Must read biographies and memoirs
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The Best Memoirs
THE BEST MEMOIRS I’VE READ – AND WHY
First of all, I want to qualify the title of this post. Obviously, there’s no such thing as ‘the best memoirs’ because as much as we might try to rank art, we are only ever voicing our preferences. And these are mine.
So, rather than a ‘Best Memoirs of All Time’ list, I present these as great memoirs that have delighted, inspired, and taught me the most about how to write memoir well. Some of these you will recognise as being among the most popular memoirs of recent times, while others will probably be new to you.
These books offer a range of styles, subjects and approaches to memoir, and the idea is to offer an overview of the terrain and a wide range of possibilities. I recommend choosing one or two books that you are immediately drawn to, as well as one or two that are not the kind of thing you normally read. As in life, we can often learn most from those who are most unlike us.
1. &nbs • 50 You’re probably familiar with The Count of Monte Cristo, the 1844 revenge novel by Alexandre Dumas. But did you know it was based on the life of Dumas’s father, the mixed-race General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, son of a French nobleman and a Haitian slave? Thanks to Reiss’s masterful pacing and plotting, this rip-roaring biography of Thomas-Alexandre reads more like an adventure novel than a work of nonfiction. The Black Count won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 2013, and it’s only a matter of time before a filmskapare turns it into a big-screen blockbuster. 4 • “I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.” When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait o
The 50 Best Biographies of All Time
Crown The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, bygd Tom Reiss
Fierce Attachments