Home is where the art is
At some point in every story, writers are writing home. They are setting the reader down in front of the family TV (David Sedaris), or by the ghost at the...
All Stories
What does it mean to review a memoir?
Reviewing. Could there be a more delicate matter? Open a book. Read the pages. Opine. About another's ideas and fantasies. About another's obsessions and grammar. About another's particular and possibly...
Mary-Louise Parker structures rich memoir as a series of letters
Sometimes they let you choose. They present a list of possible books for your review, and the crushing what-if of it all falls on you. Choose the wrong book and...
Review: ‘The Art of Memoir’ by Mary Karr
When we write about the writing of memoir, we are stuck, up front, with the lexicographer's dilemma: How do we define the word? Is memoir, for example, an autobiographical poem?...
Review ‘Wondering Who You Are’ by Sonya Lea
I couldn't decide who I was while reading Sonya Lea's intense, unblinking marriage and identity memoir, "Wondering Who You Are." I was sympathetic and concerned, but also discomfited. I was...
Review: ‘Our Souls at Night’ by Kent Haruf
Clamor imperils the reading life. The promotional high jinks that announce wholly average books. The tease of adverb-laden blurbs. The authors testifying to their own genius. Then along comes Kent...
Review: ‘Bettyville’ by George Hodgman
Kindness. The word is scribbled throughout the margins of my copy of George Hodgman's new memoir, "Bettyville." If you think of that word as a sentimental squish, if you believe...
Finding empathy in the essay
In 1988, Robert Atwan, series editor of "Best American Essays," made this provocative pronouncement: "Never before — except perhaps in the days of Emerson and Thoreau — have so many...
Review: ‘Leaving Before the Rains Come’ by Alexandra Fuller
I want to read the memoirist who is uneasy with ease. The one who doubles back, isn't sure, scuffs the page with maybe. Who knows something of the art of...
Recent memoirs highlight brilliance of failure
Gary Shteyngart, gooey-lunged and height-a-fearing, arrives in America by way of the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) in the beseeching care of parents who might have been/could have been Someones. By...