memoir

One day, Liz Jensen’s son, Raphaël, meets death in the garden. It’s a bird: a great tit that he picks up and brings inside. ‘‘I found a sleeping bird,’’ he says to his mother, who explains that this particular bird will not be waking up. They dig a hole for it and hold a funeral. “Not a bird any more, we tell him. Underground, it will rot and magic into something else. But this makes no sense to him. He puts snail shells on the little grave and howls.”At the age of 25, Raphaël meets death again. He is on a training run in…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeActor Lisa Dillon has hit out at “shameful” Patrick Stewart for “diminishing” their five-year relationship in his recent autobiography.Dillon, who is best known for her role in the BBC series Cranford, had a relationship with the Star Trek actor from 2003 to 2007 after starring in a production of The Master Builder. When Stewart met the 23-year-old Dillon, he was 62 and married to…

There is a moment at the end of every series of RuPaul’s Drag Race, the Emmy-winning drag queen reality competition, in which the glamorous host asks the finalists to address their younger selves with words of advice and encouragement. No matter how many times you have seen this happen (since its inception in 2009, there have been 16 US seasons, 20 international editions, eight all-star versions and two celebrity spin-offs), watching the contestants open up about their darkest days remains an astonishingly effective…

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. The coronation of King Charles and the success of Prince Harry‘s memoir, Spare, spurred renewed interest in the Royal Family last year, with many books about the British monarchy re-appearing on the bestseller charts. Now, new speculation around Kate Middleton and Charles’ ailing health, have once again made the British Royals the talk of well… the entire world. Spare…

This honest and troubled memoir belongs to a genre one may shorthand as I-was-Sinatra’s-valet: how an ordinary day jobber encountered a star and found life glitteringly transformed. Here it’s a 21-year-old hairdresser, Suzi Fussey, living at home with her parents in Bromley, south-east London, and working at a salon in neighbouring (“posher”) Beckenham. One day in 1970 a customer, Mrs Jones, mentions her “artistic” son, David, who plays in a band; the following week, she brings in David’s wife, Angie, who wants a haircut…

The concept of “genius loci” – the spirit of a place, often with a connotation of protection or nurturing – is the foundation of Esther Rutter’s revivifying blend of memoir, literary history and travelogue. Eliding three books into one, she explores her own terrifying mental collapse and tentative recovery, the lives of Romantic poet William Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy and their confrère Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the efforts to preserve the Wordsworths’ cottage at Grasmere within the context of the Lake District as…

The Oscar-winning actor Al Pacino’s memoir Sonny Boy is set to release this October.The book, launched by Penguin Random House, is the “memoir of a man who has nothing left to fear and nothing left to hide”, according to a statement from the publisher. “All the great roles, the essential collaborations, and the important relationships are given their full due, as is the vexed marriage between creativity and commerce at the highest levels.”“The book’s golden thread, however, is the spirit of love and purpose,” the…

Enthusiasts are invariably perceived to be an odd bunch, outliers who tend to congregate among the safety of one another. There they stand on station platforms and near airport runways, in cagoules, jotting down numbers of trains and watching jets take off. Those who contain their obsessions indoors might treasure stamps or mount butterflies on pins. It passes the time.The writer Nicholas Royle collects books. When he’s not reading them, he’s writing them (he’s the author of seven novels, two novellas and four short story…

Few autobiographies are as suited to audio as Surrender, in which U2 frontman Bono reflects on nearly 50 years in music using his band’s songs as his guide. The book opens with the singer – who narrates – undergoing heart surgery to deal with a blister on his aorta that was ready to “put me in the next life faster than I can make an emergency call”.He looks back on his life, describing the death of his mother from a stroke when he was 14 – he believes it was this that led him to become a performer, seeking the love from…

Following the death of her beloved father in 1987, Catherine Coldstream was plunged into spiritual crisis. Convinced she could still feel his presence, she was consumed by thoughts of the afterlife and the fate of the disembodied spirit. A three-year search for deeper meaning and “a transcendent source of love” eventually led her to the Carmelites, a Roman Catholic order based on the hermits who inhabited caves on the mystical Mount Carmel. For Coldstream, they represented a new way of living and a chance to do God’s…