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Tag: Memoir

Essiah Ritchie

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

Robin D. G. Kelley

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

Randall Horton
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.
Wendy A. Woloson
A cancer diagnosis reveals how pervasive consumerism has become, infecting even the stuff meant to heal us.
Brian Teare
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.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
On language and belonging.
A recording of our virtual literary event with three generations of Black women writers.
Andrew Spieldenner

“I was living in fast-forward, trying desperately to have a life before I died.” A veteran AIDS activist recalls living in the Bay Area during the 1990s, the queer people of color usually left out of the epidemic’s history, and how the decade taught him to value endings.

Houman Barekat

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.

Christina Knight, Sonia Sanchez

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

Deborah Taffa

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

Michael McColly
Indifference toward the most vulnerable has driven the death toll of COVID-19, just as it did during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Against this backdrop, even small acts of kindness can make a difference.
Nargol Aran
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.
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
Set against the backdrop of Seattle Pride, a personal meditation on trauma, loneliness, and the paradox that gay community is often both life-giving and terribly disappointing.
Marina Magloire
“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?”
Simon Waxman
Despite the myth that deaths of the elderly are never untimely, the author mourns a friend, fifty years his senior, who succumbed to COVID-19. She taught him that a moral life entails wanting those rewards not only for yourself but for everyone.
Rigoberto González
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.
Peter Coviello
On being awestruck by literature, and the necessary pleasures of intimacy—near and remote—during quarantine.
Amy Hoffman
During the AIDS crisis, different contingents of the LGBTQ movement set aside their differences to prioritize mutual care. What can we learn from this strategy today? And why is it still so difficult to talk about AIDS?
Ileana Nachescu
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.
David Ritz
Grammy winner David Ritz, who cowrote Marvin Gaye’s legendary “Sexual Healing,” recalls how the song emerged from Gaye’s struggles with faith, drug addiction, and childhood abuse.
Peter E. Gordon

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

Micki McElya
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.
Sujatha Gidla
Sujatha Gidla, born an untouchable in India, tells the story of her family.
Samuel R. Delany, Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz interviews science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany about what it means to be an aging sex radical and why he wrote the essay “Ash Wednesday.”
Samuel R. Delany

“I’m known as a sex radical, but the fact is I felt there was a world of experience that had been slipping away.”

Rafia Zakaria

A new series explores how reading works by global women of color is generative.

Judith Levine

When your father is trans, memoir is both personal and political.

Judith Levine

With terrorism scares aplenty, how worried should one be?

Louis Bury

Poems know what we will feel before we do. That’s why we need them.

Ed Pavlić

In America, life at the edge of racial belonging is not so black and white.

Dave Byrne

Serving time in Richmond City Jail

J. A. Bernstein
Serving in the Israeli army as a foreign volunteer.
Dave Byrne

More birds appear. Bending against the cold, I watch, name, and name again.

Paul Farmer

Barbara Rylko-Bauer's A Polish Doctor in the Nazi Camps.

Jessica Sequeira
A conversation with Adam Feinstein.
Nicole Rudick

Karen Green's Bough Down.

Costica Bradatan
Totalitarianism’s linguistic aggression.
Elizabeth Alexander

Remembering Ficre Ghebreyesus

(and a slideshow of his paintings)

Merve Emre

In Amanda Knox's new book, teen chick lit gives way to an insightful memoir from behind the prison walls.

Kate Korman

It’s as if the plane hits an invisible iceberg. Your new Turkish friend starts praying in what you assume is Arabic.

Thomas E. Kennedy

Your seatmate from Heathrow to Copenhagen is a beautiful young Estonian woman who, thankfully, is talkative.

Vivian Gornick

Alfred Kazin’s raw materials.

Roger Boylan

The posthumous career of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, has been a busy one.

Matthew Fishbane

The author joins a slew of Chinese tourists hiking a mountain in Tibet.

Roger Boylan
The Passions of Arthur Koestler.
Vestal McIntyre
A memoir.
James Wallenstein

On the writings of V. S. Naipaul.

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That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.

"An indispensable pillar of the public sphere."

That’s what sociologist Alondra Nelson says of Boston Review. Independent and nonprofit, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

That’s why there are no paywalls on our website, but we can’t do it without the support of our readers. Please make a tax-deductible donation to help us create a more inclusive and egalitarian public sphere—open to everyone, regardless of ability to pay.