Cheever, Susan. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker Simon & Schuster, 1999Hardcover, 192 pagesISBN 0-684-80432-8 Recommended My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord’s Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini. She showed me how to tilt the gin bottle into the tumbler with the […]
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Jessop, Violet. Titanic Survivor edited and annotated by John Maxtone-GrahamSheridan House, 1997Hardcover, 238 pagesISBN 1-57409-035-6 Violet Jessop went to sea as a stewardess on an ocean liner in 1908. She continued as a stewardess through the glory days when a transatlantic ship crossing was as much a society event as a mode of transportation. She retired
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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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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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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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Karr, Mary. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir Viking, 1995Hardcover, 320 pagesISBN 0-670-85053 Recommended Poet Mary Karr grew up in an East Texas town, where her Daddy, like everyone else’s daddy, worked at the oil refinery. After work the men would congregate at the American Legion Bar and swap stories, a gathering that became known as the
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McBride, James. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother Riverhead Books, 1996Hardcover, 228 pagesISBN 1-57322-022-1 Recommended As a young boy James McBride recognized that his mother was different: “Gradually . . . I began to notice something about my mother, that she looked nothing like the other kids’ mothers. In fact,
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McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir Scribner, 1996Paperback, 364 pagesISBN 0-684-87435-0 Highly Recommended Frank McCourt’s memoir about his childhood well deserves all the accolades that have been heaped upon it. When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly
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Darden, Christopher, with Jess Walter. In Contempt HarperCollins, 1996Hardcover, 387 pages ISBN 0-06-039183-9 Other than the victims’ families, few people were as visibly shaken by the verdict in the O.J. Simpson trial as prosecutor Christopher Darden. For him, that trial was a true trial by fire, not merely his job but an undertaking that forced him to
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