The End of Your Life Book Club
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Will Schwalbe's memoir, the story of a son and his dying mother who form a book club that brings them together in her final days, is published this month by Knopf.
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Theater video tags: memoir
My Mother Was Nuts
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Fred Armisen of Saturday Night Live and Portlandia plays Penny Marshall in this hilarious trailer for Marshall's new memoir, published by Amazon this month.
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Sugarhouse
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Matthew Batt's memoir, Sugarhouse: Turning the Neighborhood Crack House Into Our Home Sweet Home, which tells the the story of how the purchase and restoration of a disasterous fixer-upper saves a young marriage, was published last month by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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Luis J. Rodriguez
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"I ended up being the one that fell through the cracks," says poet, novelist, and journalist Luis J. Rodriguez, whose memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Curbstone Press, 1993) elevated him as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature. In this video from Open Road Media, Rodriguez tells his story and explains how books helped him escape a dangerous life on the streets of Los Angeles.
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Transforming Tragedy Into Art
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Vaddey Ratner discusses In the Shadow of Banyan, a debut novel depicting her family's experience during the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. "I didn't want to write a memoir," she says. "What I wanted was to honor the lives lost, those who perished, and I wanted to do so through my endeavor to transorm personal pain with art." In the Shadow of Banyan will be published by Simon & Schuster in July.
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Yoga Bitch
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Next month Three Rivers Press will publish Suzanne Morrison's memoir Yoga Bitch: One Woman's Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment. The book chronicles what happens when a coffee-drinking, cigarette-smoking, steak-eating, twenty-five-year-old student decides to travel to Bali for a two-month yoga teacher training program.
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Kelle Groom
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Poet Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, about her recovery from alcoholism following the death of her fourteen-month-old son, is published this month by Free Press. Check out this and other new and noteworthy books in the July/August issue's Page One section.
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The Memoir Project
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"Just because it happened doesn't make it interesting." Author and teacher Marion Roach Smith offers this and other priceless nuggets of advice for anyone thinking of writing a memoir in The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on June 9.
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Joyce Carol Oates on Widowhood
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Prolific author and Princeton professor Joyce Carol Oates recently appeared on the PBS NewsHour to speak with Jeffrey Brown about her new memoir, The Widow's Story (Ecco), in which she writes about her experience following the death of her husband three years ago. In this clip she discusses what she calls widowhood's "world of absurdity."
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Sandra Beasley's Allergy Memoir
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In July Random House will publish poet Sandra Beasley's memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life, which describes her experience growing up and coming to terms with a potentially deadly disorder—severe food allergies.
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