100 Memoirs

Did you see the summer’s best memoir movie, Julie & Julia? If not, hurry to a theater near you and catch it before it leaves. If you missed the trailer, you can find it here:

I read and relished My Life in France a few months ago and then gave the book to one of the [...]

When Joan Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunne dropped dead on December 30, 2003, he was in the middle of a speaking a sentence in their living room. She was mixing a salad for their dinner.

As I write these words, Stuart and I are about to sit down to eat the dinner the two of us [...]

The top 100 memoirs list we are constructing here is not a scientific one.  At the rate we are going, 81 posts in 9 months, and only 18 reviews so far, it will take five years to get to 100 memoirs! I’ve read many more than I have reviewed and have an entire bookcase of [...]

On the memoir bookshelf in my home office sit at least 100 memoirs.  Many of these are classics I read long ago without thinking of them as memoirs.  Some, like the one I focus on now, are famous books that fit the category but that I have never read.  Thinking about genre has allowed me [...]

In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt.  Hope you come back to read this little review.
Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure and [...]

“Ralph Waldo Emerson could have learned a thing or two about self reliance from my great-great-grandparents,” asserts Mildred Armstrong Kalish near the beginning of her book Little Heathens:  Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. I knew I would love this book when I read those lines, and [...]