100 Memoirs

The Help spent 379 days in the Amazon Top 100 list. It has 1,751 reviews on Amazon.com and rates 4.5 stars. It is a novel, but, as Lanie Tankard argues, it deserves consideration from a memoir perspective.
 
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
New York: Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam), 2009.
Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, CD, and Kindle editions.
Movie in [...]

Last Friday, The Kalamazoo Gazette published an op-ed I wrote. Its conclusion contains the revolutionary idea that if all of us finished the tasks (see below or click link above) we need to accomplish before a “good” death is possible, we would have years to live free of the fear of death and thus could [...]

The New York Times runs interviews with CEO’s of various companies in a series called “The Corner Office.” On Sunday April 26, 2009, the subject was Richard Anderson, of Delta Air Lines as interviewed by Adam Bryant.
Since I taught both English and history to undergraduates, I was delighted to see Anderson’s emphasis on the need [...]

Have you ever used Google Trends?  You can find the website here.  The home page tells you what subjects are “hot” because they have appeared frequently and recently in both blogs and news sources online.  Right now, for example “Kemba Walker,” star of the University of Connecticut basketball team, enroute again to the Final Four [...]

I remember reading this breakthrough book soon after it was published in the late 1980’s.  I don’t remember how I bought the book, and I don’t have the old copy on my shelf, so I may have loaned or given it away, Mostly, I remember how I felt after reading it. High!  I had never [...]

All during the long holiday season/vacation I took this year, I have been mulling over the connection between memoir and love.  Intuition tells me things that I can only later articulate.  This has happened to me all my life.
I love the story, whether it be true or apocryphal, that Einstein saw himself riding on a [...]

I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, which comes into my inbox first thing every morning.  I enjoy starting the day with a poem and some interesting facts about writers and writing.
The October 12 entry introduced me to Lester Dent, a writer I had never heard of before.  Here’s the text that caught my [...]

I have always enjoyed biography, autobiography, and the personal essay, but my study of memoir as a subject is only two years old.  It started when I saw a 2007 literary contest announcement in the local newspaper, The Kalamazoo Gazette.  The three categories were poetry, short story and memoir. That choice was easy, since my [...]

A few weeks ago, my husband Stuart and I traveled to the “west coast” of Michigan, first to Saugatuck, where we had a lovely visit on a rainy day to the Wickwood Inn, and then to Holland, where Stuart explored the downtown and I visited Max DePree, the man who has been my mentor for [...]

My husband Stuart and I went to our local theater Friday night and saw the Coen brothers’ latest film, Burn After Reading.    One reviewer called it a smart movie about stupid people.  I would call it not-quite-smart movie but definitely agree about the stupid people part.
Only a viewer obsessed with memoir would have thought [...]