memoir

Mark Morton, the guitarist who co-founded the heavy-metal group Lamb of God three decades ago, will release a memoir this summer that looks back on the triumphs and tragedies of his life so far. In the book Desolation: A Heavy Metal Memoir, which will come out June 25, the musician reflects on how he felt like he had to push forward with the band even after the death of his newborn daughter in 2009. That event and the perpetual motion of band life led him to addiction. His story, which he co-wrote with author Ben…

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Rolling Stone may receive an affiliate commission. RuPaul‘s highly anticipated new memoir The House of Hidden Meanings was announced back in October of 2023, but the queer icon’s tell-all has already skyrocketed to the top of on Amazon’s bestselling LGBTQ+ Biographies list ahead of its release. With the release date and cover revealed late last year, Mama Ru’s revelatory memoir gives his fans a behind-the-scenes look…

In August, 2014, Diane Foley went to church in Rochester, New Hampshire. Her son, Jim, a photojournalist, had then been a hostage of Islamic State in Syria for almost two years. It was late at night, and she was exhausted and alone. The US government, insistent that it would not pay ransoms to terrorists, would do nothing for her family; it was hellish living in fear of the sound of the telephone; the waiting and the wondering could drive a person mad. And so, here she was, clicking her rosary beads, kneeling to repeat…

The world of private equity, as described in Carrie Sun’s memoir, brings to mind less the muscular jockeying of HBO’s Succession, and instead the quiet intensity of a Sofia Coppola film: all glittering surfaces and cagey alienation. When Sun arrives at Carbon, a secretive hedge fund (the name has been changed), she finds offices with sweeping views of Central Park; a library with heavy drapes and velvet couches; a bathroom with marble sinks and stone walls. After employees complain about the state of the toilets, the firm…

Journalist Kara Swisher’s long-anticipated memoir Burn Book hit the shelves today. Apparently, a long list of other writers have also been hard at work writing about her experience as well. On the day after her book launch, Amazon is flooded with AI-generated Swisher biographies, complete with cover art from beyond the uncanny valley. Top 5 Shopping Tips for Amazon Prime DayThere’s Kara Swisher Book: How She Became Silicon Valley’s Most Influential Journalist by Cheryl J Stackhouse and Brotherhood Press. Not to your…

“One never… asks is it a novel,” wrote John Cheever in 1977. “One asks is it interesting.” Definitely not a novel – whatever its publishers say – but definitely very interesting is Jack Hilton’s 1935 book Caliban Shrieks, equal parts autobiography, political screed and artful rant, now reissued in hardback by Vintage Classics and lauded last week as a lost literary masterpiece in the New Yorker.Channelling Shakespeare’s monstrous Caliban (“the red plague rid you for learning me your language”), Hilton’s narrator uses…

“It was when I first saw Marlon Brando when I was 13. I had to become an actress, there was no turning back,” SAG Awards Life Achievement honoree Barbra Streisand says of first realizing she wanted to be an actor. (Firooz Zahedi) Barbra Streisand’s 970-page memoir, “My Name Is Barbra,” took her 10 years to complete. So it didn’t seem like that much of an ask for me to spend 48 hours listening to her read it, which I did over the course of a couple months. Exhaustive, but never exhausting,…

Gary Stevenson had a meteoric rise from the rags of east London to the riches of Citibank, and his new book charts that journey. This is not a sleazy tell-all along the lines of the 2008 bestseller Cityboy, or the 2013 box-office hit The Wolf of Wall Street. Stevenson is exceedingly smart and a man with a conscience. Since leaving the bank at the age of 27, he started the YouTube channel GarysEconomics to explain, among other things, how massive money creation by the Bank of England has favoured the wealthy, while warning…

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character…

Juano Diaz’s elegant and heartbreaking memoir immediately brings to mind Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain, which told a fictional tale of similar territory – Glasgow tenements and moments of sublimity balanced against the brutality of a breadline existence. Slum Boy manages descriptions of grinding poverty also alongside images of extraordinary beauty and is a book in which the reader feels that a large part of the redemptive arc lies in the author’s artistic skill in describing his past with clarity and…