Tag
Memoir
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The Hyphen Unites: Avi Shlaim on Arab-Jewish Life
Avi Shlaim, historian and influential scholar of Israel’s relationship with the Arab world, joins John Plotz and Yuval Evri to discuss class, caste differences, and destructive ethno-nationalist ideologies in mainstream Israeli politics.
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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 …
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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 …
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Great Liberations: Writing Beyond the Academy
Bridging scholarly and popular writing is what good essays have always done. …
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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 …
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Reading Lives, Writing Lives
My tiny captor sleeps beside me. I don’t know how long it will last, but I welcome such moments of respite. Stolen hours to write, periods in which I feel my foggy …
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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 finals!) I experienced while carrying my children. At the end of the review, I would loop back with a second admission: that reading journalist Angela…
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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 …
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Moods of Betrayal in the Story of Palestine
A few years ago I read a collection of personal reflections on what it means to be a Palestinian in the diaspora. Two entries in particular stayed with me. The first …
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B-Sides: Marion Milner’s “A Life of One’s Own”
I rarely fail to remember my first encounter with a book—it usually becomes merged with the story of the book itself—so it is disconcerting to me to realize …
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Women of the Algerian Resistance
On May 8, 1945, France joined the festivities of V-E Day, celebrating the total defeat of Nazi Germany as well as the …
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“The Horticulturalist of the Self”
In a 1963 issue of the New York Review of Books, Susan Sontag hailed the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s major early works into English, unabashedly calling the …
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B-Sides: Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood”
I first read it as a teenager in Cleveland, Ohio: sitting on a concrete wharf by Lake Erie with the interstate at my back; sitting on a bench in the hardwood forest of a …
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Rachel Cusk’s Disappearing Act
In 2001, after a decade or so as the author of well-regarded, modest-prize-winning fiction, Rachel Cusk began to develop into a kind of memoirist provocateur …
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The Book That Made Me: Gay
A professor of English and gender studies reveals how one’s identity can be transformed from the most unexpected sources—in this case, sports memoir …
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The Last Rock Star?
The most vivid passages of Born to Run recall a childhood that the author seems to have recognized as lost to him almost as soon as he could form a memory of it. Bruce Springsteen grew up “pretty …
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What It Feels Like When Your World Ends
The increasingly popular genre recently christened “cli-fi,” or climate change fiction, tends to move from the outside in: as the environment deteriorates …
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Boss Poet
Little has changed since Bruce Springsteen explained the origin of his song “Thunder Road” to a seething crowd at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, on September 19, 1978. “There was this Robert Mitchum movie, and it was about these moonshine runners down south,” he said, running a hand through his hair and leaning…
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All About My Mother
In her canonical 1939 essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf wonders how a coherent past may be reconstructed from countless angles, styles, and past selves. How do we choose from so many snapshots and memories? And how do we differentiate ourselves from the people and surroundings that shaped us? Woolf ultimately decides to…
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Earnestine & Hazel’s in Memphis: A Place Known for its Dead
This is the latest installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. On South Main, in the newly revived arts district of downtown Memphis, sits a little dive bar called Earnestine & Hazel’s, named for the women who ran it in the middle of the last century. If you’re lucky, you’ll…
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Stumbling Over a Violent Past
When Jennifer Teege was 38, she discovered a book in Hamburg’s central library that dramatically transformed her self-conception and her life: I Have to Love My Father, Don’t I? The book concerned the daughter of a prominent, infamous Nazi. That woman, Teege realized with shock, was her own mother, Monika. In that moment, Teege went…
