“The book clearly describes the horror, the conflict, the chaos, the death, the trauma that came from the war, and then after that, the invisible dream that I started pursuing.” Abdi Nor Iftin, author of the debut memoir, Call Me American (Knopf, 2018), talks about growing up during the civil war in Somalia and what the American dream means to him.

“Every conversation between us then had a way of spiraling into the same abyss. Real men were impossible to understand. Real men suffered. Real men were broken.” Jaed Coffin reads from his second memoir, Roughhouse Friday (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks about his experiences barroom boxing in Alaska with Kathryn Miles for Portland Public Library’s Literary Lunch series.

JT LeRoy is a biopic based on the book Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy (Seven Stories Press, 2008), Savannah Knoop’s memoir about her experience spending six years impersonating the celebrated author and literary persona of her sister-in-law Laura Albert. Directed by Justin Kelly, the film stars Laura Dern, Diane Kruger, Courtney Love, Kristen Stewart, and Jim Sturgess.

“Failure is part of the process—maybe the most important part. Street hot dogs are not your friend.” Erin Lee Carr lists twenty-nine things she learned from her father, the late journalist and author David Carr, in this book trailer for her debut memoir, All That You Leave Behind (Ballantine Books, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Love was not a word that was ever said in our house. It suddenly felt like a great secret, rediscovered.” Chris Rush’s coming-of-age debut memoir, The Light Years (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), is set in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the author’s childhood and teen years spent exploring drugs and counterculture.

“The book looks at my experience and goes through some of the stories and the encounters that I have lived through while also looking at this larger sense that our culture right now is going through its own existential crisis.” Amber Tamblyn, author of Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution (Crown Archetype, 2019), talks about her coming-of-age memoir and her personal approach to activism.

“Not only did To the Lighthouse help me to understand my own story, but my own story helped me to better understand To the Lighthouse—there’s sort of a beautiful reciprocity there.” Katharine Smyth talks with Michelle Dunton Cronauer about how Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel led to writing her debut memoir, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf (Crown, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If you’re on Twitter and Facebook and sharing there, there’s no pressure of concealment, and I think good memoir comes out of that place.” Dani Shapiro, whose fifth memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Knopf, 2019), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks with Literary Hub’s Emily Temple about how social media could have an adverse effect on writing and storytelling.

“Writing memoir is the ultimate control of my story.” Sandra Gail Lambert talks to author Michele Leavitt about her own motivations for writing memoir, and the challenges that accompany it. Lambert, author of the debut memoir, A Certain Loneliness (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), is featured in “Outsiders on the Inside” by Michele Sharpe in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (Free Press, 2012), Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience as a young journalist struggling with the diagnosis of a rare and mysterious neurological disease, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Gerard Barrett, the film stars Richard Armitage, Thomas Mann, Chloë Grace Moretz, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tyler Perry, and Jenny Slate.