Rebecca Walker is a widely respected writer, speaker, teacher, feminist, and activist. But she’s also known as a daughter, to Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple author Alice Walker. This month, the younger Walker’s memoir Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood after a Lifetime of Ambivalence, which chronicles her own somewhat delayed pregnancy, will make her known [...]

When we asked Abby Ellin for an excerpt from her debut book Teenage Waistland: A Former Fat-Camper Weighs in on Living Large, Losing Weight, And How Parents Can (And Can’t) Help (the paperback edition is just out from PublicAffairs press), she was glad to oblige. Then she asked us if we’d be interested in [...]

Like it or not, we all use labels to shorthand our identities—Jewish, bisexual, blonde, whatever—and anyone who denies it probably just doesn’t want to be your “boyfriend.” In her book Girl With Glasses, Marissa Walsh reclaims corrective eyewear as an identifying character trait, and a decidedly positive one at that. Below are a few vignettes [...]

Taken from “The Responsibility to Fight,” the first chapter in Sam Sheridan’s A Fighter’s Heart (Grove Atlantic) this excerpt opens in the grimy bowels of Thailand’s Samrong Stadium. After years of traveling the world–yachting, working construction, fighting fires—Sheridan reflects on the events that brought him to this ring thousands of miles from his Massachusetts roots. [...]

If you read his recent New York Times Lives column, you probably want to know more about David Matthews, an exceptional writer whose new book Ace of Spades looks at race and class in America through the personal lens of his childhood. Matthews has a Black Nationalist father, an absentee Jewish mother, and a first [...]

This excerpt from Allen Rucker’s The Best Seat in the House (HarperCollins) is taken from sections of chapter three, “Dignity Takes a Holiday.”
After waking up one morning and realizing he’s become paralyzed, Rucker spends several months in the hospital. In this excerpt, he has come home and is trying to figure out the way [...]

Last week I posted “Getting Lucky,” a memoir-in-progress I admired, in part, for its total divergence from anything familiar to me. Today, I’m ridiculously excited to post an excerpt from “Lucky,” an already-published collection of autobiographical short stories in graphic novel form. The appeal of this one is just the opposite: I think author/artist Gabrielle [...]

I could tell you that Dylan Schaffer — lawyer, novelist, and all around interesting guy — has written Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story, a cool new memoir about parents and children, cancer and forgiveness, flour and yeast, but Schaffer’s YouTube music video says it so much better.

And when you’re totally hooked [...]

We at SMITH and Memoirville like to say that every person has a story. Jami Bernard, author, reviewer, and Incredible Shrinking Critic, says that every pound has a story too. In her new book, she writes “It’s a story of anger, frustration, old wounds, and carelessness. It’s a story of misjudged portions, too-hasty celebrations, bad [...]

To tell you the truth, “inspirational memoir†isn’t a term that excites me much. I’m much more likely to pick up “crack-addicted drag queen memoir†or “sassy angry Jewish chick memoir†or even “fucked up incest memoir.†But when I saw that the second paragraph of Julia Fox Garrison’s Don’t Leave Me This Way: Or [...]