His affectionate memoir "works brilliantly and artfully as archetype," Nick Hornby said here in 1999.
Here memoir works closely with essay to develop ideas, and the thinking — the essaying — feels fully engaged with world, history, idea, sentence and self.
Cats provide an ideal metaphor for F. (It's hard to imagine this memoir working had its author been a dog person).
If her prison memoir – working title, Prisonomics – is as serious and insightful, she will be giving something truly worthwhile back to society.
He describes in his memoir "Working in the Dark" the loss of identity he suffered there, and how he found transcendence: Through language I was free.
"This indiscreet woman of genius," one of her daughters, Alice Earle Hyde, wrote in a 1920s memoir, "worked and corrected until broad daylight, when the maids began their early morning duties".
When she was a child, she lived in a village in the northern part of Derbyshire — not a pretty English village but a bleak, dank, cold Northern village on the edge of the moors, its people "distrustful and life-refusing," she wrote in her memoir, working in the cotton mills from late childhood, living in cramped houses without bathrooms or hot water, barely educated in harsh schools.
He wrote the memoir, Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do.
I'm not sure I got any great advice out of my heart-to-heart with Devotion but maybe that proves how well Shapiro's memoir works as a stand-in for a neighbor.
Such memoirs work best if there are painful pangs of recognition for the reader.
