Literary Links: Life Stories in Literature

A simple illusion can unlock your childhood memories, according to new psychology research

Recent research published in Scientific Reports suggests that “people can better access detailed memories from their childhood by experiencing an illusion of owning a younger version of their own face”:

Our memories are not just recordings of external events; they are experiences that happened to us while we inhabited a particular body. The researchers reasoned that since our bodies change throughout our lives, the physical self we had in childhood is different from the one we have as adults.

5 books that teach you how to die well — by living better

“From finding your life’s story to recognizing that one day you will die, these books help us find our purpose and engage with the world in bold ways.”

Big Think Books recommends 5 books that have helped “millions of people” look back on their lives with gratitude and contentment.

John B. Cade’s Project to Document the Stories of the Formerly Enslaved

“A recently digitized slave narrative collection consists of original manuscripts compiled by John Brother Cade and his students at Southern University.”

John B. Cade and his students at Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have compiled a collection of life stories called “Opinions Regarding Slavery.” “These 229 interviews were conducted with elderly survivors of slavery, and consistently demonstrate that the worst memory of all was having a family torn apart.”

The collection “now can be seen via JSTOR’s Open Community Collections.”

Adam Morgan on 6 Suppressed Classics by Modernist-era Women Writers

Adam Morgan is the author of A Danger to the Mind of Young Girls, a biography of Margaret C. Anderson. Anderson was founder and editor of The Little Review, an early 20^th century literary magazine that published many modernist writers and was censored by the U.S. government for serializing Ulysses by James Joyce. 

In this piece Morgan writes, “I became familiar with accounts of more than a few proto-modernist and high modernist literary works by women writers, including many that are today considered classics, being censored by the government, condemned by critics, or initially rejected by publishers because they were either too sexually explicit, or too directly aimed at exposing gender inequality.” Here he discusses 6 of those works.

Books That Made Me Gay: “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson

Writer Tess McGeer explains the seductive depth of Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting of Hill House, which “illustrates persuasively that it is the ghosts lurking in the recesses of the self, not those wraiths that race down dark halls, which one should fear most.”

Hill House’s obliterating power offers Eleanor [the protagonist] an escape from the essential human labor of trying, with time and experience, to understand, accept, and love one’s self.

How to be the archivist of your own family

“By curating your family’s stories, rituals and relics, you’ll feel anchored – and create a bridge between the generations”

All our stories begin at home.

I’d always been interested in the stories my parents and grandparents told about their lives in Iraq, which seemed so impossibly distant from my childhood in 1970s London. It was only when I became a mother that I suddenly felt I needed to record these stories and pin them down somehow – to create an archive – so I could have a hope of passing them on.

Samantha Ellis offers suggestions on how to gather materials to document and preserve those stories and memories of the people who created them.

What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?

In The Atlantic, Gal Beckerman describes “the field of the history of emotions and senses,” a specialized branch of history that has been growing over the past 20 years.

“Emotions and senses” refers to history focused less on the facts of the past than on its more ineffable qualities, such as the smells of a 19th-century city filled with thousands of horses, and the quality of grief expressed in the letters of widows during World War I. Boddice is interested in a deeper, more expansive concept that encompasses everything about how reality is perceived, melding together emotions and senses and much else into an engagement with “experience.”

We Need Diverse Books is revolutionizing what we read.

We Need Diverse Books (WNDB) believes “Every reader deserves to find themselves in a story. To accomplish this, we enact change across the entire publishing process.”

The movement began in 2014 as a Twitter hashtag. Today it’s a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Read about its history, goals, and achievements here.

Life purpose linked to 28% lower risk of cognitive decline

An analysis of the Health and Retirement Study data published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry found that “individuals who had a stronger sense of purpose in life at the start of the study were less likely to develop cognitive impairment during the follow-up period, which was up to 15 years.”

“Purpose in life is defined as a person’s tendency to derive meaning from and make sense of life experiences.”

Poetry’s Vital Role in Politics

“Like Walt Whitman before them, Joy Harjo and Amanda Gorman are reimagining what it means to be a poet in this democratic republic.”

Read about the history of the relationship between poetry and democracy and how modern scholars use poetry as “a broad democratic response to Trump’s dark rhetoric of racial division and American decline.”

© 2026 by Mary Daniels Brown