Cheever, Susan. Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker Simon & Schuster, 1999Hardcover, 192 pagesISBN 0-684-80432-8 Recommended My grandmother Cheever taught me how to embroider, how to say the Lord’s Prayer, and how to make a perfect dry martini. She showed me how to tilt the gin bottle into the tumbler with the […]
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Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) W.W. Norton & Company, 144 pages, $14.95 hardcover ISBN 0-393-02601-9 In the “Introduction,” feminist scholar Carolyn Heilbrun explains the topic of her book: There are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she
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Jessop, Violet. Titanic Survivor edited and annotated by John Maxtone-GrahamSheridan House, 1997Hardcover, 238 pagesISBN 1-57409-035-6 Violet Jessop went to sea as a stewardess on an ocean liner in 1908. She continued as a stewardess through the glory days when a transatlantic ship crossing was as much a society event as a mode of transportation. She retired
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Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton Houghton Mifflin, 1998Hardcover, 326 pagesISBN 0-395-65489-0 Billy Tipton was a musician and entertainer who flourished during the 1930’s and 1940’s. When paramedics arrived to treat Billy after he had collapsed at home in January 1989, Billy’s adopted son William, who had placed the 911 call,
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McDonnell, Jane Taylor. Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir Penguin, 1998Paperback, 161 pagesISBN 0-14-026530-9 Jane Taylor McDonnell is the mother of an autistic child. When she set out to write a memoir about her experience, she found there were no instruction manuals on how to write what she calls “crisis memoirs.” Living
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Lefkowitz, Bernard. Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb University of California Press, 1997Hardcover, 443 pages ISBN 0-520-20596-0 In March 1989 a group of boys in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, lured a 17-year-old developmentally disabled girl to a basement where they sexually abused her with a broomstick and a baseball
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Update: April 2022 When Lucy Grealy died in December 2002 at the age of 39, her death was ruled an accidental overdose. Later her close friend, novelist Ann Patchett, commemorated their relationship in the memoir Truth and Beauty: A Friendship. I wrote my review (below) of Grealy’s memoir before her death. Books by Lucy
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Zinsser, William (ed.). Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of MemoirHoughton Mifflin Company, 1987Hardcover, 166 pagesISBN 0-395-44526-4 This book originated as a series of talks sponsored by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., and presented at The New York Public Library in the winter of 1986. The book contains a memoir and introduction by William Zinsser,
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Conway, Jill Ker. When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography Alfred A. Knopf, 1998Hardcover, 205 pagesISBN 0-679-44593-5 This book opens with the question “Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction for modern readers?” (p. 3). The reason, Conway tell us, is that “We want to know how the world looks from inside another person’s experience,
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Karr, Mary. The Liars’ Club: A Memoir Viking, 1995Hardcover, 320 pagesISBN 0-670-85053 Recommended Poet Mary Karr grew up in an East Texas town, where her Daddy, like everyone else’s daddy, worked at the oil refinery. After work the men would congregate at the American Legion Bar and swap stories, a gathering that became known as the
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