Memoir Essays

You'll be wincing in recognition and scratching your head in incredulity, but like Marian herself you won't be able to stop laughing at the sheer delightful absurdity that is modern life - because each and every one of us is clearly making it up as we go along. She has wonderful and tickling words of advice for those fast approaching 50.

Reporting from the potholes midway through life's journey, Allen addresses these and other more serious matters, like the rude awakenings of being single after 25 years, of mothering a teenager, and of living with a serious illness. She also discusses life's everyday trials, like the horrors of attempting a crafts project, the anxieties of being a houseguest, and the ever-changing rules of recycling.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus's personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought....

My name is Betty. I have depression. I have passion. I have tits the size of printers. And also: I have a brain full of women. There’s Blanche VonF--kery, Ingrid St. Rash, and a host of others—some cowering in sweatpants, some howling plans for revolution, and one, oh God, and one . . . slowly vomiting up a crow? Worried for her. These women take turns at the wheel. That’s why I feel like a million selves. With a raised eyebrow and a soul-scalpel, I’d like to tell you how I got this way. Because maybe you feel this way too.

Edited and annotated by H. L. M., this is a selection from his out-of-print writings. They come mostly from books - the six installments of the Prejudices series, A Book of Burlesques, In Defense of Women, Notes on Democracy, Making a President, A Book of Calumny, Treatise on Right and Wrong - but there are also magazine and newspaper pieces that never got between covers (from the American Mercury, the Smart Set, and the Baltimore Evening Sun) and some notes that were never previously published at all.

Entwined explores the fuzzy lines between friendship, romance, and family with various essay forms, including a play, an advice column, and a love letter. Rather than wallowing in the throes of jealousy, this collection celebrates the hard work, humor, and wisdom needed to create a love life that resists conventional narratives.

The author writes with perfect pitch as she takes us through one woman's life - from childhood to marriage and beyond - and memorably captures the collision of youthful longing and the hard intransigencies of time and fate.

Scaachi Koul’s first book was a collection of raw, perceptive, and hilarious essays reckoning with the issues of race, body image, love, friendship, and growing up the daughter of immigrants. When the time came to start writing her next book, Scaachi assumed she’d be updating her story with essays about her elaborate four-day wedding, settling down to domestic bliss, and continuing her never-ending arguments with her parents. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, the world went into lockdown, Scaachi’s marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mother was diagnosed with cancer.

Creep is “sharp, conversational cultural criticism” (Bustle), a blistering and slyly informal sociology of creeps (the individuals who deceive, exploit, and oppress) and creep culture (the systems, tacit rules, and institutions that feed them and allow them to grow and thrive). In eleven bold, electrifying pieces, Gurba mines her own life and the lives of others—some famous, some infamous, some you’ve never heard of but will likely never forget—to unearth the toxic traditions that have long plagued our culture and enabled the abusers who haunt our books, schools, and homes.

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.

Who is Peter Dutton, and what happened to the Liberal Party? In Bad Cop, Lech Blaine traces the making of a hardman – from Queensland detective to leader of the Opposition, from property investor to minister for Home Affairs. This is a story of ambition, race and power, and a politician with a plan.

When Richard “Frosty” Hesson was first approached by a young Jay Moriarty in 1990, the skinny kid with a sparkle in his eye only wanted one thing from the icon: His help in becoming a better surfer. Hesson, one of the first to conquer the huge waves off northern California known as Mavericks, recognized that the kid “had a vision.” Jay quickly demonstrated a resolve that reminded Frosty of his younger self, pursuing his goal with a seriousness far beyond his years. His attitude and work ethic earned Frosty’s respect and, eventually, his friendship.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

Winner of Child magazine's Book of the Year award for her hilarious and candid book on single motherhood, The Lunch-Box Chronicles, Marion Winik returns to the topic of parenting in these nine essays. Beginning with the story of her second wedding and her move to rural Pennsylvania, she covers everything from blending families and having a child in one's 40s to dealing with the legal problems of teenage boys to the evolution of the values of a family over generations.

Award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of the world's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work.

In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one-bedroom apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Packing up his enormous, 35,000 volume personal library, choosing which books to keep, store, or cast out, Manguel found himself in deep reverie on the nature of relationships between books and readers, books and collectors, order and disorder, memory and reading.

Joan Didion and Nora Ephron have both written, by turns grimly and hilariously, about the indignities of getting older. Now comes Jane Juska, laying bare (literally) everything no one has yet said about life in the later years. With her characteristic wit, unsparing eye for detail, and famously frank opinions on gender issues, Juska, author of the best-selling memoir A Round-Heeled Woman, talks sex, the ups and downs of body parts well below the neck, and the indomitable human need for connection, whatever a woman's age.

With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls who’d follow him anywhere. He murdered three of them. It was the dawn of the free-love movement - perfect for a magnetic madman who’d also foreshadow its end a few years later in the malignant charisma of Charles Manson. The inspiration for a classic story by Joyce Carol Oates, Schmid, the most bizarre serial killer of any era, was the epitome of a narcissist flattered into believing he could get away with murder.

George Plimpton was perhaps best known for Paper Lion, the book that set the bar for participatory sports journalism. With his characteristic wit, Plimpton recounts his experiences in talking his way into training camp with the Detroit Lions, practicing with the team, and taking snaps behind center. His breezy style captures the pressures and tensions rookies confront, the hijinks that pervade when 60 high-strung guys live together in close quarters, and a host of football rites and rituals.

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.