Tag: Memoir

The seductions of medical surveillance.

My son’s violent illness humbled my sense of control and transformed my understanding of what it means to parent.

In her scholarship, mentoring, and activism, Farah Jasmine Griffin brings a praxis of radical love to an unequal academy.

Every city I’ve lived in has been filled with racism, whether out in the open or hidden in an invisible dialogue of economics and housing. Birmingham taught me to never question what it meant to be a Black American.

A cancer diagnosis reveals how pervasive consumerism has become, infecting even the stuff meant to heal us.

Narrative medicine claims to champion the experience of patients—but it does so by requiring that the sick “earn” their care by telling a redemptive tale about what is wrong with them.

On language and belonging.

A recording of our virtual literary event with three generations of Black women writers.

A veteran AIDS activist looks back on the 1990s.

Newly translated into English, Minae Mizumura’s An I-Novel is a vivid portrait of immigrant displacement and the ironies of our global cultural ecosystem.

In this searching interview, legendary Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez discusses the ancestral influences on her work and how art can give us strength.Black Arts poet Sonia Sanchez discusses the ancestral influences on her work and how art can give us strength.

A trip to Machu Picchu ends up offering surprising insights into what it means to be a survivor of the genocide of Native Americans.

Amid widespread indifference toward the most vulnerable, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.

On Ashura, Shi’a Muslims grieve the Prophet’s grandson. But with Iran crippled by COVID-19 and U.S. sanctions, it was also an occasion this year to mourn the country’s deaths from disease and despair.

A personal meditation on trauma, loneliness, and the paradox that gay community is often both life-giving and terribly disappointing.

“This sudden attention to the ongoing grief of black life can also feel like a slap in the face. Didn’t you notice we were dying?”

Mourning the elderly lost to COVID-19.

Allies can be powerful aides to social justice movements—but it is their responsibility to make sure they don’t become a distraction from the cause.

On being awestruck by literature, and the necessary pleasures of intimacy—near and remote—during quarantine.

During the AIDS crisis, different contingents of the LGBTQ movement set aside their differences to prioritize mutual care.

December 22 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the overthrow of the Romanian socialist state of Nicolae Ceaușescu. In a work of memoir, Nachescu recalls growing up under communism and wonders about the world Romanians hoped would follow its fall.

How the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.

A personal essay on family, death, and the healing power of music.

Tara Westover's best-selling memoir may reveal more about the place of feminism in contemporary U.S. life than any book in recent memory.