Memoir Essays

If you’re looking for a parenting audiobook, this is not it. This is not a treatise on how to be a mother. This is an audiobook about a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years - a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; an adrift 20-something who drops out of college to pursue her dream of making cheesecake on a stick a successful business franchise (ah, the ideals of youth).

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.

Growing up, Jena Friedman didn’t care about being likable. And she never wanted to be a comedian, either. She wouldn’t discover her knack for the funny business until research for her college thesis led her to take an improv class in Chicago. That anthropology paper, written on race, class, and gender in the city’s comedy scene, was, in Jena’s own words, “just as funny as it sounds.” But it did lay the groundwork for a career that has seen her write and produce for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the Late Show with David Letterman, and the Oscar-nominated Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.

In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud’s own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and literature.

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.

A debut essay collection by the inimitable cultural critic Maris Kreizman—an introspective, searing account of the life experiences that have pushed this former “good Democrat” even further to the political left.

Centuries ago, sound theology and good fiction were friends and not strangers. Decades ago, authors strove not for self-expression and self-disclosure but for a mastery of craft and language and books that transformed the reader with wisdom and love. In more recent years, the old ideals have been exchanged for lesser ones. Few guides to writing, which tend to focus on mechanics, point of view, and plot, address the more important matters of meaning, depth, and heart. But it is the latter qualities that make a book a blessing and gift to both writer and reader.

Whether embellishing the embarrassing, reeling over reality, or analyzing the awkward, author Matt Hribar has collected life stories and experiences into one collective book of comedic essays. Follow Matt’s journey through "professionalism," vacations gone wrong, and career highlights. Jump through awkward moments teaching children creative writing, spinning crazy DJ stories, and amuse over some emotional moments with friends. These essays blend observational comedy, real-life experiences, and even a few moments of existentialism.

Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors with jackrabbit stew and a sledgehammer to the skull. In time, their apple orchard gave up its secrets - a burial ground for their mutilated victims, each stripped of their possessions. The devilish enterprise on “Hell’s Half-Acre” would earn the Bloody Benders an undying place in the annals of American infamy. But it was the mysterious fate of eldest daughter, Kate, that would make them the stuff of mythic campfire prairie tales.

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O’Brien’s own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. Glenn O’Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets, to create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether.

One of the most famous of all literary dogs, Flush was the golden cocker spaniel belonging to Elizabeth Barrett. In this charming and heartfelt biography, Viginia Woolf tells his story: his early days as Miss Mitford's puppy running across the fields in wild abandon and fathering another, then the years spent in his invalid mistress' bedroom in Wimpole Street.

In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within this audiobook, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance.

Why do we cook? Is it just to feed ourselves and others? Or is there something more revolutionary going on? In Small Fires, Rebecca May Johnson reinvents cooking—that simple act of rolling up our sleeves, wielding a knife, spattering red hot sauce on our books—as a way of experiencing ourselves and the world. Cooking is thinking: about the liberating constraint of tying apron strings; the transformative dynamics of shared meals; the meaning of appetite and bodily pleasure; the wild subversiveness of the recipe, beyond words or control.

Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things. On footwear: “It has always been very clear to me that people who wear shoes without socks are destined to become my friends and lovers.” On public parks: “A civic garden square gentles the pace of the city that surrounds it, holding a thought before it scrambles.” Levy shares with us her most tender thoughts as she traces and measures her life against the backdrop of different literary imaginations.

Why are gravy stains on your shirt at the dinner table to be admired? Does bacon improve everything? And is gin really the devil's work? In this rollicking collection of his hilarious columns, the award-winning writer and Observer restaurant critic Jay Rayner answers these vital questions and many, many more. They are glorious dispatches, seasoned in equal measure with both enthusiasm and bile, from decades at the very frontline of eating.

What compels mountain climbers to take the risks that they do? Is it the thrill in the physical accomplishment, in managing to defy the odds, or both - and why do they continue to do what they do in the face of such great danger? In On the Ridge Between Life and Death, David Roberts confronts these questions head-on as he recounts the exhilarating highs and desperate lows of his climbing career.

David Shields’s The Trouble with Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power is an immersion into the perils, limits, and possibilities of human intimacy. All at once a love letter to his wife, a nervy reckoning with his own fallibility, a meditation on the impact of porn on American culture, and an attempt to understand marriage (one marriage, the idea of marriage, all marriages), The Trouble with Men is exquisitely balanced between the personal and the anthropological, nakedness and restraint.

The Memory Chalet is a memoir unlike any you have ever experienced before. Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt's prodigious mind.