“In the end, it’s all these crazy stories that made me who I am today.”

Growing up, Oran Canfield’s life couldn’t have been further from the average person’s childhood experience. The son of Chicken Soup for the Soul author and self-help guru Jack Canfield, Oran spent his early years honing his juggling skills among circus people, attending punk rock shows, and just basically spending time with every possible unusual subset of fringe culture.

As an adult, Oran relocated to San Francisco, where he played drums in a number of art rock bands, opened a successful recording studio, and developed a drug addiction that nearly killed him. In his debut memoir, Long Past Stopping, Oran chronicles his long and often frustrating road to recovery with unexpected humor as he unpacks the numerous bizarre stories he collected along the way. Read more »

“Writing the book was like an archaeological dig; I had to put together shards of our lives into a cohesive whole that made sense to the outside world.”

Back in July, we interviewed Philip Smith about his new memoir, Walking Through Walls, which explores his late father’s fantastic life and work as a faith healer.  Now it’s out in paperback, so we checked in with him to find out how he feels about publishing his story and how people (and spirits) are reacting. Read more »

“I just feel that secrets and shame need to be abolished—forever.”

When an author’s first book is a memoir about childhood abuse, a teenage stint driving a hearse, messy adult relationships and, ultimately, revelations of incest, here’s one thing you don’t expect from the cover of her second: a photo of an adorable Golden Retriever puppy pawing a fuzzy toy soccer ball.

But that image—along with an impossibly cuter one of her then-preschool son Wills in a goofy red hat—graces Monica Holloway’s latest memoir, Cowboy & Wills: A Love Story, the story of how the titular dog helped her son let go of some of the social isolation and fear that come along with autism. Read more »

“I feel as if [my mother's] life and essence mock Western stereotypes that obscure, much like the actual veil itself, the face of many an Arab woman.”

Kamila’s story reads like a novel: she was born in Lebanon, never allowed to attend school, and married against her will when she was only 14 years old. She could not read or write for herself, something that bothered her all of her life. What she wanted more than almost anything else was to tell her own story; she wanted her voice heard. So she called upon her daughter. Read more »

“All the silence and the necessity for learning to read body language as a means of survival, those elements made the graphic form seem an appropriate medium for my tale. I worked about three years on the book very intensely and always at night…”

David Small’s graphic memoir, Stitches, is a beautifully rendered account of a horrifying childhood, drawn in shades of gray—”a silent movie masquerading as a book,” as he describes it on his website. Small recently sat down and answered a few of Rebecca Touger’s questions on his childhood, his color choices, and his creative process.

You’ve had a long, award-winning career as a writer and illustrator of picture books for young children. But your illustrated autobiography Stitches is not children’s lit, and the subject matter is definitely geared towards adult readers. Is this the first time that you’ve drawn on your painful childhood for material, or has personal experience found its way into your other work in subtler ways?
With one exception, that being the poem “George Washington’s Cows,” my picture books are all metaphors for actual experience. The dark elements are overlain with humor and fantasy. With Stitches, which is a straight memoir, I felt I had to drop all the veils of metaphor—for a while at least—and look directly at the source. Read more »

“It’s a common misperception that for some reason we should be telling stories about other people instead of ourselves.”

Depression, as we all know, can be deadly. Writer’s block is lethal. Combine the two, toss in some ADD, and it’s a wonder that writer Stephen Elliott would ever get out of bed, let alone pick up a pen and paper.

Fortunately, for the past eight years he has, delivering a huge body of work since, as he explains, “I sold a couple of books and got a Stegner Fellowship at the same time and just like that I was a writer.” Read more »

“I know everything there is to know about fathers who root against their sons.”

On May 5, 2007, Floyd Mayweather meets Oscar De LaHoya at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. The fight has been hyped for five months. Floyd will make more than twenty million dollars and De LaHoya will make more than thirty. De LaHoya is heavier and Mayweather faster. Mayweather goes running late at night in Las Vegas, three a.m. sprints in the dark. The underlying drama is that Floyd’s father had been in jail for drug running. Floyd trained with his uncle instead.

The boxers move quickly inside the ropes, sweat pouring down their backs like a glaze. Mayweather peppers the older De LaHoya, landing a shot in the tenth that snaps De LaHoya’s head back like a spring toy. De LaHoya, well past his prime, comes out hard in the final rounds, his shoulders turning as if on rotors, delivering a flurry of jabs into Mayweather’s ribs. Mayweather just barely wins the fight and tells anyone who will listen, “This proves I’m the greatest fighter of all time.” But it doesn’t. Read more »

“My editor said, ‘Why don’t you do this as fiction? You could riff with more impunity.’”

The mommies in Amy Sohn’s satiric third novel, Prospect Park West, are nobody’s idea of first pick at the babysitting co-op: There’s on-the-prowl Rebecca, fuming because, 16 months after the birth of their daughter, her husband has still not deigned to have sex with her; Lizzie, haplessly up for anything after leaving her girlfriend (and her job) to raise a son with a constantly-on-tour black musician; Karen, the over-protective “helicopter mom” with a scary celeb fetish; and Melora, a former child star who wants to resurrect her career only slightly more than she wants to avoid interaction with her adopted toddler. (Read an excerpt from Chapter 1.)
Read more »

“There were quite a few situations ranging from awkward to humiliating. Certainly the month I spent practicing Radical Honesty was particularly difficult. This is the movement that instructs you to say whatever’s on your mind. No filter between your brain and mouth. Like Jim Carrey’s Liar, Liar, but the real-life version. Every day was filled with hundreds of little confrontations.”

Unlike many people who make a living writing about their lives, Esquire Editor-at-Large A.J. Jacobs hasn’t been cast into unusual circumstances by fate. Instead, he creates unusual circumstances and willingly throws himself into them. His latest book, The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment, is a follow-up to the enormously successful The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World and The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. In The Guinea Pig Diaries, Jacobs continues to experiment on himself in a collection of hilarious and thoughtful essays. Read more »

The following is an excerpt from The Guinea Pig Diaries: My Life as an Experiment by A.J. Jacobs. Be sure to check out Chris Teja’s interview with him here.

240 Minutes of Fame

In my real life, I’ve had just the tiniest taste of what it’s like to be famous. Three instances come to mind:

1. The book festival in Texas where I met my one and only rabid fan—a man who took off his sweater to reveal passages of my book scrawled on his T-shirt in Magic Marker. (Later, Israeli writer Etgar Keret would tell me that one of his fans got a chest tattoo of his book’s cover, which made me feel small and inadequate.)

2. The time my mother-in-law called in a tizzy and said, “You’re a clue in the New York Times crossword puzzle!” This was a dream come true. A bona fide mark of fame.

“It’s forty- eight down,” she said.

I grabbed the Times and opened to the puzzle. The clue was “Reads the encyclopedia from A to Z.”

The answer was N-E-R-D. Read more »