Magical Memoir Moments

Here's a Quick Way to Discover Great Books: Six Lists That Get to the Heart of Memoir

I love lists. Don’t you? Lists save us time. They help us visualize our goals. They inspire us. They appeal to our sense of completion with a beginning, middle, and end. Book lists are the best of all. I first enjoyed lists I found on Amazon. Then Goodreads offered me the chance to see the…

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A Walker in the City: Inspiring and Daunting

November 20, 2011. Brooklyn, New York It’s nearly midnight. I’ve just closed the book A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin. Outside Flatbush Ave. pulses with movement and light in the rain. The wet streets glisten and double the images of white headlights approaching, red taillights receding, and green traffic light swaying above. The…

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The Sound of Rain on a Corrugated Iron Roof: Another Lanie Tankard Review

Our popular guest blogger Lanie Tankard has reviewed a pre-publication copy of One Day I Will Write About This Place: A Memoir   by Binyavanga Wainaina Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press (July 19, 2011) Reviewed by Lanie Tankard Binyavanga Wainaina busts clichés about Africa in his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, due…

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Julie and Julia Aren't Enough: They Both Needed Judith!

Did you see the summer’s best memoir movie, Julie & Julia? If not, hurry to a theater near you and catch it before it leaves. If you missed the trailer, you can find it here: I read and relished My Life in France a few months ago and then gave the book to one of…

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The Year of Magical Thinking: A Memoir to Read and Reread

When Joan Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne dropped dead on December 30, 2003, he was in the middle of a speaking a sentence in their living room. She was mixing a salad for their dinner. As I write these words, Stuart and I are about to sit down to eat the dinner the two of…

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Ava's Man: A Review And A Question for You

The top 100 memoirs list we are constructing here is not a scientific one.  At the rate we are going, 81 posts in 9 months, and only 18 reviews so far, it will take five years to get to 100 memoirs! I’ve read many more than I have reviewed and have an entire bookcase of…

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A Moveable Feast: Classic Memoir, Classic Metaphor

On the memoir bookshelf in my home office sit at least 100 memoirs.  Many of these are classics I read long ago without thinking of them as memoirs.  Some, like the one I focus on now, are famous books that fit the category but that I have never read.  Thinking about genre has allowed me…

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Coming Home to Roost

In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt.  Hope you come back to read this little review. Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure…

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Little Heathens–Perfect Memoir for a New Depression?

“Ralph Waldo Emerson could have learned a thing or two about self reliance from my great-great-grandparents,” asserts Mildred Armstrong Kalish near the beginning of her book Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. I knew I would love this book when I read those lines, and I…

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