Memoir
Lonely City: Adventures in the art of being alone by Olivia Laing
In her mid-thirties, British writer and critic Olivia Laing moved to New York City to live with her partner. When the relationship ended, Laing found herself alone ...
... (read more)One of the claims that is sometimes made for the memoir form is that it gives the author a degree of release from the past. Getting it down on paper can also be about ...
... (read more)Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories by Kim Mahood
At the bottom of one of Kim Mahood's desert watercolours, she scrawled, 'In the gap between two ways of seeing, the risk is that you see nothing clearly.' A risk for ...
... (read more)Undaunted by Joseph Furphy's autodidactic complexities and indulgences, A.D. Hope proposed in his 1974 collection, Native Companions, Essays and Comments on ...
... (read more)The dislocation of international travel often prompts spontaneous moments of clarity, sparking a renewed awareness of where one is at in life ...
... (read more)The Boy on the Tricycle by Marcel Weyland & The May Beetles by Baba Schwartz
Memoirs of Eastern European children of the 1920s could hardly be more different than this pair. The old age Marcel Weyland describes in The Boy on the Tricycle ...
... (read more)We must all die, but many of us live as though we don't know this fact. When death comes close to us or our loved ones, we may feel totally unprepared ...
... (read more)Shelley Davidow's multi-generational memoir begins in 1913 with her Jewish great-grandfather Jacob escaping the pogroms of tsarist Lithuania for the rigours of life in the American Midwest. The English language eludes Jacob, who struggles to make a decent living in his adopted country. Poverty contributes to his wife's untimely death. Jacob's son and daughter are co ...
Enemy: A Daughter’s Story of How Her Father Brought the Vietnam War Home by Ruth Clare
Growing up with a violent and controlling father who served in the Vietnam War may be a familiar story, but Ruth Clare's memoir takes us deeper, into the mind of the child and her day-to-day reality, where she is constantly primed for her father's next act of cruelty. Resembling a novel in its sensory detail and riveting narrative, Enemy recreates life in R ...
When I heard that there was a new book out on why women run, I assumed I would be reading about women fleeing domestic horrors rather than running marathons. Such a reaction might make Catriona Menzies-Pike sigh with frustration, and the cultural myopia which gave rise to my unthinking assumption is one of the reasons she wrote this book. 'I'd read a lot of books ab ...