MetaFilter posts tagged with memoir

If you’re going to poke around the bushes, you’d best be prepared to scare out some snakes.

anotherpanacea — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 07:28:21 -0800

The Education of Little Fraud

reenum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:12:49 -0800

Many kids read The Education of Little Tree in school, but the author of the book, Forrest Carter, was actually Asa Carter, a staunch racist and charlatan.

What she thought she knew: a love story

alms — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 20:28:59 -0800

What she thought she knew.

Write Your Own Irish Memoir!

tommasz — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 13:48:40 -0800

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.

It's that time again.

availablelight — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 07:41:45 -0800

Coming February 3, 2009.... It's time for the next big wintertime memoir scandal.... ...and Oprah is not going to be amused. The New Republic--with the help of some prominent Holocaust historians--is raising serious questions about the veracity of (two-time Oprah's guest) Herman Rosenblat's forthcoming memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love That Survived. Rosenblat has been telling his story for ten years now, and it was published as a children's book earlier in 2008. A $25 million dollar movie adaptation is already on the table, and the producer is already threatening legal action...against The New Republic. Snopes gave the story an "undetermined" rating as of this October.

"Those who desire to peruse works that tell about Heaven only, are urged to drop this book and run."

amyms — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:56:04 -0800

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). A few excerpts... From Chapter 11, Candidate for the State Senate (Reynolds ran for office while incarcerated): As I sat there in my solitude the question came to my mind as to what part of the great political play I would be engaged in were I a free man. Some months prior to this a petition signed by 5,000 people had been forwarded to President Cleveland for my pardon. Had I secured my liberty it was my intention to make the race for State senator in my district for vindication. Mr. Cleveland interfered with my plan by refusing my pardon. Thinking over the matter in my cell that Sunday afternoon, I determined that while the President had the power of keeping me in prison he should not keep me from making the race for the position I coveted. From Chapter 14, The Convict's Home: The prison is supplied with a large library of choice books to which the inmates have access. They also are allowed to read daily newspapers, if they have money with which to purchase them. The managing officials of the Kansas pententiary are possessed of a very foolish notion in regard to the reading of daily newspapers. They will not under any circumstances allow a prisoner to take his home paper, or have access to any political daily. They claim that it excites the prisoner and makes his imprisonment more difficult to bear when he knows what is going on in the outside world. From Chapter 19, Noted Convicts : The female prison is kept scrupulously clean, which reflects great credit upon those having the management of this department. In company with Doctor Lewellyn, the prison physician, I passed through the dormitory. Here I found a great curiosity. It was a baby prisoner, six months old. The little convict was born in the penitentiary. It is a colored child --- its mother being a mulatto, who was sent to prison for fifteen years for murdering two of her children. When on the outside, she lived with her paramour, a white man, and, as fast as children were born to them, she would murder them in cold blood.

Memories are really stories, stories about stories.

Panjandrum — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 04:56:08 -0800

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. Some other reviews: Popmatters Obligatory NYT Book Review Some interviews: Soup Cans Huffington Post Powells If you get tired of reading you can always watch the videos on the nifty official site, or perhaps something a bit on the truthier side?

June 30th, June 30th

ikahime — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:59:52 -0800

30 years ago, Richard Brautigan's last collection of poems, June 30th, June 30th, was published. June 30th is a haibun (a poetic travelog in the tradition of Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior) of his time in Japan, a place he frequented in the 70s after his poetry sadly fell out of favor. A number of excellent tribute pages exist, as well as several fond memoirs & collected essays, not to mention a few imaginary libraries based off of his novel The Abortion: An Historical Romance. "The Hillary Express" I just ordered my first meal curry and rice all by myself in a Japanese restaurant. What a triumph! I feel like an infant taking its first faltering step. Watch out Mount Everest! Tokyo May 16, 1976

Gang Memoir Fabricated

lunit — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 08:31:42 -0800

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. In the wake of discovering another fake memoir this week, some are understandably upset. Others are more forgiving. Still others are raising questions about what this means for the publishing industry. Further speculation abounds. Did Love and Consequences benefit from a special relationship with the New York Times? Maybe, or maybe not.

It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving

KokuRyu — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 05:45:31 -0800

"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. Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France. According to Wikipedia: Her real name is Monique de Wael and she is not Jewish; while she still says her parents were taken away by the Nazis, she says that she did not leave her home during the war to find them, as the book depicts. In a statement released through her lawyers to the Brussels newspaper Le Soir Defonseca/de Wael said that the story of "Misha" "is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving" and that there were moments when she "found it difficult to differentiate between what was real and what was part of my imagination."

blah blah baby shoes blah

dersins — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:11:23 -0800

Six word memoirs: too short for

Chris Chester, B and The Providence of a Sparrow

y2karl — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 10:52:26 -0800

'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 From B:

Mornings begin with "war bird." usually. sometimes he's not in the mood or I can't deal with it, drugged as I am from too little sleep, trying to reacquaint myself with the rigors of consciousness, confused by sunlight flouncing through the windows. But B's desperate when it's spring and swoops the room, turning, as Yeats would have it, in a widening gyre. Up to the mirror, tail flicking he checks, I think, his look. I move to the bed and he to the top of the towel-draped television. That tail: flick, flick, flick. Wings akimbo, beak parted a little, he assesses my opening gambit in a game that is our first rite of the day. "Bad, messy bird," I say, sweeping my hand back and forth across the bed. "Toss him outside; that's where he belongs. Just look at this room; germs, poop, and seed everywhere. To hell with birds, especially house sparrows." More flicks, a quick evacuation to lighten his load, and down he bears in a rush of wings, chirping, nipping my fingers, following quickly and precisely whatever reversals and arcs I make with my hand. I surrender at last, chastened for my slander. B struts atop my lifeless fingers, savoring his win. He dances and bows, chirps and pants. "Fierce, brave bird," I say, "you've slain your enemy, you've bested the foe." He flies to his water dish to drink, and I sit on the little couch by the window. He'll join me presently and preen, working wing feathers first and then his black bib. Every few seconds he raises his head, scanning for cats and hawks that will never come. Small creatures are cautious, the burden of being prey seldom laid down. During his first year he would flinch when light, glinting from a passing car, moved across the ceiling stirring racial memories of death from above. He has since learned to ignore it. He stretches his wings and combs them with his toes, wing and leg extending completely-a movement that has about it a sense of tai chi forms perfectly rendered. Often he sits on my shoulder to do this, just as often in the palm of my hand or perched on a finger. I can see his tongue, a pointed, triangular affair, working the plumes into the svelte vanes that form each contour feather. His beak reseals the barbules by zipping them together. His grooming habits are as fascinating to me now as when I first became privy to them. Since his arrival as a naked blob of flesh in my flower beds, he's claimed my attention in a way that few other things ever have. I may be adrift in a limitless universe, but this bird on my shoulder drifts with me. At least once a day I catch him looking at his feet as if he's noticed them for the first time. Three toes in front, one in back, they seem (measured in human terms) large for his body. He looks at his feet, and I look at him, a circumstance more remarkable to my here-and-now than a billion galaxies spiraling outward to some unfathomable denouement. Two citizens of a shared reality eyeing one another's improbable fortune.

In better times, Chris Chester: Chapter 1 Chris Chester: Chapter 2 Chris Chester: Chapter 3 Chris Chester: Chapter 4 Chris Chester: Chapter 5 Chris Chester: Chapter 6

Fear of a Left Planet

The Bellman — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 08:12:54 -0800

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.

A Novelist in Shadowland

digaman — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:47:10 -0800

"Mem, mem, mem." A fascinating memoir of global aphasia -- total language loss -- following a stroke, by British poet and novelist Paul West.

From cocaine to foie gras

teem — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 04:44:44 -0800

"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.

My Life in France

grapefruitmoon — Sat, 27 May 2006 15:43:26 -0800

My Life in France by Julia Child (discussed here, and here) has been published posthumously with the assistance of Alex Prud'homme.

"I am the only woman in the room with shirt on at the VIP Strip Club"

matteo — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 11:59:07 -0800

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.

The Serial Killer Who Hugged Me

Cassford — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 10:50:37 -0800

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.

Illusion of Gaia and my cousin David

Tlogmer — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:24:18 -0800

Illusion of Gaia and my cousin David

A review of Bob Dylan in his own and other people's words

y2karl — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 16:22:55 -0800

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'

Book Report As Criminal Sentence

Cassford — Fri, 11 Feb 2005 10:06:55 -0800

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.

'I could fcuk Raquel Welch for £25.'

zeoslap — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 09:16:12 -0800

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