For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
This book is about a woman who thought she’d married and could make a home with her forever man except, over time, he stopped seeing and supporting her.
As they grew from couple to family, she lost her sense of self, eventually realizing how lonely and lost she was, finally swimming back to the surface all while clinging to her kids and her words. It’s a book about the craft of writing, about universal themes—relationships, compromise, identity—that are woven through the pages.
Like my memoir, Smith writes in short chapters; my favorite ones were the unanswerable questions, which came and went like waves and which changed as she changed.
"[Smith]...reminds you that you can...survive deep loss, sink into life's deep beauty, and constantly, constantly make yourself new." -Glennon Doyle, #1 New York Times bestselling author
The bestselling poet and author of the "powerful" (People) and "luminous" (Newsweek) Keep Moving offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age.
"Life, like a poem, is a series of choices."
In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins…
In 102 brief numbered chapters, Dani Shapiro goes on a journey to examine her belief system.
Raised as an only child in a religious Jewish house, she fled to find herself. Decades later—after losing her father, being left alone to deal with her mother, and facing her infant son’s life-threatening illness—she wrestled with existential questions.
Like a spiritual investigator, she searched for answers, jumping from one house of faith and experience to another, from her childhood synagogue to her meditation teacher. In my early 50s, I, too, woke up and wondered if my inherited religion served me.
For my half-century birthday, my husband and I checked into a French Benedictine Monastery in Abu Gosh near Jerusalem, where a nun asked our religious affiliation. Born Jewish, I said, but questioning.
“Devotion’s biggest triumph is its voice: funny and unpretentious, concrete and earthy—appealing to skeptics and believers alike. This is a gripping, beautiful story.” — Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep
“I was immensely moved by this elegant book.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
Dani Shapiro, the acclaimed author of the novel Black and White and the bestselling memoir Slow Motion, is back with Devotion: a searching and timeless new memoir that examines the fundamental questions that wake women in the middle of the night, and grapples with the ways faith, prayer, and devotion affect everyday life. Devotion…
A difficult-to-categorize story (illustrated memoir, graphic memoir, is it even memoir?), Belonging is about a young girl growing up in Karlsruhe, Germany, where she notices something strange in their backyard. But when she asks her mother, she doesn't get a clear answer.
Decades later, after leaving home in search of something unnamable, she returns to confront her family, their past, her country of birth, its past, and to own it. Throughout the colorful, inventive pages, Krug incorporated her illustrations, photos, archival research, German products, family tree, and more as she tells the story of Heimat—what it means to belong.
After hearing her speak and reading her book, I knew words did not suffice to tell my own story.
* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators *
* Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, andLibrary Journal
This“ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany.
Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city…
The Part That Burns is not a linear narrative but a memoir in fragments. Each essay or chapter is different, interesting, engaging like scattered pieces of a puzzle that the writer—and reader—are trying to put together.
It's about a childhood wrought with abuse and rejection, about trauma and epigenetics, home and roots. It's about a girl who grows up to become a teenager who becomes a young woman who becomes a wife and a mother and every step of the way, she yearns for what we all yearn for: acceptance and love.
My memoir is as slim and sparse as Ouellette’s and some might consider my chronological story as fragmented because of its tiny chapters and missing connective tissue from one chapter to the next.
"I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." —Dorothy Allison, New York Times best-selling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller "Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." —Joyce Carol Oates "A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping…
This book combines compressed prose with nonfiction truth-telling but it isn’t linear or a complete story as much as a snapshot of Fennelly’s childhood, home life, and keen observations.
This book showed me that the quality of writing trumps the quantity of words. Short and sparse, when well written, can find a place on a bookshelf and shine.
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of non-fiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer and deeply original observer of life's challenges and joys.
Some pieces are wistful, some wry and many reveal the humour buried in our everyday interactions. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs shapes a life from unexpectedly illuminating moments and awakens us to…
When American-born Jennifer falls in love with French-born Philippe during the First Intifada in Israel, she understands their relationship isn't perfect. Both 23, both Jewish, they lead very different lives: she's a secular tourist, he's an observant immigrant. Despite their opposing outlooks on two fundamental issues—country and religion—they are determined to make it work. For the next 20 years, they root and uproot their growing family, each longing for a singular place to call home.
In Places We Left Behind, Jennifer puts her marriage under a microscope, examining commitment and compromise, faith and family while moving between prose and poetry, playing with language and form, daring the reader to read between the lines.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
