Lately, I have been taken with books by young female dynamos: Tami Lahren's Never Play Dead captivated me in August, and now I have a new one to share: Girl, [...]
I just clicked the Send button to submit my last book review. Until now I told myself that this would be my last. I don't want to have to read [...]
The destruction of the synagogue in Reichenberg (Liberec), November 9-10, 1938 Last year I wrote about Remembering Kristallnacht in Liberec, which is featured in my book Jumping Over Shadows. [...]
Have you ever been startled by a sound you had never heard before? Stopped in your tracks, wondering what the hell was going on? Felice Benuzzi's unique adventure memoir [...]
"Eventually, I hear footsteps crunching along the side of the house through the glazed snow and my mother's navy blue sigh through the frozen air." from The Language of [...]
The other day I cast about for a comfort book, something pleasant to read in the tub after a busy day. Usually that would mean an Agatha Christie mystery for [...]
Kelley reading at her book launch party at the Book Cellar in June September is Suicide Awareness Month, and on this occasion I want to present you with the beautiful [...]
Once in a while a book comes along that is like an old armchair. You simply don't want to get up. You could read on and on until your butt [...]
In December I interviewed Sarah Wildman about her book Paper Love. This was a particular privilege because Paper Love is my kind of story: figuring out what happened in a [...]
Isn't this a great title? It's a great book, too; one of the most skillfully wrought I have read in a long time. Things I Don't Want to Know is [...]
Meeting other formidable writers is one of the great benefits of attending a writers residency. And so, last January, I had the great fortune of meeting Glen Finland during my [...]
While I am off amidst the frenzy and heat of the World Cup in Brazil, I leave you with a post on practice, inspired by Natalie Goldberg's newest book, The [...]
I can't write about the book I recently finished and liked so much, Lynne Greenberg's The Body Broken, without going into my own experience of chronic pain, which is [...]
With the Winter Olympics currently happening in Sochi, Russia, it fits that my review of Maxim Shrayer's memoir Leaving Russia just appeared in the Jewish Book World. Thanks to this book, I feel [...]
Following up on yesterday's post, The Bookshelves of Others, the book I spotted in the bookcase in my bedroom at VCCA was Natalie Goldberg's classic Writing Down the Bones. I entertained [...]
My most meaningful read of 2013 was, without a doubt, Julia Cameron's The Right to Write. It transformed my understanding of the creative process; it has me writing Morning Pages [...]
The Make Way for Ducklings sculpture in the Public Garden in Boston, created by Nancy Schön Oh, the power of fiction! Especially children's fiction! It had my kids and me retracing [...]
Sometimes it is interesting to retrace where something began, when a meaningful connection was made. My interview with Susannah Conway appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books last week, and [...]
When I saw the news on my Chicago Tribune homepage last night that Joyce Brothers had died, my heart sank. I never met her, never had an exchange with her, [...]
If memoir is the genre of truth, how could it possibly be acceptable to lie? Wasn’t James Frey fried because he lied? And yet, I venture to say that it [...]
"It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944..." Thus begins Primo Levi's preface to his stunning but short memoir of his time as a prisoner [...]
The often incorrect use of the term memoir is a pet peeve of mine; after all, it is my genre. It's what I write primarily, and what I teach. So [...]
Of all the books I read this year, the one I have thought most about, talked most about and continue to think about is Mara Moustafine's Secrets and Spies [...]
I wonder what it means if I don't even notice anymore that my writing has gotten published? Have I reached a level of publication success where I can go, [...]
We've been dealing with a few health issues lately (everything seems OK now), and so I've slacked off blogging. However, yesterday, as I retired to my bathtub with the [...]
Once in a while we read a classic in my Advanced Memoir Workshop, and this June the group chose E.B. White's One Man's Meat. The book proved hard to get [...]
Edmund de Waals' memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes was my favorite memoir of 2011. I am still trying to figure out why because it defies so many of the [...]
My daughter's stack of books she wants to read These days, I feel like my children, a middle schooler and two high schoolers: I have to read certain books [...]
On the surface, Johanna Adorján’s An Exclusive Love is about her grandparents’ suicide. But it is really a love story, in more way than one, with all the requisite [...]
I love it when a book becomes a place, an alternate reality I can dwell in. That’s what happened as I was reading Terry Tempest Williams’ now classic memoir [...]
Today is the 50th anniversary of Ernest Hemingway’s death. An article by Jeffrey Meyers in the Wall Street Journal on Hemingway’s literary achievement reminded me of that. He died, [...]
If you're ever looking for a break from dark and heavy memoirs and want to read one that is light yet literary; or if you wouldn’t mind spending time [...]
“i never can get interested in things that didn’t happen to people who never lived.” Helene Hanff, in her letter of January 9, 1952 in 84, Charing Cross Road [...]
In all my years of studying memoir, I have read many how-to-write-memoir books but I only go back to these three. I'm also not a big believer in books [...]
Reading poetry is a wonderful way to infuse your mind with the beauty of words. For me April as National Poetry Month is a good reason to get back [...]
My Advanced Memoir Workshop students and I were fortunate enough to host Michael Steinberg, founding editor of the esteemed nonfiction journal Fourth Genre, and author, most recently, of Still [...]