Memoirville

Excerpts Archive

EXCERPT: Welcome to Shirley by Kelly McMasters

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

On the surface, Kelly McMasters had a perfect American childhood: A kind family, supportive neighbors, sparklers on the Fourth of July, sledding expeditions in the woods, popsicles made in ice cube trays. But as she grew older, she started to notice that things in Shirley, a working class Long Island town, were not what she’d […]

EXCERPT: Rockabye by Rebecca Woolf

Monday, April 28th, 2008

“It seems impossible for me to be pregnant now. All of the years of drunken sex with strangers, forgotten birth-control pills, weekend trips blurred from substance abuse, my year of so-called nymphomania. My name is Rebecca and I’m a sex addict. But I wasn’t a sex addict. I was just lonely.”
Chapter 1. Holy Shit, I’m […]

EXCERPT: Red Leather Diary by Lily Koppel

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Painted—played piano—read Baudelaire—and saw Manny. But I couldn’t resist thinking about that girl—! Invited that girl—Pearl is her name—to tea next Thursday afternoon—I hope I’m not disappointed—with her voice, I shouldn’t be.
According to plan, Florence and Pearl Siegelstein met, one late afternoon in March 1932, at an English tearoom on Lexington Avenue, advertised as “a […]

EXCERPT: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee

Monday, March 17th, 2008

New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee started tracking down a suspiciously high number of lottery winners, and ended up following a trail that led through hundreds of Chinese restaurants on six different continents. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, the book that resulted from this epic journey, ended up being about a lot more than fortune […]

EXCERPT: Mortified: Love is a Battlefield

Wednesday, March 5th, 2008

One of the highlights of our book tour was spending Valentine’s Day with hundreds of other awkward single people (and one couple that wouldn’t stop licking each other’s faces) at a live Mortified event in Los Angeles. It was everything we hope to someday achieve with a SMITH Slam—great writing, brilliant comedy, perfect projections and […]

Perfect From Now On By John Sellers

Monday, March 3rd, 2008

Perfect From Now On, John Sellers’ breezy, smart indie-rock-is-my-life anthem-cum-memoir, is just out in paperback. Back when it first published as a hardcover, SMITH was pleased to run an excerpt from this debut memoir, as well as an audio interview with the author. Like music? Memoirs? Guided By Voices? Some or all of […]

EXCERPT: Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood by Trey Ellis

Monday, February 25th, 2008

“I haven’t strangled my son, raised my voice, or even just slapped him around a little. I imagine I would be a shoo-in for Father of the Year.”
Trey Ellis has spent the past 15 years exploring nearly every form of prose imaginable to a writer. In 1989, just out of Stanford University, he wrote The […]

EXCERPT: The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here by Felicia Sullivan

Tuesday, February 5th, 2008

In Brooklyn, my mother and I lived with a man named Avram who taught me two sentences in Hebrew: I love you and I need five hundred dollars. His body was covered in hair as thick as wool, but his skin was slick, smoothed with baby oil. He never left the house without Afrin nasal […]

EXCERPT: House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis

Monday, November 5th, 2007

Chapter One
1953: Amherst, Massachusetts
Read an in-depth interview with Leslie Garis here. Buy the book here.
In those years I spent a lot of time in the dumbwaiter, moving up and down behind the walls, listening to voices. I sat with my knees up: sometimes I clasped my arms around my legs, sometimes I kept my hands […]

EXCERPT: Gonzo By Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

“He shot out of the womb angry. And then he left that same way. “

How do you tell the tale of Hunter S. Thompson? Arguably, no one has told the story of the Louisville, Kentucky-born rebel who went on to change journalism (and inspire hordes of awful imitators) better than the man himself, via his […]