This week, I’ve been thinking about a book – You Can’t Please All: Memoirs 1980-2024 by Tariq Ali, published by Verso in 2024. I’ve been thinking about it, but I’ve been quite uncertain how to talk about it. Let me explain. Tariq Ali is a well-known radical and writer. He was born into a prominent …
A mixture of movement memoir and grounded theorizing about some key areas of reflection and debate in movements. The author is one of the three Black women who initially coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. She was already an experienced organizer at that point, having cut her teeth doing neighbourhood and city-wide organizing in the Bay Area …
Memoir. By someone who is part of southern Ontario/Montreal anarchist networks, about their decade working as a stripper. Rich and nuanced, vehemently refusing the caricatured understandings held by many who do not do this work. As the backbone of the book, uses fragments, moments, nights, weekends extracted from their time at the various clubs where …
Essays. A lot of memoir – which I wasn’t expecting, for some reason, but certainly didn’t mind. The author is Cowlitz, a Coast Salish people from the northwest of what is currently the United States. She grew up in a coal-mining family in Appalachia, and then for much of the period covered in the book …
Memoir that sometimes reads like essays, with a heavy emphasis on linguistics. Written by a white English woman who is a literary translator between Japanese and English. Orbits around her time living in Japan when she was younger, and her complicated, ambivalent trajectory with Japanese nation, culture, and language. Reflects, through all of that, on …
Memoir – I’d even say lyric memoir, a la Maggie Nelson. Not sure I’m using that category quite correctly, but it seems to me that there are two broad areas of writing that distinguish lyric memoir from more conventional life-writing: the artfully (if intermittently) nonlinear flow of ideas, images, events, and reflections, and the play …
Lyric memoir. By a queer Cree poet, writer, scholar. Intense, compelling. Memory, poetry, theory, love, lust, rage, grief, joy, opacity, play. Keenly situated in the painful space between worlds violently unmade and worlds straining to grow. As is often true with this kind of book, I feel a pull to find a “right way” to …
Memoir. By a well-known Antiguan-American novelist. Focused on her gardening. Perhaps an odd choice for me, given that I have never read any of Kincaid’s novels (though I do remember carrying stacks of them when I briefly worked at a campus bookstore many years ago) and that I am not a gardener (though I dabbled …
By a prominent US scholar of slavery. A mixture of history, memoir, and essay. Organized around an extended stay in Ghana and an exploration of the key sites of the slave trade there. An intense, often painful meditation on loss, forgetting, remembering, legacies of relentless violence, and the impossibility of return. Focused to a significant …
Graphic memoir. I’ve read a couple of graphic novels by the author, but picked this up somewhat randomly not so much for fannish reasons but because I figured it would be a light and quick read. And it was. Drawing largely from material she has previously published online, it follows her life from 2011 to …