I remember when Frank McCourt’s memoir of his impoverished Irish childhood, Angela’s Ashes, came out in 1996. I was working at a Barnes and Noble at the time, and it absolutely sold like hotcakes. It seemed like everyone was reading it, from every walk of life. It had something for everyone: men, women, Catholics, Jews, [...]
Archive for the ‘Memoir’ Category
Angela’s Ashes
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction on December 26, 2009 | 4 Comments »
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
Posted in Classics, Memoir, Nonfiction on December 18, 2009 | 25 Comments »
I was interested in reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, a 17th-century businessman who helped turn the Royal Navy into the great institution it became, for a few different reasons. First, of course, it is One Of Those Things One Ought To Read. It’ s a classic. People quote from it, and read it in [...]
Down and Out in Paris and London
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction on October 13, 2009 | 12 Comments »
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty — it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically different. You thought it would be quite simple; it [...]
Comfort Me with Apples (audio)
Posted in Audiobooks, Food, Memoir on October 8, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I don’t believe I’ve ever read Gourmet magazine, but I was still sad to learn this week that the magazine was closing up shop because I was just getting acquainted with its editor, Ruth Reichl, through listening to the audio version of Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, the second of her memoirs [...]
The Tender Bar
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on September 23, 2009 | 5 Comments »
I read J.R. Moehringer’s memoir The Tender Bar for my book club. We usually read mysteries, but in this case the owner of the restaurant where we meet offered to buy our dinners if we read this book and discussed it with him. We weren’t about to turn that down!
JR was the only son of a [...]
Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood
Posted in Contemporary, Fiction, Memoir on September 2, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I suspect that Me Cheeta is the most unconventional book to make the Booker longlist this year. Ostensibly a memoir by Cheeta, the chimpanzee from the Tarzan films, the book is really a parody of the Hollywood tell-all. “Cheeta” writes of his discovery, his experiences on the Tarzan sets, and his many encounters with Hollywood stars. [...]
The Year of Magical Thinking (reread)
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir on August 10, 2009 | 13 Comments »
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
The question of self-pity.
These are the lines that open Joan Didion’s memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking. They are also the first lines that she wrote after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack as they were sitting [...]
Soldier’s Heart
Posted in Contemporary, Memoir, Nonfiction on July 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Elizabeth Samet writes about “soldier’s heart” in several ways in the course of this book. It’s a phrase that can mean courage (“steel my soldiers’ hearts,” says Henry V), or the values a soldier holds dear. It is also the name of a condition that has been diagnosed since the Civil War: at first considered [...]
Hotel Bemelmans
Posted in Food, Memoir, Nonfiction on July 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
You probably know Ludwig Bemelmans best from his wonderful Madeline books for children: “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines/ Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.” I certainly did; I could go on to quote nearly the entire book by heart.
But as it turns out, Bemelmans was more of [...]
Lipstick Jihad
Posted in Memoir, Nonfiction on July 4, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Azadeh Moaveni was born in the United States in 1976 to Iranian parents. As part of the Iranian diaspora community in Palo Alto, California, Moaveni experienced the pleasures and pains of being part of two cultures; however, she struggled with never quite feeling that she understood her family’s country of origin:
What I wanted, though I chose not [...]
