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“Knowing your true origins connects you to history, it tells you where you are in time, in the world,” says Carmen Rita Wong about discovering family secrets and facing the revelations as she wrote her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me? (Crown, 2022), in this video for Penguin Random House’s Inside the Book series.
“For a long time, I worked day jobs that were different from the one I have now.” In this Books Are Magic recorded event, Jami Attenberg reads from her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (Ecco, 2022), and speaks about her writing process with author Kristen Arnett. For more Attenberg, read “1000 Words of Summer: How an Accountability Project Opened Up My Writing Life” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about my mom losing her hair, or my mom losing weight, I was thinking about us in Korea eating patbingsu,” says Michelle Zauner in this CBS Sunday Morning interview about her best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021), and finding comfort in the Korean-owned supermarket chain after losing her mother to cancer.
“A lot of my life has been unconventional, but it has led to this point and I wouldn’t have reached this point if I’d given up.” In this Penguin Books UK video, Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo speaks with her longtime editor Simon Prosser about her writing career and books, including her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove Press, 2022).
In this excerpt from a short film directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads from the second chapter of her memoir Blue Nights (Knopf, 2011). Be sure to read Kevin Nance’s moving profile of Didion from the November/December 2011 issue and listen to Kimberly Farr read a passage of the audio book.
“The opening and closing of windows really meant a thin line between life and death,” says Farah Bashir, author of Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (HarperCollins India, 2021), in this reading and conversation with Madhuri Vijay for Champaca Books.
“Here is another reason to write a memoir: to utter what must not be erased.” In this 2017 PBS NewsHour video, Richard Ford speaks about his reasons for writing, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Ecco, 2017), a memoir about his parents. “I wrote about my parents because, decades after their deaths and when I was no longer young, I realized that I plainly missed them.”
“It wasn’t until I was assigned the family tree project at the age of nine, the same age as my mother when she became a refugee, that I began to understand that she had survived a war.” In this Greenlight Bookstore virtual event, Grace M. Cho reads from her memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), which is shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction, and speaks with Sun Yung Shin about breaking the conventions of writing genres.
“My daily life was one of hunger and fear, but all around me I saw skyscrapers and lights and beauty.” In this video, Qian Julie Wang talks about growing up as an undocumented child in New York City and what she hopes readers will take away from her debut memoir, Beautiful Country (Doubleday, 2021).
Flag Day is a film adaptation of Jennifer Vogel’s 2005 memoir, Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life, directed by Sean Penn with a screenplay by Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth. Penn stars in the film along with his daughter Dylan Penn, Josh Brolin, Regina King, James Russo, and Katheryn Winnick.
