What she thought she knew.
posted by alms on Jul 12, 2009 - 57 comments

Write Your Own Irish Memoir! Francesco Marciuliano, creator of Medium Large and writer for Sally Forth presents his Irish Memoir generator I Can't Find Me Legs: A Tale of Growing Up Poor, Catholic and Eventually Blind in Ireland.
posted by tommasz on Mar 17, 2009 - 25 comments

GUILTY! This word, so replete with sadness and sorrow, fell on my ear on that blackest of all black Fridays, October 14, 1887. And so begins John N. Reynolds' The Twin Hells: A Thrilling Narrative of Life in the Kansas and Missouri Penitentiaries, a very detailed and eventful memoir originally published in 1890, archived online in its entirety (including illustrations). [more inside]
posted by amyms on Dec 14, 2008 - 11 comments

David Carr is a New York Times columnist and Oscar blogger. He also just published his memoir, The Night of the Gun, about his time as a crack addicted fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, using his journalistic skills to investigate events he barely remembers. Reviews have placed it head and shoulders above the recent spate of other junkie redemption narratives, with one reviewer stating his confusion as to "whether you’ve just seen the memoir redeemed or irrevocably dismantled."

He has some sort of potato fixation, too. [more inside]
posted by Panjandrum on Oct 2, 2008 - 41 comments

30 years ago, Richard Brautigan's last collection of poems, June 30th, June 30th, was published. [more inside]
posted by ikahime on Jun 30, 2008 - 24 comments

Fake Memoir Exposed: Margaret Seltzer, pen name Margaret Jones, wrote a critically acclaimed memoir, Love and Consequences, that was published last week. NPR's "On Point" covered the story, and she gave Penguin an interview. After seeing a New York Times feature, though, her own sister outed her as a fraud. [more inside]
posted by lunit on Mar 5, 2008 - 83 comments

"I ask forgiveness to all who felt betrayed." A Belgian writer has admitted that she made up her best-selling memoir and that she did not trek 1,900 miles as a child across Europe with a pack of wolves in search of her deported parents during World War II. More at Slate. Here's an excellent portal about feral children. [more inside]
posted by KokuRyu on Mar 2, 2008 - 63 comments

Six word memoirs: too short for
posted by dersins on Feb 6, 2008 - 160 comments

'There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 't is not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes?'

Chris Chester, author of Providence of a Sparrow: Lessons from a Life Gone to the Birds, a meditation on his life with B, an English Sparrow which he raised from a hatchling fallen from the nest, died suddenly early this past Spring. His nephew Marc Mowery has created Chris Chester - born May 14, 1952 died April 17, 2007 to his memory and has posted 6 of 8 short videos of Chris and Rebecca Chester and the sparrow named B on YouTube.
And here is The Sorrow and the Sparrow: The Life and Death of Chris Chester
Excerpt and video links within [more inside]
posted by y2karl on Oct 25, 2007 - 9 comments

It's the first Monday in October and time for Supreme Court Justices to compare liberals, unfavorably, to the Ku Klux Klan. In his new memoir, released on the first day of the Supreme Court's 2007 term, Justice Clarence Thomas writes that he grew up fearing the KKK, but now knows he had "been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony. " No small man, he also comments on Anita Hill's bad breath. Slate's spectacular legal columnist, Dahlia Lithwick, notes that "in the few hundred pages of his new book, Thomas has managed to undo years of effort by his colleagues to depoliticize the judicial branch." As usual, only Jon Stewart can make us laugh through the tears.
posted by The Bellman on Oct 4, 2007 - 110 comments

"Mem, mem, mem." A fascinating memoir of global aphasia -- total language loss -- following a stroke, by British poet and novelist Paul West.
posted by digaman on Aug 17, 2007 - 40 comments

"From the first day on pots and pans, I knew what I wanted. I was never cool with being small-time -- that's what got me locked up in the first place: I wanted to be the man."
In 1988 Jeff Henderson landed himself in a federal prison for dealing cocaine. In 2007 he's executive chef at Cafe Bellagio in Las Vegas. Cooked: From the Streets to the Stove, from Cocaine to Foie Gras is his story.
posted by teem on Feb 27, 2007 - 15 comments

My Life in France by Julia Child (discussed here, and here) has been published posthumously with the assistance of Alex Prud'homme.
posted by grapefruitmoon on May 27, 2006 - 10 comments

Showing Off a Little (Inner) Cleavage. Author Geralyn Lucas wore bright, red lipstick to her mastectomy. "It was my way of saying I knew I would still be a woman when I woke up with a blood-soaked bandage where my breast used to be... women have sacrificed breasts and hair to try to save their lives. We have traded in our beauty for some kind of cure. But something strange often happens when we lose the bling — the big boobs and big hair — of womanhood. We're left with what I call 'inner cleavage,' and no plastic surgeon can sculpt it. It is the beauty that exists when everything else has been stripped away".
Lauren Greenfield photographs here. More inside.
posted by matteo on Apr 4, 2005 - 19 comments

Life and Death: an extraordinary post from Chris Clarke about his connection to serial killer Stephen Peter Morin. His family chimes in meaningfully in the comments. Morin's execution is often pointed to as proof of the cruelty of lethal injection.
posted by Cassford on Apr 4, 2005 - 20 comments

Illusion of Gaia and my cousin David
posted by Tlogmer on Mar 29, 2005 - 20 comments

Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades... 'I Is Someone Else'
posted by y2karl on Feb 19, 2005 - 34 comments

Throwing the Book at Em'. 2,500 words about a memoir of growing up poor in South Boston. It seems like a great idea, but the book has glaring errors and many Southie faithful consider it a work of fiction. Nevertheless, it has to be a better educational tool than this Southie memoir written by a sociopath.
posted by Cassford on Feb 11, 2005 - 10 comments

Sebastian Horsley - a man who's slept with more than 1,000 prostitutes - gives a controversial and candid account of his experience of paying for sex
posted by zeoslap on Sep 24, 2004 - 40 comments