REVIEW or retrospective

Mary Gordon’s master class in the soul

August 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

Guest post by Olga Khotiashova Why do people write memoirs: to share their most exciting experiences with readers or to get rid of haunting ghosts? The truth probably lies somewhere in between these two poles. The magic of a memoir is that any experience, when articulated, loses its privacy, becomes distinct from the author, so the moments of sheer joy, although not so dazzling as before, rest peacefully in a safe place together with unspeakably painful experiences which, on the …

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Q&A: Gregory Orr on ‘The Blessing’

June 2, 2011 | 5 Comments

Orr has distilled the anguish of his youth right down to its holy bones.—Booklist The Blessing: A Memoir by Gregory Orr. Council Oak, 209 pages. Gregory Orr’s The Blessing is one of the finest memoirs I’ve read. There are tons of good memoirs and more than a few great ones, but this one did it for me. It joins a select handful that thrilled me to my toes: Lee Martin’s From Our House, Dinty W. Moore’s Between Panic and Desire, …

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Q&A: Jim Minick on his earthy memoir

May 14, 2011 | 4 Comments

Desiring to grow things is surely in humans’ DNA, planted at least 10,000 years ago in our genetic code, not as old as the impulse to gather wild food, but tenured. As a boy and young man haunted by the loss of our family farm, I devoured back-to-the-land literature for years; then I farmed commercially for over a decade; and I’m now up to my eyeballs in writing my own memoir of rural life. Almost burned out on the genre …

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Q&A: Lisa Davis on a Mormon tragedy

May 4, 2011 | 3 Comments

The Sins of Brother Curtis: A Story of Betrayal, Conviction, and the Mormon Church by Lisa Davis. Scribner, 368 pages. I met Lisa Davis six years ago, in a creative nonfiction workshop at Goucher College, and I read her recently published The Sins of Brother Curtis first out of loyalty to a friend and then with increasing admiration for her work. Davis, a San Francisco journalist and a teacher at Santa Clara University, has painstakingly crafted a gripping narrative about …

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Review: ‘Half A Life’ memoir

April 4, 2011 | 5 Comments

Darin Strauss’s sad and somber gift to others from his suffering: stunning in its artistry, honesty. Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss. Random House, 187 pp. Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness.—Darin Strauss I was surprised—but pleased—when Darin Strauss’s memoir Half A Life recently won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. I hadn’t heard much buzz about the book. The judges called it a “brave and heartbreaking account,” placing it ahead of finalists that …

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B. Dylan meets A. MacLeish

March 16, 2011 | 7 Comments

How Archibald MacLeish courted Bob Dylan for a musical. Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982) won three Pulitzer prizes, two for poetry and one for his play about Job, J.B, which also won a Tony Award. His collected poems won the National Book Award. Like some other famous writers of his generation, MacLeish served as an ambulance driver in World War I but also as an artillery officer. After the war he moved to Paris and knew many artists, including Gertrude Stein, John …

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Review: Memoirs by James Michener

March 11, 2011 | No Comments

Sharing this small immense world A guest post by Olga Khotiashova Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome; The World Is My Home: A Memoir Reading The World is My Home by James Michener was a rare case when I read a memoir not being acquainted with the other works of a writer. Well, not exactly. I had already read his Pilgrimage: A Memoir of Poland and Rome and was hooked. As I had known a lot about Poland, it …

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