Word: memoir
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...first chapter, which takes place years after they have graduated high school, the Swede, who wants help writing a memoir about his recently deceased father, invites the elderly Zuckerman to dinner. Zuckerman is captivated by the opportunity to explore what he dubs “the substratum,” his term for the deep and authentic life of the mind. This quest for the profound proves devastating as the Swede only discusses the happy, superficial lives of his family and does not even mention grieving for his father. During the dinner scene, Roth juxtaposes paragraphs in which the Swede...
Smith is 63 now and ready for her memoir. But the story she's chosen to tell isn't about the rock-star years. It's a coming-of-age tale about a shy Jersey girl who falls in love with a lapsed altar boy from Long Island with "tousled shepherd's curls." He's Robert Mapplethorpe, future famed photographer and shrewd reprobate who would die of AIDS in 1989. As Smith tells us, "I would someday hold his ashes in my hand." After his death, his matter-of-fact pictures of leather S&M, with their strange composure, would...
...years ago, Dani Shapiro began suffering from what she calls an "is-this-all-there-is despondency," a spiritual malaise she chronicles in her new memoir, Devotion (HarperCollins; 245 pages). She had her farmhouse with a quarter-mile-long driveway, a sweetheart of a husband, an adorable son and a thriving career as a novelist, but something was missing...
...that end, Shapiro talks with her old family rabbi, meditates, practices yoga and produces a memoir preciously divided into 102 tiny chapters loaded with mantras, definitions and people chatting over cups of herbal tea. The sense is of an essay padded to book length, but some of these miniatures work. A charmingly self-aware one describes the family car being struck by a bottle of salad dressing. Shapiro is taken aback; she had not put salad dressing on her list of fears...
...read Slow Motion, her memoir recounting a misspent youth as the cokehead mistress of a rich creep and the car accident that nearly robbed her of both parents, you know Shapiro has a heightened sense of drama. She is wiser now but still can't stop obsessing over what could have been, whether it be a medical crisis her son survived as an infant or a terrorist attack. (She put her Brooklyn brownstone on the market a few days after Sept...