memoir

Olivier Assayas’s new film is a flimsy but elegant autofictional sketch about his own experiences during the Covid lockdown, bubbling up with family members in his childhood home in la France profonde. It’s a movie which reminds us that for all the anxieties, this period of enforced inactivity was for grownups of a certain age and financial security not entirely unpleasant – a reminder of the endless, aimless summer days of childhood, an Edenic existence outside time which workaholic media professionals thought never to…

Darius Rucker has turned the soundtrack of his life into a book. The country musician has announced his first memoir, Life’s Too Short, set for release on May 28, structured around 23 songs that have been transformative during his career. “This book is the story of my life as told through 23 songs that took me away, soaring, starting at ground level, living in a poor but happy home, never wanting for much more, enjoying what I had, even when times got tough, because I had my escape, my refuge, my music,” Rucker…

To westerners, the public beheading of the US journalist James Foley in Syria was grim confirmation of the brutality of Islamic State and, more specifically, of the cruelty of a trio of British militants nicknamed “the Beatles”. For Foley’s mother, Diane, who since his kidnapping two years earlier had been pressing Barack Obama’s government to rescue him or negotiate his release, his death was incomparably more painful. But that didn’t deter her from meeting Alexanda Kotey, the man found guilty of conspiracy to murder her…

Intervals is an exceptional book, for which every deserved superlative seems cliched, in part because the language of illness, death and bereavement often feels too hollowed out by use to accommodate the magnitude of those experiences. Frequently repeated words may gain a carapace that resists our scrutiny: take “dignity”, for example, which Marianne Brooker regards with “mild suspicion” as “too clean-cut and classed”, with “none of the chaos that makes us human”.Brooker’s mother, Jane, had experienced a certain amount of…

With notable, largely historical exceptions, literary lives can be disappointingly dull to read about. Not so Lisa St Aubin de Terán’s. Better Broken Than New is the novelist and memoirist’s first book since 2007 and its vivid, sometimes chaotic narrative details – adventures and misadventures enough for multiple lifetimes – leave the reader wondering not from where she derives her creative material but how she’s lived to tell the tale.Cheating death thanks to a premonition, cooking for a cannibal and surviving the…

‘But isn’t it boring?” asked my partner. I had just explained the concept of Alphabetical Diaries, a book which delivers almost exactly what its title promises. The novelist Sheila Heti kept a journal for more than 10 years; she then culled sentences from the pages and arranged those sentences in alphabetical order. The book proceeds from A to Z: in the first chapter, each sentence starts with A, in the second each starts with B, and so on. The structure of the book is slick and oddly captivating. I read it over the…

Britney Spears has revealed a witty secret from her past that she left out of her explosive 2023 memoir: she once locked lips with Ben Affleck. Britney Spears reveals secret make out with Ben Affleck in deleted Instagram post (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP, File)(Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP) The pop icon shared this juicy tidbit on a since-deleted Instagram post on Wednesday, Feb 7, along with an old photo of her, the Hypnotic star, and songwriter Diane Warren. Discover the thrill of cricket like never…

If you crave romances about beekeepers in the Algarve, or sagas of whimsical poisoning in Kensal Green, Nicolas Lunabba’s memoir probably isn’t for you. The clue is very much in the title. Will You Care If I Die? is a raw, intimate story of desperate trust and betrayal, of people perpetually balanced above a terminal abyss. Elegantly translated by Henning Koch, the prose juggles twisted humour, poetry, love and polemic in an aching, challenging journey. Lunabba anatomises what happens when a guarded heart surrenders and…

Patrick Joyce is emeritus professor of history at the University of Manchester and one of the leading social historians of his generation. The illustrious referees for his first academic job in the 1970s were Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson. In his 70s, Joyce has found a new non-academic audience combining memoir and history. His new book, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, follows in the footsteps of Going to My Father’s House, which looked at themes of emigration, home and war. Joyce lives in…

The title of Reba Som’s latest book might lead a reader to believe she is just an appendage of her diplomat husband. They couldn’t be further from the truth. This narrative about living out of suitcases as she journeys across the world and establishes herself as an accomplished author and academic, and scholar in Hindustani Classical music and Rabindra Sangeet shows she can definitely hold her own. Indeed, she has also authored such volumes as Margot:Sister Nivedita of Vivekananda (2017), Differences within Consensus:…