Kelly McMasters’ first memoir, Welcome to Shirley, is more than an account of her childhood—it’s a portrait of the town in which she was raised. Kelly, a journalist and writing professor at Columbia University, traveled back to Shirley, New York, a working class Long Island town that has been repeatedly touched by tragedy. She slowly […]

Blogger Rebecca Woolf’s new memoir, ROCKABYE: From Wild to Child (Seal Press) (read an excerpt) is about finding herself unexpectedly pregnant at 23 and her journey to become a mother and wife without losing herself in the process. Rebecca and I G-chatted about sex, baby weight, and the blogosphere while I was in a Brooklyn […]

Four years ago, Lily Koppel, a young reporter for the New York TimesMetro desk, walked out of her Upper West Side apartment building to find a Dumpster on the curb. The Dumpster overflowed with at least fifty old steamer trunks—detritus from the building’s basement, waiting to be carted away by city workers. The promise of […]

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 book that resulted from this epic journey (read an excerpt here) ended up being about a lot more than fortune […]

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 […]

I’m going to disclose right here that I know Felicia Sullivan, author of the new memoir The Sky Isn’t Visible From Here. Not especially well, but from the New York writery scene—a book party here, a KGB reading there. She’s a blogger, an online marketing whiz, a radio host, and the founder of a terrific […]

When I was growing up, any time my mother observed two of her children doing something alike—wearing the same color, picking out the same pair of sneakers in the shoe store—she’d laughingly ask, “What are you, The Bobbsey Twins?”
I find myself saying it today, but I doubt many of my own generation understand the second-hand […]

Ten years ago, while rehabilitating from a traffic accident, Ann Marie Fleming came into possession of several reels of 16-millimeter film, home movies of her great-grandfather that revealed a curious bit of family history: her great-grandfather had been a famous magician who performed under the name Long Tack Sam. Inspired by this discovery, Fleming […]

Entangled Lives: Memoirs of 7 Top Erotica Writers offers a true-story peek into the very private lives of some very public sexual intellectuals. Marilyn Jaye Lewis edited Bill Brent (excerpt here), Rachel Kramer Bussel, Amie M. Evans, Ian Philips, Greg Wharton, and Rob Stephenson, as well as contributing her own steamy selection. Read on for […]

In her just-released memoir, Visiting Life: Women Doing Time on the Outside,
Bridget Kinsella, an editor at Publishers Weekly for 14 years, has written a story fueled in part by literary love. After meeting through a now-defunct writing program at California’s notorious Pelican Bay State Prison, Kinsella began a correspondence with, and eventually visited, Rory Mehan, […]