Memoir Essays

ECW was one extreme contradiction piled on top of another. It was an incredibly influential company in the world of professional wrestling during the 1990s, yet it was never profitable. It portrayed itself as the ultimate in anti-authority rebellion, but its leadership was, at various points, working covertly with the two wrestling giants, the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Most of all, it blurred the line between real life and the fantasy world of professional wrestling like no other company before it.

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and best-selling Samantha Irby. Irby is 40, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state....

As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started writing an essay about being abused by her stepfather. It took her more than a decade to realize that she was actually trying to write about how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. This gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers.

From bestselling and Booker-nominated author Colm Tóibín comes a beautiful collection of essays ranging from personal memoir to brilliantly acute writing on religion, literature and politics.

Whether Samantha Irby is talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets; explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette; detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes; sharing awkward sexual encounters; or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms (hang in there for the Costco loot!); she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.

At six years old, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. At 66, Terry had lived a life full of achievements: becoming one of the UK's best-selling writers, winning the Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Following his untimely death from Alzheimer's disease, the mantle of completing Terry's memoir was passed to Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the author's literary estate.

The author of Bel Canto, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, and long-running New York Times best seller, turns to nonfiction in a moving chronicle of her decades-long friendship with the critically acclaimed and recently deceased author, Lucy Grealy.

Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder and Bel Canto examines her deepest commitments: to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband in This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Together, these essays, previously published in The Atlantic, Harper, Vogue, and The Washington Post, form a resonant portrait of a life lived with loyalty and with love.

As an adult, Lauren Hough has had many identities: an airman in the US Air Force, a cable guy, a bouncer at a gay club. As a child, however, she had none. Growing up as a member of the infamous cult The Children of God, Hough had her own self robbed from her. The cult took her all over the globe - to Germany, Japan, Texas, Chile - but it wasn't until she finally left for good that Lauren understood she could have a life beyond "The Family."

The inimitably witty David Rakoff, New York Times best-selling author of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, defends the commonsensical notion that you should always assume the worst, because you’ll never be disappointed. In this deeply funny (and, no kidding, wise and poignant) audiobook, Rakoff examines the realities of our sunny, gosh­ everyone-can-be-a-star contemporary culture and finds that, pretty much as a universal rule, the best is not yet to come, adversity will triumph, justice will not be served, and your dreams won’t come true.

There is absolutely no logical reason why I am here. The life trajectory my nationality and class and circumstances portended for me was not even remotely close to the one I now navigate. But logic is a science and living is an art. The release I felt in writing my first memoir, Not My Father’s Son, was matched only by how my speaking out empowered so many to engage with their own trauma. I was reminded of the power of my words and the absolute duty of authenticity.

In Tales from the New Jersey Devils Locker Room, former New Jersey goalie Chico Resch and coauthor Mike Kerwick bring listeners along for a wild ride from the lean early seasons to the three Stanley Cup championships of this beloved team.

An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his fiction. Now The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of his outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart.

Sometimes in medicine the only way to know what is truly going on in a patient is to operate, to look inside with one's own eyes. This audio is exploratory surgery on medicine itself, laying bare a science not in its idealized form, but as it actually is - complicated, perplexing, and profoundly human. Atul Gawande offers an unflinching view from the scalpel's edge, where science is ambiguous, information is limited, the stakes are high. In dramatic and revealing stories of patients and doctors, he explores how deadly mistakes occur and why good surgeons go bad.

In the chapters of Never Sniff a Gift Fish, McManus will teach you the wisdom that is usually shared only in the close ranks of modern-day hunters and gatherers. To complete your arsenal, McManus also includes "The Hunter's Workout Guide" and a special "Family Camper's Dictionary". Exercises like the hindquarter shuffle will make you move like a hunter. And phrases like "Yip-yip-yip-Owoooooo!" will help you sound like one, too.

Kristin Newman spent her 20s and 30s dealing with the stresses of her high-pressure job as a television comedy writer, and the anxieties of watching most of her friends get married and start families while she wrestled with her own fear of both. Not ready to settle down and yet loathe to become a sad-sack single girl, Kristin instead started traveling the world, often alone, for a few months each year, falling madly in love with attractive locals who provided moments of the love she wanted without the cost of the freedom she needed.

From the author of the popular newsletter That’s What She Said, Nobody Cares is a frank, funny personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your 20s and 30s. As she shares her hard-won insights from screwing up, growing up, and trying to find her own path, Anne T. Donahue’s debut book offers all the honesty, laughs, and reassurance of a late-night phone call with your best friend.

The international sensation that illuminates the experiences women are supposed to hide - from addiction, anger, sexual assault, and infertility to joy, sensuality, and love. In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life - those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self.

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction.

When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, she did not yet have the piece of shattering knowledge that would finally make sense of the chaos of her life. At age 24, Hornbacher was diagnosed with type I rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disorder. In Madness, in her trademark wry and utterly self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story.