McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir Penguin, 1998Paperback, 161 pagesISBN 0-14-026530-9 Jane Taylor McDonnell is the mother of an autistic child. When she set out to write a memoir about her experience, she found there were no instruction manuals on how to write what she calls “crisis memoirs.” Living […]
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O’Connell, Carol. Killing Critics (1996) G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 309 pages, $23.95 hardcover ISBN 0 39914168 5 I found this to be the least enjoyable of O’Connell’s Mallory books. In this installment, an art-related murder leads Mallory back to an unsolved brutal double homicide Markowitz had worked on 12 years earlier. The plot of
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Lefkowitz, Bernard. Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb University of California Press, 1997Hardcover, 443 pages ISBN 0-520-20596-0 In March 1989 a group of boys in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a 17-year-old developmentally disabled girl to a basement where they sexually abused her with a broomstick and a baseball
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Update: April 2022 When Lucy Grealy died in December 2002 at the age of 39, her death was ruled an accidental overdose. Later her close friend, novelist Ann Patchett, commemorated their relationship in the memoir Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. I wrote my review (below) of Grealy’s memoir before her death. Books by Lucy
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O’Connell, Carol. The Man Who Cast Two Shadows (1995) Jove Books, 308 pages, $6.99 paperback ISBN 0 515 11890 7 After a short prologue, the first chapter of this book opens with a page about the young child Kathy who had a phone number written on her hand. The first three digits of
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Woods,Stuart. Swimming to Catalina (1998) HarperCollins, 311 pages, $25.00 hardcover ISBN 0 06 018369 1 In his latest adventure Stone Barrington travels to Hollywood at the request of the country’s hottest movie star, Vance Calder. Vance is now married to writer Arrington Carter, Stone’s former lover. When Vance tells Stone that Arrington is
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Sandford, John. Secret Prey (1998) G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 392 pages, $24.95 hardcover ISBN 0 399 14382 3 After an interlude with Anna Batory on the West Coast, in Secret Prey John Sandford puts detective Lucas Davenport back to work in Minneapolis. Daniel S. Kresge, chairman of the board, president, and CEO of the
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O’Connell, Carol. Mallory’s Oracle (1994) Jove Books, 310 pages, $5.99 paperback ISBN 0 515 11647 5 NYPD detective Louis Markowitz has been tracking a serial killer who preys on elderly women. Now Markowitz has been murdered, his body found near that of the killer’s latest victim. One of the officers who arrive on
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Zinsser, William (ed.). Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of MemoirHoughton Mifflin Company, 1987Hardcover, 166 pagesISBN 0-395-44526-4 This book originated as a series of talks sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., and presented at The New York Public Library in the winter of 1986. The book contains a memoir and introduction by William Zinsser,
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Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography Alfred A. Knopf, 1998Hardcover, 205 pagesISBN 0-679-44593-5 This book opens with the question “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” (p. 3). The reason, Conway tell us, is that “We want to know how the world looks from inside another person’s experience,
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