I knew very well that it was an irrational conviction — I was in no way psychotic, and perhaps not much more neurotic than most of us; but there it was, I knew it to be true, and if it was impossible then the definition of possibility was inadequate. I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. In the book, Smith... Persepolis is an autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood up... 18 Amazing Comics That Don't Come From America Or Japan, Comic Books Written By Women That Prove The Medium Isn't Just For Teenage Boys. This memoir is her account of the six months she spent there, a frustrating and fascinating time that opened her eyes to the world beyond dance. “Negroland” is an extended form of criticism that dances between a history of social class to a close reading of her mother’s expressions; the information calibrated in a brow arched “three to four millimeters.”, The prose is blunt and evasive, sensuous and ascetic, doubting and resolute — and above all beautifully skeptical of the genre, of the memoir’s conventions, clichés and limits. Patricia Lockwood, an acclaimed poet, weaves in this memoir the story of her family — including her Roman Catholic priest father, who received a special dispensation from the Vatican — with the crisis that led her and her husband to live temporarily under her parents’ rectory roof. Released, his father died in a plane crash on his way home when James was 5. Graham took command of the paper in 1963, and steered it through the Watergate scandal and the end of Richard Nixon’s presidency, among other dramas. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”, When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. Yet he has also written three revealing volumes about his life — “Boyhood,” “Youth” and “Summertime.” The first, “Boyhood,” is most explicitly and conventionally a memoir, covering his years growing up in a provincial village outside of Cape Town. "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Vidal had a lifelong companion but remained passionately compelled by a beautiful classmate, his first paramour, Jimmie, who died at 19, shot and bayoneted while sleeping in a foxhole on Iwo Jima. There’s the jarring impression that every grain of rice is a maggot. There’s the Chinese village of Kingston’s ancestors, where girls learn the song of the warrior woman while being told they are destined to become a wife and a slave. The most recently published entry on this list of 50 books, Kiese Laymon’s “Heavy” details the author’s childhood in Mississippi in the 1980s and his relationship with his alternately loving and abusive mother, who raised him on her own. She was raised in Virginia by sophisticated, lettered parents. Richard Burton and Marlon Brando tried to get her into bed. “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,” he writes, “understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” To see what held his worlds together was also to learn what kept them apart. It is thrilling to watch her arrive at an understanding of a sense of self and language that is her own, bespoke. He is the phantom that has haunted Vidal’s long, eventful life. This shape-shifting, form-shattering book carves one path forward. Katharine Graham’s brilliant but remote father, Eugene Meyer, capped his successful career as a financier and public servant by buying the struggling Washington Post in 1933 and nursing it to health. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored people,” Cobb says, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.” This book is not always easy reading, but it is the real deal, an essential American document. What comes as a shock is the book’s directness and deep feeling — its innocence. Edmund White’s portraits of his parents and their lives before him are novelistic; his writing about his own sexual experiences is exceedingly candid. She told her friends to leave her alone. written by Erin Donnelly. It’s the sort of book that releases the emergency brake on your soul. The motto was simple in Margo Jefferson’s childhood home: “Achievement. Graham led her family’s newspaper, the little … He was a distant man who devoted himself to the refurbishment of his sprawling Victorian home — and to a hidden erotic life involving young men. Totto-Chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. She could barely play guitar, yet she became the lead guitarist for the Slits. Hilarious descriptions — of, to take one example, Greg’s guitar playing — alternate with profound examinations of family, art and faith. Carrère’s girlfriend chides him for thinking that such unpromising material offers him some sort of golden storytelling opportunity: “They don’t even sleep together — and at the end, she dies,” she says to him. Laing. He didn’t care for drugs; he barely drank. In “Life,” the Rolling Stones guitarist writes with uncommon candor and immediacy — with the help of the veteran journalist James Fox — about drugs and his run-ins with the police; about the difficulties of getting and staying clean; and about the era when rock ’n’ roll came of age. Among those who came to her parties were Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Princess Margaret and Jane Fonda. This book’s author, Theodore Rosengarten, was a Harvard graduate student who went to Alabama in 1968 while researching a defunct labor organization. — Dwight Garner. Sleepless nights, yes; colic, yes; but also a raw, frantic love for her firstborn daughter that she depicts and dissects with both rigor and amazement. https://offtheshelf.com/2018/06/13-of-the-most-powerful-memoirs-ive-ever-read The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. This indelible book, an oral history from an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper, won the National Book Award in 1975, beating a lineup of instant classics that included “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses; Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s Men”; Studs Terkel’s “Working”; and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Unlike these other books, “All God’s Dangers” has largely been forgotten. It’s an enviably full life, with a long marriage, four children and Morris’s determinedly sunny disposition and ability to regard every second of her life, however difficult — especially if difficult — as a species of grand adventure. Then he turns to the story of his girlfriend’s sister, a small-town judge who’s dying of cancer, and her friendship with another judge, who also has cancer. The book was truncated, but the writing in it is brilliant and often epigrammatic: “I just want love to live up to its publicity.”. He also describes the spongelike love of music that he inherited from his grandfather, and his own sense of musical history — his reverence for the blues and R&B masters he has studied his entire life. About his advanced old age, in a line that is hard to forget, Twombly tells the author that he is “closing down the bodega for real.” But this story is entirely her own. It’s a love story, at the end of the day. Both worthy ambitions, but I’m thankful she wrote this indelible memoir instead. Some 19th-century U.S. presidents who wrote autobiographies are James Buchanan and Ulysses S. Grant, though Grant's autobiography is about his time as General during the U.S. Civil War and not about his presidency. Hitchens recounts moments with friends that include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton. It was a rangy life — one that took him into the military, politics, Hollywood, Broadway — and he depicts it with the silky urbanity you expect. Or, at least, to try to, because what becomes clear is that it’s impossible for Cusk to hold on to her old self. Karr evokes the contours of her preadolescent mind — the fears, fights and petty jealousies — with extraordinary and often comic vividness. We have no one quite like him over here: Think Johnny Carson combined with Edmund Wilson. The book recounts Walls' and her... Angela's Ashes is a 1996 memoir by the Irish author Frank McCourt. “You stole it from Carson McCullers.”. He began his career as a writer by making up stories about the people he saw there. Her autobiography covers her life from childhood to her command of a towering journalistic institution in a deeply male-dominated industry. At 14, she left Iran for a boarding school in Austria, sent away by parents terrified of their outspoken daughter’s penchant for challenging her teachers (and hypocrisy wherever she sniffed it out). It features a Dickensian gallery of schoolmasters, shopkeepers and priests, in addition to McCourt’s unforgettable family. The Glass Castle is a 2005 memoir by Jeannette Walls. This memoir was born from a long silence, written 50 years after Amos Oz’s mother killed herself with sleeping pills, when he was 12, three months before his bar mitzvah. The American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Kingston navigates a bewildering journey between worlds, each one stifling yet perforated by inconsistencies. Wolff became wild in high school, a delinquent and a petty thief, before escaping to a prep school in Pennsylvania. Moments Of Truth: 6 Memoirs Written With Heart Vacations are where we do some of our most serious thinking, but when it comes to summer reading, we … Years of misdiagnoses culminated in the removal of her reproductive organs, barnacled by scar tissue caused by endometriosis. The book, consistently alive with feeling, is written with elastic style. Acting legend Katharine Hepburn was 84 years, 12 Academy Award nominations, and 4 Oscars old when she finally released… There is a lot of wit here, and bawdy wordplay, and accounts of long nights spent drinking and smoking. There’s a lot of pain in the second section: loneliness, doubt, a bad marriage, cancer, depression. Personal History by Katharine Graham. Sonali Deraniyagala was searching the internet for ways to kill herself when one click led to another and she was staring at a news article featuring pictures of her two young sons.
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