Browsing: Memoir

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[McKenzie] Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, returns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hindsight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.”

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Maumort is not so much a novel as a fictionalized memoir—at least in its present state. Du Gard changed his mind several times while writing it regarding how exactly to tell the story; more on that later. What surprised me the most was a) how little known it is today, and b) how incredibly frank and nonjudgmental it is on sexual matters in general and on homosexuality in particular. Indeed, du Gard, who was a close friend of André Gide (in fact, the work is dedicated to him), spends a lot of time contemplating why the Lieutenant-Colonel did not turn out to be homosexual, despite the fact that many of his early sexual forays—one could even argue, his most significant ones—were with men.

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LEGENDARY DRAG PERFORMER and playwright Charles Busch lets it all hang out in his candid new memoir Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy (Smart Pop Books). It’s an intensive look back at his life encompassing early memories of yearning to be on stage as a boy and success with his own plays (among them The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife and Vampire Lesbians of Sodom) and various celebrity encounters with people ranging from Milton Berle to Audra McDonald.

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Reaching Ninety, is a summing up of a long and remarkable life as [Martin Duberman] reaches his ninetieth birthday. In it, he covers some familiar ground, but more than in previous memoirs, he’s willing to speak out about matters that he was reluctant to speak of before. At ninety, one imagines, he doesn’t really care if he offends anyone or if someone disapproves.

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In this memoir, Shakur searches for emotional and political meaning in a country that can no longer hide from its racist past. We follow his political and personal journeys from Ohio, back to Jamaica, to the Philippines, to France, and to the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. His dramatic disappointment at the lies and compromises that ripple through the American Dream, particularly for immigrant families, is lamented in ways both poignant and painful.

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OVER TWO DECADES AGO, Kathleen Norris published Dakota, a wonderfully poetic and ruminative memoir about life on the Great Plains from a spiritual point of view. Now comes Taylor Brorby’s Boys and Oil, an equally contemplative book, this time attempting to capture the experience of growing up gay in that beautiful but bleak environment.

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[Keeping Family Secrets] ]is itself based on memoirs by people who lived through this era, people whose often jaw-dropping personal stories came to light once it was safe to reveal them in memoirs. The “secrets” are organized into categories: absent siblings, i.e., children who were institutionalized all their lives because of physical or mental disabilities; same-sex desire among boys; “unwed mothers”; parents who were members of the Communist Party; unorthodox conceptions (hidden adoptions); and hidden Jewish ancestry.

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Wanting to move “out of my Catholic cocoon,” D’Emilio chooses to attend a secular college and live away from home. His years at Columbia University, 1966–1970, are the most exciting part of the book, not least because they were tumultuous years in American history and on college campuses.

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WHEN HER MOTHER said that the mere sight of her made her want to vomit, college freshman Casey Parks reached for solace from her grandmother, a plain-spoken, chain-smoking woman who’d grown up picking cotton. The older woman explained that being a little “different” never bothered her, that, in fact, someone who was different had been her best friend once, when she’d moved from the farm to the city. She spun a tale that captivated Parks for more than a decade, and that made Parks vow to solve a decades-long mystery.

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EVERY GOOD BOY Does Fine is an engaging memoir by MacArthur “Genius Grant” pianist Jeremy Denk. With humor and intelligence, he recounts his life story through his music lessons and his love for music.

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