The latest collection from master storyteller Ivan Coyote. Charming. Thoughtful. A great mix of heavy and light, grief-laden and joyful. The same wise, compassionate insight into life in general and into gender in particular. This collection seemed to have more very short pieces than I remember from those I’ve read in the past. Which is …
Memoir. Place, desire, compulsion, shame, relationships ending and beginning, abuse, family history, faith. And especially place. The place that it is, especially, is Epping Forest, a 2400 hectare former royal forest in the UK that straddles the border between London and Essex. It is other places too, but particularly there. The author broods and reflects. …
Memoir. By a prominent French public intellectual of the left (whom I had not heard of until a friend recommended this book to me). He first made a name for himself with an important biography of Michel Foucault, cemented his reputation by producing some of the foundational scholarly work in gay studies in the French …
Essays about schizophrenia and related conditions. Written by a multiple-award winning author (and highly skilled essayist) with a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. Draws heavily on memoir, of course. Intense, powerful, honest, sometimes hard to read, occasionally funny, and very well written. I can imagine it would be a topic where it would be easy to overdo …
Memoir shading into dream, everyday life into imagination that reveals truths as it goes beyond fact. Meditations that are melancholy, even bleak, with age and the looming deaths of friends and the state of America in 2016, but that are also, through their weariness, curious and playful and fully engaged with life. I love Smith’s …
Graphic memoir. A self-identified tomboy looking back on the frictions, frustrations, and traumas of gender she experienced growing up. Thoughtful, readable, and interesting. Both an engaging story and a useful entry into thinking about gender – I can imagine, for instance, it being a useful teaching tool with students who had not really thought about …
Memoir. Short. Focused on the body. Thoughtful and theoretical and nonlinear and lyrical, a la Maggie Nelson (who also happened to blurb it). Ran across it while I was investigating another book and justified picking it up with the idea that it might be vaguely relevant to some work that I’m doing. It’s not, sadly, …
A collection of essays by Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott. I’ve encountered her writing online from time to time in the last few years and thought highly of it every time, so I was very excited to hear she had a debut collection coming out. I was not disappointed. These essays are strongly grounded in memoir, …