Memoir Essays

After death, Townes Van Zandt found the success that he sabotaged during life. Diagnosed as bipolar, an alcoholic, and perennially unreliable, Van Zandt died of heart failure at the age of 52 on New Year’s Day in 1997. He released 16 albums during life. Since his death, several more albums have been released, both by and in honor of him.

In a series of intimate and humorous dispatches, McOuat examines her identity as a queer woman, and as a mother, through the lens of the pop culture moments in the '80s and '90s that molded her identity. McOuat stirs the ingredients required to conjure an unsettled spirit: the horrors of pregnancy and motherhood, love and loss, the supernatural, kaleidoscopic sexuality, near-miss experiences, and the unexplained moments in life that leave you haunted.

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

A group of notable writers - including UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, Julian Barnes, Margaret MacMillan, and Jenny Uglow - celebrate our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

Jeanna Kadlec knew what it meant to be faithful--in her marriage to a pastor’s son, in the comfortable life ahead of her, in her God--but there was no denying the truth that lived under that conviction: she was queer and, if she wanted to survive, she would need to leave behind the church and every foundational building block she knew. Heretic is a memoir of rebirth. Within, Kadlec reckons with religious trauma and Midwestern values, as a means of unveiling how evangelicalism directly impacts every American--religious or not--and has been a major force in driving our democracy towards fascism.

東大病院救急医療の現場で、人間の生と死を見つめてきた医師が伝えたいこと。
「人生100年時代」と言われても、自分の寿命がいつ尽きるかはわからない。

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever experienced before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles—and here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.

In this self-portrait by an American genius, Kurt Vonnegut writes with beguiling wit and poignant wisdom about his favorite comedians, country music, a dead friend, a dead marriage, and various cockamamie aspects of his all-too-human journey through life. This is a work that resonates with Vonnegut's singular voice: the magic sound of a born storyteller mesmerizing us with truth.

In the late 1990s, a young physician in Albuquerque, New Mexico, published a stunning memoir of his experiences in the highly charged world of the ER. Presented in a series of powerful, poetic vignettes, The Blood of Strangers became an instant classic. Now, over two decades later, Dr. Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the trenches—this time from the perspective of middle age. In portraits visceral, haunting, sometimes surreal, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine practiced on the razor’s edge between life and death.

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things. On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations.

Love in the Time of Covid is a memoir in fifty short essays written during the Covid era between 2020 and 2024. The essays describe the author's responses to media reports, debates, and public commentaries on a range of current affairs during the course of the pandemic. His primary focus is on the poisoning of social discourse during this period, when there was 'no love lost' in conflicts between adversarial parties

'Decline of the English Murder' analyses the kinds of murders depicted in popular media during Orwell's life and why society of the time was obsessed with these grizzly crimes. Tribune published it on 15th February 1946, and Secker and Warburg republished it after his death in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays in 1952.

Deborah Levy invites us into the interiors of her world, sharing her most intimate thoughts and experiences, as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of the literary and artistic muses that have shaped her. From Marguerite Duras to Colette and Ballard, and from Lee Miller to Francesca Woodman and Paula Rego, we can relish here the richness of their work and, in turn, the richness of the author’s own. Each moment draws upon Levy’s life in exalting ways, encapsulating the wonderful precision and astonishing depth of her writing,.

Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. For many Canadians, the big moments - births, deaths, marriages, moves - are all mixed up with the wins and losses of our teams. The voices of Hockey Night in Canada sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep. George Bowering, Canada's former poet laureate, is no different.

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?

Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality.

Maeve Higgins was a best-selling memoirist and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of 31, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more. Like many women in their early 30s, she both was and was not the adult she wanted to be. At once smart, curious, and humane, Maeve in America is the story of how Maeve found herself, literally and figuratively, in New York City.