Download or read book The Magic of Memoir written by Linda Joy Myers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Magic of Memoir is a memoirist’s companion for when the going gets tough. Editors Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner have taught and coached hundreds of memoirists to the completion of their memoirs, and they know that the journey is fraught with belittling messages from both the inner critic and naysayers, voices that make it hard to stay on course with the writing and completion of a book. In The Magic of Memoir, 38 writers share their hard-won wisdom, stories, and writing tips. Included are Myers's and Warner's interviews with best-selling and widely renown memoirists Mary Karr, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Azar Nafisi, Dani Shapiro, Margo Jefferson, Raquel Cepeda, Jessica Valenti, Daisy Hernández, Mark Matousek, and Sue William Silverman. This collection has something for anyone who's on the journey or about to embark on it. If you're looking for inspiration, The Magic of Memoir will be a valuable companion. Contributors include: Jill Kandel, Eanlai Cronin, Peter Gibb, Lynette Charity, Lynette Charity, Roseann M. Bozzone, Carol E. Anderson, Bella Mahaya Carter, Krishan Bedi, Sarah Conover, Leza Lowitz, Nadine Kenney Johnstone, Lynette Benton, Kelly Kittel, Robert W. Finertie, Rita M. Gardner, Robert Hammond, Marina Aris, LaDonna Harrison, Jill Smolowe, Alison Dale, Vanya Erickson, Sonvy Sammons, Laurie Prim, Ashley Espinoza, Jing Li, Nancy Chadwick-Burke, Dhana Musil, Crystal-Lee Quibell, Apryl Schwab, Irene Sardanis, Jude Walsh, Fran Simone, Rosalyn Kaplus, Rosie Sorenson, Rosie Sorenson, Jerry Waxler, and Ruthie Stender.
Download or read book Once Upon a Life written by Temsula Ao and published by Zubaan. This book was released on 2014-04-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Temsula Ao, her father's favourite of his six daughters, remembers her childhood as a time of happiness. The sudden loss of both parents mean that the orphaned children were left to fend for themselves as best they could. Desperately poor, emotionally scarred, lonely and often hungry, the young Temsula made up for her lack of resources with courage and determination. From these unpromising beginnings, Ao went on to become one of Northeast India's best known writers and to build a distinguished teaching career, serving as Director of the Northeast Zone Cultural Centre, and finally, Dean of the School of Humanities and Education, North Eastern Hill University, Shillong. Temsula Ao describes her memoir as 'an attempt to exorcise my own personal ghosts from a fractured childhood that was ripped apart by a series of tragedies... [it] is about love and what it is like to be deprived of it.' For her readers, Ao’s memoir gives not only an insight into her role as a leading figure in the Northeast, but is also a moving account of a writerly life. Published by Zubaan.
Download or read book Fictions of Femininity written by Edith Sarra and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of Japanese memoir literature began over a thousand years ago, its greatest practitioners being women of the middle ranks whose literary talents won many of them positions as ladies-in-waiting at the Heian imperial court. As female writers they both inhabited and helped create a discursive world obsessed with the arts of concealment and self-display, the perils and possibilitieserotic, political, and literaryof real and metaphorical peepholes. As memoirists they were virtuosos in the exacting art of feminine self-representation. Fictions of Femininity explores the Heian memoirists creations of themselves in four texts: Kagero nikki (The Kagero Memoir, after 974), Makura no soshi (The Pillow Book, after 994), Sarashina nikki (The Sarashina Memoir, after 1058), and Sanuki no suke nikki (The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid, after 1108). Essays on the individual memoirs pursue a dual interest, asking how each text works as a rhetorical construct and how it reflects the authors negotiations with Heian fictions about women and writing. Letting the memoirs themselves set the terms for exploring gender constructions, Fictions of Femininity addresses a spectrum of related issues. The reading of The Kagero Memoir probes two traditional avenues of feminine expression: the writing of waka and the discourse of Buddhist nunhood. Two essays on The Sarashina Memoir reveal a fine weave of literary, religious, and autoerotic fantasies, highlighting the intellectual gifts of a memoirist long misread as naive and girlish. The essay on The Memoir of the Sanuki Assistant Handmaid examines the use of spirit possession as metaphor for commemorative writing, tracing the balancing act its author performed in the midst of political intrigues at court. The relationship between the memoir and voyeurism takes center stage in the closing essay on The Pillow Book, which compares its authors treatment of the thematics of seeing and being seen with that of her chief rival, Murasaki Shikibu, creator of The Tale of Genji. Taken together, the essays in this book underscore the diversity of the Heian memoirists responses to their roles as women and as writers in one of the most unusual epochs of Japanese history.
Download or read book The Glass Castle written by Jeannette Walls and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-01-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.
Download or read book Deep Creek Finding Hope in the High Country written by Pam Houston and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”
Download or read book I Am Yours written by Reema Zaman and published by Amberjack Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is time. It is time to free our voice. To speak is a revolution. For too long, through the most intimate acts of erasure, women have been silenced. Now, women everywhere are breaking through the limits placed on us by family, society, and tradition. To find our voices. To make space for ourselves in this world. Now is the moment to reclaim what was once lost, stolen, forsaken, or abandoned. I Am Yours is about my fight to protect and free my voice from those who have sought to silence me, for the sake of creating a world where all voices are welcome and respected. Because the voice, without intimacy, will atrophy. We're in this together. You are mine, and I am yours.
Download or read book Country Girl written by Edna O'Brien and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.
Download or read book Memoirs of Scandalous Women Volume 1 written by Dianne Dugaw and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These memoirs all come from women forced to live lives of impropriety, often after ill-treatment from unscrupulous men. Their tales of survival in the face of extreme hardship and privations make inspirational and compelling reading.
Download or read book Women Memoirists written by Harold Bloom and published by Facts On File. This book was released on 1998 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are critical extracts, with separate bibliographies, about the following women authors: Maya Angelou, Vera Brittain, Frances (Fanny) Burney, Annie Dillard, Janet Frame, Martha Gellhorn, Lillian Hellman, Violet Hunt, Zora Neale Hurston, Harriet Ann Jacobs, Alice James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mary McCarthy, Kate Millett, Anaïs Nin, Hester Thrale Piozzi, May Sarton, Gertrude Stein, Eudora Welty, Jade Snow Wong, and Virginia Woolf.
Download or read book Eighteenth Century Women s Writing and the Scandalous Memoir written by Caroline Breashears and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contributes to the literary history of eighteenth-century women’s life writings, particularly those labeled “scandalous memoirs.” It examines how the evolution of this subgenre was shaped partially by several innovative memoirs that have received only modest critical attention. Breashears argues that Madame de La Touche’s Apologie and her friend Lady Vane’s Memoirs contributed to the crystallization of this sub-genre at mid-century, and that Lady Vane’s collaboration with Tobias Smollett in The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle resulted in a brilliant experiment in the relationship between gender and genre. It demonstrates that the Memoirs of Catherine Jemmat incorporated influential new strategies for self-justification in response to changing kinship priorities, and that Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs introduced revolutionary themes that created a hybrid: the political scandalous memoir. This book will therefore appeal to scholars interested in life writing, women’s history, genre theory, and eighteenth-century British literature.
Download or read book Women s Theatrical Memoirs Part II vol 6 written by Sue McPherson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-23 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the close of the eighteenth century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection presents the lives of some of the most celebrated actresses of their day. These memoirs also provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Download or read book Memoirs of Victorian Working Class Women written by Florence s. Boos and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-12-02 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first to identify a significant body of life narratives by working-class women and to demonstrate their inherent literary significance. Placing each memoir within its generic, historical, and biographical context, this book traces the shifts in such writings over time, examines the circumstances which enabled working-class women authors to publish their life stories, and places these memoirs within a wider autobiographical tradition. Additionally, Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women enables readers to appreciate the clear-sightedness, directness, and poignancy of these works.
Download or read book Intimate Reading written by Janet Mason Ellerby and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2001-06-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maintaining that the memoir requires a more personal relationship with its readers and critics, Janet Mason Ellerby calls for "intimate readings." She begins this work with her own memoir, narrating a long-held secret-her pregnancy at age sixteen, her life in the Florence Crittendon Home for Unwed Mothers, and the birth and adoption of her first daughter. She goes on to tell about the aftermath of this pivotal time in and the painful consequences of keeping a secret. Included are detailed analyses of more than a dozen contemporary memoirs by American women, all of which share a common purpose: the disclosure of secrets. Ellerby describes the costs of this secrecy and explores the possibilities of breaking intractable codes of silence. It is a study that is germane to the intellectual and e~otional lives of all women. This book is the first serious exploration of a genre that has gained acceptance with an expanding audience of readers. Ellerby maintains that the efforts of memoirists to plumb their painful pasts has cultural significance and precipitates important social work. The memoir joins fiction and autobiography as an important commentary on modem life.
Download or read book Mother Winter written by Sophia Shalmiyev and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-02-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Lyrical and emotionally gutting." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE “Intellectually satisfying [and] artistically profound.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS (STARRED REVIEW) “Mesmeric.”—THE PARIS REVIEW “Vividly awesome and truly great." —EILEEN MYLES “Gorgeous, gutting, unforgettable." —LENI ZUMAS “Brilliant.” —MICHELLE TEA An arresting memoir equal parts refugee-coming-of-age story, feminist manifesto, and meditation on motherhood, displacement, gender politics, and art that follows award-winning writer Sophia Shalmiyev’s flight from the Soviet Union, where she was forced to abandon her estranged mother, and her subsequent quest to find her. Russian sentences begin backward, Sophia Shalmiyev tells us on the first page of her striking lyrical memoir. To understand the end of her story, we must go back to the beginning. Born to a Russian mother and an Azerbaijani father, Shalmiyev was raised in the stark oppressiveness of 1980s Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where anti-Semitism and an imbalance of power were omnipresent in her home. At just eleven years old, Shalmiyev’s father stole her away to America, forever abandoning her estranged alcoholic mother, Elena. Motherless on a tumultuous voyage to the states, terrified in a strange new land, Shalmiyev depicts in urgent, poetic vignettes her emotional journeys through an uncharted world as an immigrant, artist, and, eventually, as a mother of two. As an adult, Shalmiyev voyages back to Russia to search endlessly for the mother she never knew—in her pursuit, we witness an arresting, impassioned meditation on art-making, gender politics, displacement, and most potently, motherhood.
Download or read book Women s Theatrical Memoirs Part I Vol 1 written by Sue Mcpherson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the close of the Eighteenth Century, the theatrical memoir had become a popular and established genre. This ten-volume facsimile collection offers accounts of the late eighteenth-century stage, which provide insights into contemporary constructions of gender, sexuality and fame.
Download or read book The Art of Memoir written by Mary Karr and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2015-09-15 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well. For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate. Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.
Download or read book The Feminist Memoir Project written by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The women of The Feminist Memoir Project give voice to the spirit, the drive, and the claims of the Women's Liberation Movement they helped shape, beginning in the late 1960s. These thirty-two writers were among the thousands to jump-start feminism in the late twentieth century. Here, in pieces that are passionate, personal, critical, and witty, they describe what it felt like to make history, to live through and contribute to the massive social movement that transformed the nation. What made these particular women rebel? And what experiences, ideas, feelings, and beliefs shaped their activism? How did they maintain the will and energy to keep such a struggle going for so long, and continuing still? Memoirs and responses by Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Michele Wallace, Alix Kates Shulman, Joan Nestle, Jo Freeman, Yvonne Rainer, Barbara Smith, Ellen Willis, Eve Ensler, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Roxanne Dunbar, Naomi Weisstein, Alice Wolfson and many more embody the excitement that fueled the movement and the conflicts that threatened it from within. Their stories trace the ways the world has changed.
