Biography and memoir reviews: authoritative accounts of real lives, from historical figures to contemporary voices.
On the evening of December 7, 1972, a group of strangers came to the door of a Belfast apartment and took Jean McConville away. She was a thirty-eight-year-old widow with ten children, Protestant by birth but married into Catholicism, living in a neighborhood where she had never quite belonged. The IRA accused her of being…
Summary Between 2000 and 2004, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men she knew to the overlapping disasters of rural Black Mississippi: her brother Joshua to a drunk driver, and four friends and neighbors to drugs, accidents, and suicide. She was twenty-three when the last of them died. Men We Reaped is her account of those…
Summary Brian Broome opens his memoir on a Pittsburgh bus watching a father teach his young son what it means to be a Black man in America: be hard, be strong, be invisible in the ways that make you a target, be visible in the ways that demand respect. Broome uses this observed moment to…
Summary In the 1920s, hundreds of young women worked in watch dial factories in New Jersey and Illinois, painting tiny numerals with a phosphorescent paint that contained radium. To keep their brushes fine enough for the precise work, they were instructed to put the brushes in their mouths between strokes. The factory owners knew radium…
Summary Glennon Doyle was, by conventional measures, thriving. She had a Christian blog with millions of readers, a nonprofit organization she founded, a marriage, children, and a speaking career built around the message of honest vulnerability. She was also, by her own account, not living the life she was actually living. Then, in the middle…
Summary Michelle McNamara spent the last years of her life pursuing a serial killer she named the Golden State Killer: a man who committed at least fifty rapes and thirteen murders across California in the 1970s and 1980s and was never identified. She was not a detective. She was a true crime writer, the founder…
Summary In 1985, when Natasha Trethewey was nineteen years old, her stepfather murdered her mother on a road in Atlanta called Memorial Drive. He had threatened to kill her before. Her mother had fled him before. The restraining orders and the warnings had not been enough. Trethewey has been living with this knowledge and this…
Summary Kiese Laymon addresses Heavy to his mother. It is the most radical formal choice in the book, and there are many radical formal choices: the memoir is structured as a direct address, “you” throughout, a letter to the woman who shaped him and harmed him and who he loves with a complexity that the…
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