“There’s a passage early on in Book 2 that’s so smug, so macho (in a literary way), that’s so—ugh! I can’t explain it.”
Tag: Memoir
The Spy Who Read Me
Women writing about women spies who are, themselves, writing. What’s next for women’s espionage writing?
A Tale of Two Valleys
To understand Silicon Valley, first examine the stories it tells about itself; just like, to understand the Victorian age, first read writers like Dickens and Dreiser.
B-Sides: Brecht Evens’s “The Making Of”
How could any Belgian graphic novel escape Tintin’s shadow? Enter Brecht Evens’s The Making Of.
We Must Heal Each Other
At some point, it became a mark of privilege to talk about “self-care.” Once unknown outside the niches of trauma therapists and burned-out activists, the concept has become so mainstream that it’s ...
Imperial Couplings
Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies explores the couple, and intimacy, as foundational historical categories in postcolonial and decolonial studies. At the heart of her narrative lie Carl, a Jamaican ...
Homing Empire
Family memoirs are a special kind of historical offering. They have the power to tell fine-grained stories of the past, of epochal events—wars, migrations, empires—and to intricately connect them to ...
Thailand: The Playwright and the Junta
Everything changed with the May 22, 2014, coup, Thailand’s 12th military takeover since the end of the absolute monarchy, in 1932. This time, a ...
Can a Recipe Save Your Life?
A recipe can be more than a guide to making food. A recipe can be a mantra, a ritual, a symbolic stay against chaos in the psyche and in the world. A hybrid genre ...
Acts of Mothering
Back in 1976, Adrienne Rich described what she called the “institution of motherhood.” When biological motherhood was turned into a social and historical institution, she explained, the potential ...
Another Mormon Education
The first sentence Tara Westover writes in her engrossing memoir Educated is a disclaimer: “This story is not about Mormonism.” This is true in the same ...
Women Who Write About Their Feelings and Lives
Two recent memoirs by women who grew up in “sexually liberated” 1970s artistic Australia present a sobering picture: of predatory and violent men whose ...
Adoption and the Abundance of Narrative
Adoption narratives are hard to tell. This is ironic given that adoptions are fueled by stories. Birth parents tell themselves that giving up their child is for the best and ...
Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...
The Great Global Grad School Novel
Was Sharmila Sen “happy” on the first morning she woke up in the United States to the strange smell of bacon frying? That’s what her young son wants to ...
Our Mothers, Ourselves
I intended to begin with a personal admission. “I didn’t like being pregnant,” I was going to write, before describing the bodily discomforts (hypersalivation!) and psychic stresses (due date during ...
Who Is Sick and Who Is Well?
I might be tempted to describe Terese Mailhot’s new memoir, Heart Berries, as “raw,” had she not warned against it. “The danger politically or artistically is that ...
Saboteurs in the Modern Academy
What hope remains for the masses of disillusioned graduate students, unemployed PhDs, and embittered faculty who still, despite everything, believe in ...
Michelle Obama’s Embrace
I told Michelle Obama that I admired Becoming for its courage, honesty, risk taking, and optimism. But my admiration went further, because in her story I had seen myself, and not just in the book’s main character ...
The Gay Conversion Therapy Memoir
“To continually go before God and ask for forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and ...
