memoirs
Lena Dunham’s “Famesick” Is a Cautionary Tale of Filmmakers Doing TV
Even before submitting the script for the pilot, Dunham was asked to write four episodes along with it. In September, the studio decided to make the pilot, and the...
Can You Write a Memoir in the Third Person?
The first-person insights of memoir serve epiphany and discovery, as though all confessions are truthful. The distance of third person makes these moments of reflection more meaningful, as though...
J. D. Vance’s Contemptuous Conversion Memoir
Thiel donated a record-setting fifteen million dollars to Vance’s successful 2022 bid for Ohio senator, but his largesse on this score receives no acknowledgment in “Communion,” which portrays the...
What’s Missing from Belle Burden’s Best-Selling Memoir, “Strangers”
Margaret Ryznar, a visiting professor at Brooklyn Law School who specializes in trusts and estates, had a somewhat different view on the prenup. “Our modern idea of marriage is...
Joan Lowell and the Birth of the Modern Literary Fraud
Sensing that she was losing the argument, Lowell rushed at Colcord, winding up to throw a punch before stopping short a few feet away from him. “If you weren’t...
What Can Conversion Memoirs Tell Us?
Eventually, Ash finds in herself a gradual attraction, not only to religious practice but to the wild disharmonies of belief. Her mother is sliding into late-stage dementia, and Ash...
Does Olivia Nuzzi Make Good Copy?
In addition to not being a tell-all, “American Canto” is not a book about Trump, nor is it about politics, as Nuzzi establishes in an author’s note. Rather, “it...
Life at the Edge of a Famous Family
This comparatively reduced terrain has often served as complement to her husband’s much grander vistas. “I am the observer, the audience watching the action as if in a theater,”...
Malala’s Favorite Mother-Daughter Memoirs
When the Nobel Peace Prize–winning activist Malala Yousafzai was fifteen, she was shot by a member of the Taliban for advocating for girls’ education—an event that, as she writes...
How the Supreme Court Defines Liberty
Barrett, like most originalists, insists that the Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education can be defended on originalist grounds—the alternative is unthinkable. The “drafters and ratifiers...
