All posts tagged: memoir

Lindy West’s Disconcerting New Memoir

Lindy West’s Disconcerting New Memoir

Published by Daniella Wilson

Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces, ends with a portrait of unconventional domestic bliss. She has moved to a cabin a few hours outside of Seattle with her husband, Aham, and her husband’s girlfriend, Roya, who is now also her girlfriend, Roya. Happiness in triplicate! This arrangement gives West an extra hand to do the dishes, an extra brain to remember to pay the bills, an extra warm body to have sex with Aham when West is feeling depressed and isn’t in the mood. The trio has even established a charming rotation system so that there are only ever two people sleeping in the same bedroom at a time. “It’s what I want,” she writes. “I like it. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.” This outcome wasn’t inevitable. West—whose earlier memoir, Shrill, was turned into a Hulu series—writes that she was resistant when Aham first expressed a desire to be nonmonogamous. Most of Adult Braces is spent describing the road trip she took from Seattle to Florida and back again to process …

Emergence: A memoir by David Sussillo

Emergence: A memoir by David Sussillo

Published by Jenni Sidey

Excerpted from Emergence: A Memoir of Boyhood, Computation, and the Mysteries of Mind by David Sussillo. Copyright © 2026. Reprinted with permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved. My heart pounded as I approached the stage. The grand wooden pavilion, filled with two hundred of my academic colleagues, stretched before me. I’d already delivered my keynote address the day before: “Dynamical Motifs as the Link Between Neurons and Cognition,” a lecture on how to use tools from artificial intelligence to better understand the human brain. That talk had been a piece of cake. It was today’s talk, part of the Growing Up in Science series — meant to showcase the human behind the scientist — that had me on edge. Previous speakers had opened up about the challenges of being first-generation Americans or overcoming gender bias in academia. But nobody had a story quite like mine. I made it to the podium and surveyed the crowd. Waitstaff bustled around the tables, pouring beverages. It had taken forever for my colleagues to make their way through the …

Jill Biden opens up in memoir about Joe Biden’s decision to end his 2024 reelection bid

Jill Biden opens up in memoir about Joe Biden’s decision to end his 2024 reelection bid

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON — Jill Biden is breaking her silence about Joe Biden’s decision to abruptly end his 2024 presidential reelection bid under pressure from Democrats concerned about his age, health and viability against Republican Donald Trump in a rematch of their 2020 campaign. A political spouse for nearly 50 years, Jill Biden said she has never publicly discussed her feelings about the three-week stretch when her husband ended his political career, instead saving her thoughts for the pages of her soon-to-be-released memoir. Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, on Wednesday announced that her book, “View from the East Wing: A Memoir,” is scheduled to be published June 2. Jill Biden told the Associated Press in a brief telephone interview that the book is a “reflection of my four years as first lady” and that writing it was somewhat healing. “It was kind of cathartic for me to write it, and I wrote about all the, you know, sometimes painful, but other times, most of it really beautiful, moments that Joe and I shared during his presidency,” …

Valerie Bertinelli details tragic family loss from before she was born in new memoir

Valerie Bertinelli details tragic family loss from before she was born in new memoir

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Valerie Bertinelli has spoken out about a loss within her family that took place before she was born in her new memoir, Getting Naked: The Quiet Work of Becoming Perfectly Imperfect. In her second book — which hit shelves Tuesday — the former Food Network host opened up about the death of her brother, Mark, who died when he was 17 months old. “It wasn’t until I was pregnant with [my son] Wolfie that my mom started to open up about Mark,” she wrote, per Us Weekly. “Before then, details about him came out in dribs and drabs. But once I was carrying my own child, she told me about her own pregnancy and what Mark had been like as a baby and a …

“I Survived It”: Liza Minnelli on Her Captivating Memoir ‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’

“I Survived It”: Liza Minnelli on Her Captivating Memoir ‘Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!’

Published by Sam Flores

Manhattan nightlife had become what Minnelli describes in the interview as “a crazy-quilt group of New Yorkers,” who gathered regularly after the sun set. At its center stood the nightclub on Broadway and 8th Avenue where Minnelli held court, often clad in Halston. “People think it was just a wild party,” Minnelli says today. “Yes, there was plenty of that. But what they sometimes forget is how creative that time was. Artists, designers, musicians, actors —everyone was mixing together. You might walk in and see Bianca Jagger, Halston, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol, and Frank Sinatra all in the same room. It felt like a collision of different worlds. It was chaotic, yes. But it was also incredibly alive.” But as the club “burned baby burned,” something insidious was creeping further into Minnelli’s life: “Alcohol, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, amphetamines, and cocaine,” she writes. “Overnight, it seemed, I’d gone from being an original ‘nepo baby’ to Sally Bowles—a hot mess of ambition, lovable quirks, crazy sex, and selfish manipulation,” she writes. “I had ‘trouble’ stamped all over me, …

Sex with Scorsese, beef with Sondheim … and inventing the moonwalk? The wildest moments in Liza Minnelli’s memoir | Liza Minnelli

Sex with Scorsese, beef with Sondheim … and inventing the moonwalk? The wildest moments in Liza Minnelli’s memoir | Liza Minnelli

Published by Sam Flores

Tuesday marks the publication of Kids, Wait Til You Hear This!, the enormously entertaining memoir by Liza Minnelli, and that title – gossipy, confiding and with no small measure of Broadway panache – sets the tone from the off. As well as coming across as kind and politically aware, Minnelli is quite heroically unburdened by tact, and as she sketches her life from gilded Hollywood to scrappy New York and on through addiction, ill health and multiple marriages, everyone – most of all herself – is assessed with bracing honesty. A jawdropping story about Lady Gaga patronising her at the Oscars has already been aired in a published extract, and it would be unfair on Minnelli to give away all of the other juicy moments in publication week, but there are so many such moments in the book that we couldn’t hope to summarise them all anyway. Without including choice anecdotes involving Princess Diana, Goldie Hawn, Charles Aznavour, Pet Shop Boys, Frank Sinatra, Halston, the pope and many more, here are just a handful of …

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli review – a heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance | Autobiography and memoir

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! by Liza Minnelli review – a heady brew of gossip, glamour and defiance | Autobiography and memoir

Published by Sam Flores

Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was famously depressive and addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine.” In her memoir, Minnelli – who turns 80 this month – recounts how she broke free from her dysfunctional family at 16 and moved to New York to make it as a singer and actor. …

Forbidden love finds a way in new memoir about Israeli-Palestinian couple

Forbidden love finds a way in new memoir about Israeli-Palestinian couple

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Sari Bashi was working at a Tel Aviv nonprofit providing legal assistance to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip when she fell in love with one of her clients. The man she calls “Osama” in her memoir, “Upside-Down Love,” was born in Gaza but had been living in Ramallah, in the West Bank, unable to leave for fear he would be arrested and taken by force back to Gaza. In 2006, he was accepted to a doctoral program in London and sought legal help to allow him to leave Ramallah and return there — not to Gaza — when he completed his studies. Bashi, who is Jewish, grew up in New Jersey and graduated from Yale Law School with a passion for human rights. She co-founded a law clinic to help Palestinians work through Israel’s draconian regulations that control the movement of Palestinians who live there. Bashi secured Osama’s passage to London and back. Years later, after he completed his Ph.D. and returned to Ramallah, Osama and Bashi began a tenuous, on-and-off-again relationship. It …

In His Memoir, Gavin Newsom Sets Out to Reconcile “the Split Personality” of His Life Spent Growing Up Alongside the Gettys

In His Memoir, Gavin Newsom Sets Out to Reconcile “the Split Personality” of His Life Spent Growing Up Alongside the Gettys

Published by Sam Flores

Gavin Newsom was seven years old when he became cognizant of his other family. Just before Christmas, when his father, William “Bill” A. Newsom III, was taking him and his sister to their favorite toy store in San Francisco, Bill told them they had to pick someone up first. “Now, whatever you guys do or say, all I’m asking is that you don’t mention Paul’s missing ear,” Bill instructed the kids before a lanky, red-haired 17-year-old climbed into the car. The world’s most famous kidnapping victim, Paul Getty III, was Bill’s godson. It took Gavin some time to figure out the complicated Getty family tree. It descends from oil baron J. Paul Getty; with his five wives, he had five sons, including Paul Jr. (Paul III’s father) and Gordon—two brothers whom Bill counted as his closest friends since childhood. In turn, Gavin became like a son to Gordon and his wife, Ann—in addition to their boys, Peter, Andrew, John, and Billy. All five were tall and good-looking, so they were almost indistinguishable around town and …

Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu review – a powerful memoir of postcolonial unease | Autobiography and memoir

Chasing Freedom by Simukai Chigudu review – a powerful memoir of postcolonial unease | Autobiography and memoir

Published by Sam Flores

To be part of Zimbabwe’s “Born Free” generation was to be handed a promise: that your life would no longer be shaped by colonial rule. Skin colour would not dictate the right to vote, learn or work. For Simukai Chigudu, born in 1986, six years after independence, that promise was stamped on him from the very beginning: “Your name, Simukai, it means to stand up,” his father, a former liberation fighter, tells him. Yet, as Chigudu reflects in his compelling memoir, the end of colonial rule does not mean freedom from historical events and how they reverberate in everyday life. He tells two interlinked stories: Zimbabwe’s brutal war of independence, and his own search for belonging in the years that followed. It is a wide-ranging, restless book, passing through Uganda, Rwanda, Ireland and Mexico City. Yet at its centre are Zimbabwe and Britain, “former colony and metropole”, and the unfinished business between them. Chigudu’s parents, who became part of the growing post-independence black middle class, enrol him in elite private schools. There, he acquires what he calls …