A Life Like Other People’s, Bennett’s latest memoir, was first published in his autobiographical essay collection Untold Stories (2005). This detailed and moving account of his early memories of his family, with closest attention given to his mother …
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GUILLERMO REYES’ Madre and I: A Memoir of Our Immigrant Lives follows the parallel lives of María, a Chilean single mother, and her gay son Guillermo, who immigrate to the United States in the 1970’s.
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The Bad Life, a best-selling memoir by Frédéric Mitterrand, the openly gay minister of culture in the government of Nicholas Sarkozy (and nephew of a past president of France, François Mitterrand), …
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PATTI SMITH’S Just Kids is a memoir about the singer’s relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946–1989). The book resonates with all the portentousness of the Fates spinning threads around inextricably entangled mortals. Just Kids isn’t a lurid exposé but a serious reflection upon creative vision, regeneration, and devotion.
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WHAT DOES a gay waiter with a soon-to-be transgendered lover have in common with an über-heterosexual writer? Well, as Dwayne Raymond points out in his accomplished memoir Mornings with Mailer, a lot more than one would think.
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Reading Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man can be a toe-curling experience, and you may find yourself rushing from page to page, not because it isn’t a good story (it is), but because the life that Clegg is describing is often painfully hard to endure.
MoreI’M ON A SHIP, a small one built for the rigors of icy seas, not for transporting people comfortably, and so as it rocks and rolls, dips and surges, so does my stomach. We’re riding 25-foot waves, and explosions of salt water are smashing against the small porthole of my cabin. Eventually we get to our destination, where I’m unloaded with the rest of the cargo and a few other people. Here I am, at a station in Antarctica where I’ll be living for a couple of months with a group of scientists and their support staffs.
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WHOEVER put together the index of the English decorator Nicholas Haslam’s memoir evidently had a low opinion of the reasons people read a book like his. When I had to look up George Dyer (the lover of the painter Francis Bacon), I discovered that the index consists entirely of names.
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IN PARIS, while serving with the U.S. military during WWII, James Lord found his way to an address on the rue des Grands Augustins and informed the secretary who opened the door that he had come to see Pablo Picasso. He had no appointment, but Lord’s uniform provided bona fides; Americans had just expelled the Nazis (Lord amusingly points out that it didn’t take long for some Parisians to resent that favor).
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The most striking and significant aspect of Plante’s memoir is its form. Comprised solely of a series of fragments, each no longer than a paragraph, The Pure Lover takes on a pensive and elliptical tone that works well with Plante’s themes and content on several levels.
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