memoir

When Sarah Polley was four years old she entertained her Christian kindergarten class with a rendition of the Monty Python song Sit on My Face. “I love to hear you oralise / When you’re between my thighs … ” she chirruped, to the delight of her libertarian parents, who denied all responsibility when they were called to account by the school.At the age of eight, egged on by her superfan dad, she auditioned for a new fantasy adventure movie by the Pythons’ Terry Gilliam. She was already the veteran of a handful of horror…

In a sense, writing a book is easy. You just keep putting one interesting sentence after another, then thread them all together along a more or less fine narrative line. Only, it isn’t easy – in fact, it’s famously difficult, a daunting and arduous labour that can frequently leave you in a state of utter nervous exhaustion, reaching for the bottle or the pills. Since his creative breakthrough with The Adversary, published in 2000, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère has done something doubly amazing: he’s pioneered a…

I was on the bus when it happened: racked by an unexpected sob, as if some invisible hand had reached inside me and flicked the switch marked tears. In his new memoir, a book I was about to have to put aside for a few moments, Melvyn Bragg was describing the funeral of his publican father, Stanley, in Wigton, Cumbria, some time in the 1990s. Bragg and his mother, Ethel, were just coming out of the church, trailed by a great crowd of mourners because Wigton isn’t big and everyone in it had known Stanley. Bragg looked up.…

Daniel Lavelle knows how the story of his homelessness might look to the casual observer. Viewed in isolation, he notes, “the circumstances that precipitated my journey to the streets seem entirely of my own making”. As well as racking up considerable rent arrears, he had been drinking heavily, lost a series of low-paid jobs and moved out of his flat voluntarily. But, as we learn in his candid yet resolutely un-self-pitying memoir, there were complicating factors, among them his ADHD (his psychiatrist said his was the…

The first memoir from the former lead singer of Pulp would have been better titled A History of Jarvis in 100 Objects. That’s what it is: an illustrated guide to the things that make Cocker who he is. He doesn’t appear in many of the photos; the great majority show his collection of ephemera: a 20-year-old pack of Wrigley’s Extra gum, a fragment of Imperial Leather soap with its old-style label still attached. That’s him in a nutshell: driven by a lifelong love of the everyday, perceiving romance and poignance in items…

To be a musician is to learn to live with paradox. That is the conclusion that Jeremy Denk, a first-rank American concert pianist, has come to after more than 40 years of work on his playing. In classical music, there are always more details to be fine-tuned and technical challenges to be overcome, but the obsession with total mastery can also be what keeps you from obtaining it. Denk’s mentor, the Hungarian-American pianist György Sebők, once told his pupil that his big problem was that he was a perfectionist – even…

If you have ever wondered from where the death-row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith gets his intransigent, crusading spirit, this vivid, inquiring memoir provides much of the evidence. It is set up as a book not about its author but about the lives of two very different men who helped to define him. The first is Stafford Smith’s father, Dick, a wildly volatile man with bipolar disorder, who squandered the family fortune and blamed everyone but himself. The second is Larry Lonchar, an inmate in Georgia State Prison facing a…

Selma Blair hasn’t been shy about sharing details of her personal struggles, speaking publicly about her battle with multiple sclerosis since she was diagnosed in 2018, but she reveals new, shocking experiences from her past in her new memoir, Mean Baby. In the book, excerpts of which were published in People magazine on Wednesday, Blair explains how she began drinking at the age of 7. “The first time I got drunk it was a revelation,” she writes, according to People. “I always liked Passover. As I took small…

Henry Winkler will recount his life and career, from “the Fonz” to Barry, in a memoir due out in 2024. Celadon Books announced Wednesday that the beloved 76-year-old actor has agreed to a deal to pen his memoir, which will cover his lengthy career in television and film as an actor, producer, and director; in addition to his 100+ on-screen credits, Winkler also produced the series MacGyver and directed films like Cop and a Half. Winkler quipped of the tome in a statement, “I am both excited and nervous to contemplate…

In 2015, French film director Benoît Cohen decided on a career change: he would become a New York City taxi driver. His journey into that world, and how his experiences there changed his life, are chronicled in his 2018 memoir Yellow Cab: A French Filmmaker’s American Dream. Now French cartoonist Christophe Chabouté‘s graphic novel adaptation of that book, titled simply Yellow Cab, is set for release from IDW’s Top Shelf Productions imprint next week. The English version of the graphic novel is translated by Edward…