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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The New Self-Help
Now that self-help personalities Helen Gurley Brown and Pauline Phillips, the original Dear Abby, are gone, who will the new generation of millennial readers look to for advice? Some surprising frontrunners are not therapists or professional writers, but television comediennes, such as Tina Fey, Mindy Kaling, and Amy Poehler, whose autobiographies offer counsel on subjects…
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Autobibliography
What is reading, especially novel reading, for? What does it mean to love a book or to love reading? These questions hover over the pages of recent bibliomemoirs or autobibliographies that return to formative scenes of reading (Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch); recount “the serious pleasure of books,” as the subtitle of Wendy Lesser’s…
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Whitman with Quinoa
Although David Copperfield grows up to be a successful novelist, Charles Dickens’s contemporary readers had no reason to suspect the historical author had based parts of his protagonist’s story on his own life—that he had, in fact, assigned his own most traumatic childhood experiences to David, going so far as to incorporate passages from an…
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Knausgaard’s Novel Degree Zero
Proustian epiphanies happen all the time, particularly to children, and they don’t necessarily add up to much.
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Lending an Ear
It’s 2006 in Iowa City. Two women sit at opposite ends of a library table, fingers arched over their keyboards. A moment’s pause, then they begin—an étude on the voice for four hands. The reading room is so quiet that the clacking of their keyboards easily fills the room, but neither of these women is…
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Through the Looking Glass
Although the numbers are at epidemic levels (in the United States, it is estimated to affect 1 in 68 children and 1 in 42 boys),1 autism remains a singular experience—as unique as each individual. Reaching a formal diagnosis is often a complex task. According to the Autism Society, it typically involves a team of doctors and…
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“We” Includes Me
In my world, which is populated by people obsessed with race, statistics about black men and boys are ubiquitous. Study after study lays out how few graduate from high school, how many wind up in prison, how few are employed, how many are killed by the police. I can find a number for nearly any…
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Cassandra, Retiring
I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra, mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics universe.1 Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s Market Day, Chris Ware’s Lint (an entry in his ongoing Rusty Brown), and Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s remarkable miniseries, Daytripper—ominous signs seemed unmistakable:…
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Her Mother and Herself
Do you hear a sound like rolling surf in the self-help section labeled “Family”? It’s what a sea change sounds like in its early stages, when one paradigm is fading away and another surging forward. Drifting away is the idea of the repressive family, out to “fuck you up,” in Philip Larkin’s phrase of 1971.1…
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Positive Discomfort
The cover of Miriam Katin’s graphic memoir Letting It Go is striking: against a backdrop of horizontal bars of red, white, and yellow, a woman dressed in black has opened her palm to release a balloon emblazoned with a swastika, which floats up and bleeds off the top right edge of the book. The title…
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Pop Justice
Sonia Sotomayor is not the only Supreme Court justice with a good story to tell. The tales of Thurgood Marshall or Clarence Thomas are, in some ways, no less dramatic. But Sotomayor may be unique in that she sees the promotion of her story as her most essential mission as a Supreme Court justice: “It is…
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It’s Bigger Than “Buck”
Reading M. K. Asante is like flipping pages between generations, going back and forth among the “flowering of Negro literature” of the Harlem Renaissance, the iconoclastic spirit of the Beat generation, and the cornered, misunderstood post-hip-hop generation. Listening to him speak is a similar experience. “My education came from so many different places,” confesses the…
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Collateral Melancholy
Two children meet by chance on the night of a historic Santiago earthquake, develop a brief, tentative friendship around a secret task that neither of them understands too well, and then, years later, meet up as adults, both attracted and estranged by the silences and intersecting threads that had earlier entangled them. Alejandro Zambra’s third…
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People in Trouble
“My Awesome Place is truly the result of a massive community effort …”1 When the poet and performance artist Cheryl Burke died at the age of 38 from complications related to the treatment of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, friends and members of her writing group brought her unfinished memoir to publication. The book, which was awarded a Lambda Literary…
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All About the Clothes
Though Grace Coddington is well-known in her native Britain by lovers of London’s Swinging Sixties, most Americans only learned who she was from the 2009 documentary about the making of Vogue’s annual landmark, The September Issue. This despite the fact that she has worked at American Vogue since 1988, and arrived there on the same…
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For Now and for Nao
Both of the protagonists in Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, A Tale for the Time Being, set out to tell one story and wind up telling another. “Ruth”—like the book’s author a novelist living on an island in …
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When the Diaspora Is Enuf
Quiet as it’s kept, some of us colored-girl creative-writer types kept our cool circa 2006 when that gelato-dripping, Gita-flipping, Bali-bossa-nova-ing best seller Eat, Pray, Love went multi-multiplatinum. We did not hate, because we knew the truth: we too binge, chant, and passionately blur the pages of our passports with so many stamps from Senegal, Salvador,…
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Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section that nobody knows what to call: in front of the cash register, between the chocolate bars and fridge…
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Memoir 2.0; or, Confession Gone Wild
Wild is Cheryl Strayed’s first confessional memoir—unless, of course, you count her name. As Strayed recalls about a third of the way through Wild, she authored that briefest of autobiographies on a set of no-fault divorce papers in 1994. Obsessed by the blank line where she was to write her new name, she toyed with…
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Fatwa: A Love Story
Salman Rushdie’s new memoir, Joseph Anton, is much like his career to date: great until about halfway through. One ought to feel worse about taking such a cheap shot. Over the last three decades, Rushdie has been one of the finest novelists working in English. The loose tetralogy that began with Midnight’s Children (1981) and…
