I sometimes joke that the greatest gift my parents gave me was a troubled childhood. Difficult circumstances taught me about patience and gave me the grit to persevere. My mother’s mood swings and my brother’s violent outbursts turned me into a shrewd observer of people and their unpredictable behavior. That led me to study psychology at Harvard, where so much research seemed to boil down to one goal: giving people context to understand why they act and behave in particular ways. As a journalist who has interviewed thousands of people across dozens of countries, the theme of family – and how we sometimes have to overcome them – remains as salient as ever.
I wrote...
Wild Dances: My Queer and Curious Journey to Eurovision
As a boy, I spent my days taking care of my quadriplegic brother, while worrying about my undiagnosed bipolar Vietnamese mother, and steering clear of my openly racist and homophobic father. Too shy and anxious to even speak until I was six years old, it seemed unlikely I would ever leave small-town Georgia. I passed the time alone in my room, studying maps and reading encyclopedias, dreaming of distant places where I might one day feel free.
Years later, as a journalist in London, I discover the Eurovision Song Contest—an annual competition known for its extravagant performers and cutthroat politics. As I address childhood traumas and confront dark family secrets, the contest becomes a surprising vehicle to help me heal and forgive.
I interviewed Doris Lessing about her memoir Alfred & Emily at her home in London in 2008. She was 88 years old, but was still trying to break free of the “monstrous legacy” of World War II, which had left her father, Alfred, broken and her mother, Emily, “demented.”
Growing up in colonial Rhodesia, she was more comfortable in the bush with wild snakes than she was at home with her troubled parents. Yet she acknowledges what they could have been had history not been so cruel. I’ve tried to apply that same grace to my parents, who met during the Vietnam War and later struggled to care for my severely disabled brother.
Acknowledging my parents’ war wounds, as Lessing did with hers, helped pave the way for forgiveness.
I think my father's rage at the trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents' emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.
In this extraordinary book, the 2007 Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing explores the lives of her parents, each irrevocably damaged by the Great War. Her father wanted the simple life of an English farmer, but shrapnel almost killed him in…
My childhood was defined by chaos: My older brother sometimes chased me with knives and darts and my mother was at one point placed in a psychiatric facility.
After I came out as a teenager in the Deep South, school, once a sanctuary, felt like a place of threat. That constant mayhem explains why Running with Scissors spoke to me so strongly.
The narrator first copes with his mother’s psychotic episodes and, after moving in with his psychiatrist, must forge a path without a support system. Burroughs leans on an older teenager named Natalie, illustrating the power of chosen family.
This is the true story of a boy who wanted to grow up with the Brady Bunch, but ended up living with the Addams Family. Augusten Burroughs's mother gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa Claus and a certifiable lunatic into the bargain. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients and a sinister man living in the garden shed completed the tableau. The perfect squalor of their dilapidated Victorian house, there were no…
Nigel Slater was already one of the U.K.’s most celebrated chefs when he released his memoir Toast in 2003.
When I read it more than a decade later, it was like diving into a prequel to his many cookbooks, columns, and TV shows that I’d followed for years. The book is hilarious and heartbreaking. It beautifully illustrates how interests and passions can save people from unhappy childhoods and toxic people, like his coarse stepmother and distant father, both of whom are vividly drawn.
As a memoirist, I took inspiration from his narrative arch and how he persevered. The darkness and isolation of my own childhood is what prepared me to embrace the glitz and glamour of Eurovision.
TOAST is top food writer Nigel Slater's eat-and-tell autobiography. Detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked his passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer. In December 2010 the BBC will bring out a film of Toast starring Helena Bonham-Carter and directed by Lee Hall, who won an oscar nomination for Billy Elliot.
Britain's most popular cook describes his personal culinary odyssey, from dangerous encounters with his mother's weevil-seasoned cakes to being harangued by readers who think he deliberately styles Yorkshire puddings to look like a woman's private parts.
Hilarious, irreverent and mouthwatering, TOAST captures thirty years…
My therapist once told me that regret is a useless emotion. Rather than regretting the many ways my father and I struggled to connect when he was alive, I should acknowledge the sadness but remember I was acting (and not acting) within a particular set of circumstances.
Out Stealing Horses dives into similarly difficult terrain, where clear-cut answers remain elusive. It follows a man trying to make peace with a father who abandoned him. The understated sorrow of that proves to be as chilling as the Nordic landscape Per Petterson describes.
It’s a haunting testament to the ongoing struggle of making peace with the departed.
A bestseller and winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, now in paperback from Graywolf Press for the first time
We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.
Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance…
My parents and I struggled to see eye-to-eye on a lot of things—like my American father’s racism and disdain for immigrants, even though my mother was Vietnamese.
My mother joined my father in insisting that I was white rather than multi-racial. Neither could stomach my sexual orientation and they frequently suggested I would inevitably contract AIDS. The mismatch of cultures in our household—from the southern United States to Vietnam, my progressive values pitted against their often backwards thinking—led me to Zadie Smith’s On Beauty.
She creates a rich mosaic of characters, including an erudite academic and atheist whose children include a would-be street hustler and a religious zealot. The book asks what love means and how tightly it binds a splintered family. Smith does this with laser-sharp observations and overflowing wit, making it a breezy read.
From the acclaimed author of Swing Time, White Teeth and Grand Union, discover a brilliantly funny and deeply moving story about love and family
Why do we fall in love with the people we do? Why do we visit our mistakes on our children? What makes life truly beautiful?
Set between New England and London, On Beauty concerns a pair of feuding families - the Belseys and the Kipps - and a clutch of doomed affairs. It puts low morals among high…
I am a freelance writer from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, specializing in media history and speculative fiction. I have been enchanted by animation since childhood and followed many series avidly through adulthood. My viewing inspired my MA thesis on the history of animation, out of which grew two books on the history and theory of animation on television, America 'Toons In: A History of Television Animation (available from McFarland and Co.) and The Encyclopedia of American Animated Television Shows (available from Rowman and Littlefield). Hopefully, others will follow.
Jefferson Ball, the mightiest female dog in a universe of the same, is, despite her anti-heroic behavior, intent on keeping her legacy as an athlete and adventurer intact. So, when female teenage robot Jody Ryder inadvertently angers her by smashing her high school records, Jefferson is intent on proving her superiority by outmuscling the robot in a not-so-fair fight. Not wanting to seem like a coward, and eager to end her enemy's trash talking, Jody agrees.
However, they have been lured to fight each other by circumstances beyond their control. Which are intent on destroying them if they don't destroy each other in combat first...
