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you'll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick's Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating.

Timbaland is indisputably one of the most innovative music producers working today. The Grammy Award–wining producer, rapper, songwriter, and composer has collaborated with the mega-superstars of pop, rap, hip-hop, and R&B, from Jay Z to 50, Madonna to Justin, Nelly to Björk. His solo album Shock Value has sales tipped in the millions, and the video for his international chart-topping single "Apologize" has been viewed more than 100 million times on YouTube.

In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness.