In The Art of Memoir Karr combines practical advice with intangible wisdom, which fuses together beautifully to create a useful guide that also inspires.
Review: The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr
Category: Reviews
An archive of our reviews of memoirs, essay collections, and other works of creative nonfiction.
Review: Transmogrified by Travel — Cannot Stay: Essays on Travel by Kevin Oderman
Once you walk into the airport “you’ve already begun to be someone else,” writes Kevin Oderman in his collection of deeply felt meditations on the art of travel
Review: Requiem for the Living by Jeff Metcalf
After nine years of battling with prostate cancer, Jeff Metcalf’s doctors told him that the drugs keeping his cancer at bay were no longer working.
Review: In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeanette by Hampton Sides
Sides writes: “The scenery grew more impressive: ice-gouged fjords, towering bergs calved fresh from the glaciers, the crisp sound of cold surf lapping against the pack, ringed seals peeking through the ice,
Review: O’s Little Book of Happiness
On the happiness book spectrum, O’s Little Book of Happiness falls somewhere between happiness memoir and motivational cat poster.
Review: Wreck of the Whale Ship Essex: The Extraordinary and Distressing Memoir That Inspired Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick by Owen Chase / Introduction by Gilbert King
On Nov. 20, 1820, an infuriated sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean charged at the whale ship Essex, causing a crew of 20 men to escape into three smaller whale boats.
Review: Recapitulations by Vincent Crapanzano
Vincent Crapanzano grew up in the 1940s on the grounds of a psychiatric institution where his father worked as a resident physician.
Review: The Ghosts Who Travel With Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan’s America by Allison Green
Allison Green’s memoir begins on the road in Idaho, where she and her partner Arline are following in the tire tracks of Richard Brautigan…
Review: Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola
“How did we get home last night? Do you have any idea what happened to my jeans? Why is there a corn dog in my bed?”
Review — Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own by Kate Bolick
Like any good book, Spinster is many things, but it is in large part an effort to replace our fundamentally negative description of the single woman …
