memoir

The Mourner’s Bestiary is part memoir, part illness narrative, and part ecological treatise.

In Knife, the novelist goes back to Chautauqua, where he was nearly killed in a 2022 attack.

Taymullah Abdur-Rahman demonstrates that friendship across religious difference can elicit personal and social transformation.

Rebecca McCarthy traces Norman Maclean’s poetic sensibilities from his University of Chicago classroom to A River Runs Through It.

In her memoir, Lore Ferguson Wilbert draws connections between her life and the forest‘s understory.

Danielle Chapman’s lustrous memoir is at its best when she holds her family’s Confederate history up to the light.

Dana Trent’s heartbreaking and hilarious book eschews the conventional American rags-to-riches arc.

Grace Loh Prasad’s memoir shows how the death of parents, for a child of immigrants, represents the vanishing of entire worlds.

In a blend of memoir and scholarly inquiry, Megan Sweeney challenges readers to take clothing seriously.

Amy Butler’s memoir is a story of relentless striving and continued failures. In other words, it’s a story of the church.

Five new memoirs by women who left evangelicalism

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s fractured and stirring memoir is haunted by war—and religion.

Beth Nguyen’s second memoir is a deep dive into the void of a mother’s absence and the silence surrounding it.

Keenan Norris’s sobering book explores Chicago’s role in forging the identity of the Black man in modern America.

Washed Ashore is, at its heart, about a man growing up while raising children.

Javier Zamora’s memoir chronicles the harrowing solo journey he made from El Salvador to the US at age nine.

In Alejandra Oliva’s new memoir, she describes how her body becomes an archive of migrants’ stories.

Sikh educator and activist Simran Jeet Singh says no. I’m not so sure.

Suzanne Robertson didn’t meet “life” on death row. She met a man named Cecil who loved cheesecake.

In either case, Elizabeth McCracken’s account of losing a mother is wrenching and tender.