A stark reminder of how expensive it is to be poor Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, by Stephanie Land, is an eye-opening look at a sadly common type of poverty: the poverty experienced by people who are working too many hours for too little pay while raising children without…Continue reading Maid, by Stephanie Land
Category: memoir
4 Great Memoirs to Get You Through the Holidays
December is long. All those open houses, all those family dinners, all that shopping and buyer’s remorse and returning. All those cocktails. All that love and drama. All the twinkling lights and last-minute dashes to Walgreens because you forgot to get the stuff for the stockings. All those holiday cards featuring families clad in white…Continue reading 4 Great Memoirs to Get You Through the Holidays
Bleaker House by Nell Stevens – Loneliness & Creativity in the Falklands
Verdict: an unusual and utterly absorbing memoir, an apt examination of one young woman’s struggle to create in solitude In general, I think memoirs are best told by writers who have a few decades under their belts. Memoir by its very nature tends to veer toward navel-gazing; it takes a degree of intellectual rigor and self-depecration to…Continue reading Bleaker House by Nell Stevens – Loneliness & Creativity in the Falklands
What to Read This Weekend
Childhood Stories, a short memoir by Irina Howell: In this exquisitely detailed memoir, Howell examines her Soviet childhood—the boundaries crossed and secrets kept within her broken family. The author was raised in Soviet Russia with a fighter pilot for a father. Her work explores the complexities of individual lives played out against the backdrop of…Continue reading What to Read This Weekend
Book Two of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard (A Man in Love)
Book Two of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume memoir, My Struggle, recently published by Archipilego Books in Brooklyn–is a bit of a puzzle. First, there is the controversy of the title. Publishers around the world have tried to find clever ways to deal with the negative associations with Mein Kampf. Then, there is the question…Continue reading Book Two of My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard (A Man in Love)