memoir

Author and journalist Leah McLaren was a precocious 13-year-old when she broke down at her mother’s kitchen table one night in Toronto and described a harrowing sexual experience at a pool party. Her mother, Cessie, brewed her a mug of herbal tea, added a slug of whisky, and countered it with a tale of her own. At just 12, Cessie had been raped by her riding instructor. The Horseman, she called him. Having groomed her for assault, he then persuaded her that she was in love with him, continuing his abuse until she was…

Astounding wealth and equally astounding levels of alienation distinguish the globe-spanning Love the Dark Days. Indian-born Trinidadian author and broadcaster Ira Mathur traces a complex saga spreading out from her aristocratic, elite-tier Muslim Indian ancestors and grandparents through the glittering lives of her glamorous parents, down to the international jaunts and diasporic privileges of her own generation.At a gorgeous wedding, “there are the usual stories of privilege, of pranks, of Oxford. Someone says Lord…

Those of us who cut our teeth on the weekly music press are, by nature, bullishly nostalgic for the days when NME and Melody Maker sold hundreds of thousands of copies, reputations and heated pub exchanges hinging on their contents. Music and its chronicling seemed like the central whorl around which the universe spun. The tone alternated between bumptious certainty and shit-stirring mischief, in-jokes and crusading.Then two things happened. Around the time Kurt Cobain died, newspapers decided music was worth covering in…

This extraordinary memoir by the poet Seán Hewitt suggested itself after he had made a brutally impersonal discovery. While trawling the internet, he stumbled, in a moment of casual curiosity, upon something he had not known – that a young man with whom he had been romantically involved at Cambridge had died before his time (there is a non-invasive sensitivity about Hewitt’s decision to leave the reader to guess at what must have happened). He remembers “Jack” (the names in the book have been changed) with warmth and in…

The area around Chornobyl was once meant to be a paradise. “They even planned to build a promenade with bridges, street lights and musical entertainment. They already started to lay the foundation of new power plant units, the apotheosis of joy and happiness looming on the horizon,” writes Markiyan Kamysh. “Until,” he says, with characteristic directness, “things got fucked and reactor number 4 blew the hell up.”Kamysh was born in 1988, two years after that calamity, the son of a nuclear physicist who had been brought in…

Chris Patten’s appointment as Hong Kong’s last governor in 1992 marked a cultural change for the colony. His predecessors had mostly been diplomats or administrators – Patten was a senior UK politician with reforming ambitions and a flair for public relations who aroused suspicion in both Beijing and Hong Kong. Many intrigued against him. But he had one supreme advantage – the loyal backing of John Major, the prime minister, and Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, back in London.Patten’s goal was to ensure the 1997…

Nothing about Original Sins, Matt Rowland Hill’s memoir and first book, should work. Or rather, it should work, but in such a smooth-grooved, unsurprising, seen-it-all-before way that it would fail to stir much excitement. Stuffed in here is every trope of the memoir boom from the past 15 years. First comes the story of middle-class drug addiction, as Hill’s promising young life is reduced to waiting in scary inner-city parks for a boy in a hoodie to drop off a wicked little packet. Then there is the oppressively…

On Tuesday evening, actor Deepti Naval unveiled her memoir, A Country Called Childhood in the Capital. Twenty years in the making, her memoir has taken shape in the form of evocative vignettes peppered with details about her childhood, her cinematic calling and more. The book was launched by actor Sharmila Tagore who shared her insights. “She delves into her childhood with admirable honesty. I felt many emotions going through her book, the uppermost emotion was of joy...pure, unadulterated joy,” she said. The veteran…

At the age of 3o, Selma Blair saw a fortune teller. She was a successful Hollywood actor – famous for her role in 1999’s Cruel Intentions, and about to set off for Prague to film Hellboy – but privately she was depressed, binge-drinking, and prone to periods of overwhelming despair. Seeing a psychic was in many ways a search for reassurance: about a body whose pain she didn’t understand (Blair would later be diagnosed with multiple sclerosis), the scars of repeated sexual assault, and alcoholism that had almost killed…

Matt Rowland Hill’s turbulent debut plunges the reader irresistibly into the hell that followed his adolescent rejection of a taboo-laden upbringing as an evangelical Christian in south Wales. The descent is steep: when his parents move to the home counties, sending him on a scholarship to boarding school, he seems set fair for the upward mobility his fretful mother has scrimped to secure. But his next stop, Oxford, is where he first injects heroin, heralding a decade of dependency, criminality and near-death as he sinks…