Confessional writing has gotten a bad rap in intellectual circles, seen as more suited for the diary than the bookshelf. Melissa Febos is the queen of the confessional, or rather a literary and political offshoot. Her last book, “Girlhood,” about the experience and expectations of living in a precociously developing female body, is currently up for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. In “Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative,” Febos hopes to revamp the genre’s reputation.
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The New York Times: A Singer Lends Her Voice to a Conversation About Autism
Allison Moorer opens her new memoir, “I Dream He Talks to Me,” with a letter to her nonverbal autistic son, John Henry. The Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter writes, “I wasn’t sure how you would feel about me telling people these things about us, so I wrote every word here imagining you were reading each one over my shoulder.”
Read MoreThe New York Times: Jill Solloway Goes Completely Transparent
Writers may be familiar with that peculiar sensation that comes in a moment of crisis, trauma or transition when you simultaneously feel all the feelings of that instant and also know, with bone-marrow certainty, that you will one day turn this moment into art. For Jill Soloway, that moment came when the author’s father came out as transgender.
Read MoreThe New York Times: Questioning Gender Amid a Chaotic East Village Childhood
Those of us who were raised the only child of a single parent know how intense the relationship can be. Different days you may play the role of child, parent, sibling or emotional crutch — some days all at once. As you get through it, you try to find space for yourself, to become someone outside the all-enveloping world that your parent has provided. This is the main struggle driving iO Tillett Wright’s debut memoir, “Darling Days.”
Read MoreThe Boston Globe: ‘New Life, No Instructions’ by Gail Caldwell
In her third and latest memoir, “New Life, No Instructions,” Gail Caldwell offers the kind of wisdom and grace you’d wish a friend, sister, or mother might deliver when you’re circling the drain. “Any change that matters, or takes,” she explains, “begins as immeasurably small. Then it accumulates, moss on stone, and after a few thousand years of not interfering, you have a glen, or a waterfall, or a field of hope where sorrow used to be.”
Read MoreThe New York Times: A Life in Pieces
Which feels more true: a memoir told in fits and starts, stutters and sighs, a blend of sensual details and analytic asides? Or one that hews to the conventions of narrative with a beginning, middle and end? All memoirists know order is a contrivance, but readers also rely on the writer to create art by organizing the mess of life...
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