Tag: Memoir

Essiah Ritchie

Father of War

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

Robin D. G. Kelley

Flowers for Farah

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

Randall Horton

The Protagonist in Someone Else’s Memoir

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

Selling Hope

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

Brian Teare

Neither Chaos Nor Quest: Toward a Nonnarrative Medicine

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

Unlearning Our Settler Colonial Tongues

On language and belonging.

The Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

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

Andrew Spieldenner

To Say Goodbye

“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

Autofiction’s First Boom Was in Turn-of-the-Century Japan

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

Straight Down to the Bones

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

The Millions

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

Caring in Viral Times

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

Mourning in Tehran

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

Translation

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

Black Bereavement, White Condolences

“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

A Politics of the Future

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

The Privilege of the Ally

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

Mercy Hours

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

Amy Hoffman

Love One Another or Die

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

Walks in the Park: On the Foreignness of the Socialist Past

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

The Origins of Sexual Healing

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

Lenny Boy

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

Micki McElya

The Education of an Ambivalent Feminist

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

Ants Among Elephants

Sujatha Gidla, born an untouchable in India, tells the story of her family.

Samuel R. Delany, Junot Díaz

Radicalism Begins in the Body

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.”