memoir

In what might be the most entertaining music memoir since Elton John’s Me, Boy George’s Karma weaves a meandering path through several decades’ of fame, success, crash and burn, before delivering him into a kind of autumnal meditative serenity, aged 62. That it is all wildly discursive, spectacularly catty and occasionally quite mad merely confirms its authenticity. This is George O’Dowd in all his exhausting glory.It isn’t, however, his first memoir; it’s his third. Both 1995’s Take It Like a Man and 2007’s Straight…

TORONTO —  The service at the Rosedale Diner is friendly, but Geddy Lee gets extra attention. A scruffy line cook stops by the table for a second time and looks at Lee. “You’re a Canadian classic!” he exclaims.As the singer and bassist for Rush, the Canadian power trio, Lee, 70, is a hometown hero, but he’s also largely responsible for spreading heavy progressive rock around the world. From its 1974 debut album to 2015, when the band played a farewell show at the Forum, Rush was the standard-bearer for elaborate,…

Growing up in rural Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Martin Doyle glimpsed few signs of the Troubles. There were no peace walls, he never walked in a victim’s funeral cortege and only once did he spot soldiers patrolling his village. Yet his life was saturated by the conflict. It was like an invisible pandemic, one that he knew was striking down his neighbours, but had not yet visited his home.When his parents went shopping, he was expected to sit in the parked car: in order to deter car bombers, no vehicles were permitted…

Breadcrumb Trail LinksMusicCanadian rocker looks back on his time with prog-rock trio and contemplates a new future with old bandmate Alex LifesonPublished Nov 12, 2023  •  12 minute read Musician and author Geddy Lee. Photo by Richard SibbaldArticle contentGershon Eliezer Weinrib’s dark hair still falls past his shoulders. In most rooms of his home, a bass sits within reach. And as he watches his beloved Blue Jays from his seat behind home plate, there’s always some guy lingering nearby, waiting for the moment to…

When the South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya won her first 800m gold medal at the Berlin world championships in August 2009, her achievement was marred by controversy. Rivals and commentators alike speculated openly on the “masculinity” of her build and the ease with which she dominated the race.A month later, the results of a gender test she took at the event were leaked. Poignantly, scandalously, she discovered along with the rest of the world that she had been born with “differences in sex development”…

“All I ever wanted to do was play Shakespeare, nothing else. It was a kind of zenith for me,” says Judi Dench, discussing her first professional role (Ophelia with the Old Vic) straight out of drama school in 1957. Despite the book’s jokily disparaging subtitle – “the man who pays the rent” is how Dench and her late husband,Michael Williams, used to refer to the Bard when they both worked for the Royal Shakespeare Company during the 1970s – her passion for Shakespeare shines through every conversation reproduced here.The…

“There is some doubt about the fact that this person is a lady.” It was 2009, and 18-year-old Caster Semenya had just won a gold medal in the 800m at the World Championships in Berlin. The general secretary of the International Association of Athletics Federation (now World Athletics) was addressing the media, announcing that Semenya was clearly “a woman, but maybe not 100%”.Semenya has, to this day, not watched this press conference: “I’ve heard about it, but I don’t care to see it,” she writes in her memoir, The Race to…

My earliest reading memoryThe Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton was my first book without pictures; I was seven, at school in England. What hooked me was a concept: a ladder poked through the clouds at the top of a tree. Above was a world where laws and norms were different, where you could cavort like an innocent – but after a time, an unsettled wind blew in and swept the land away. I still find this describes our passage through seasons of life.My favourite book growing upOne that strangely haunted me was Arthur…

The fan is a necessary but ambiguous figure in sport. A vital part of the spectacle as well as a source of financial support, he (and it’s most often a he) can be a dutiful follower, fierce critic, passive spectator, possessive adulator, worshipful and entitled, and not infrequently all at the same time.This tribal dependency, with all its pain, disappointment and fleeting moments of triumph, has made for some powerful memoirs, such as Frederick Exley’s (loosely fictionalised) A Fan’s Notes and Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch.…

Liz O’Riordan is a consultant breast surgeon who was forced to retire from practice six years ago after her own breast cancer diagnosis. Like many, I knew her story, having followed her on social media since my own sister passed away from breast cancer. Online, she comes across as both candid and joyful, sharing adventures, advice and pictures of her bright handmade dresses.I had assumed her memoir would be the straightforward tale of a doctor turned patient. However, the experiences of illness, both depression and…