Memoir
It’s the wreckage of alcoholism, not the road to recovery, that makes for enthralling reading
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, novelist, columnist, bestselling essayist and assistant professor at Colombia University, makes for bracing reading. Clever,…
Fried squid, stale sweat and sensuality in Ian Buruma’s Tokyo
In 1975, the 24-year-old Ian Buruma (now an award-winning essayist and historian, and the editor of the New York Review…
Enduring life under Chairman Mao
Rao Pingru is 94, and a born storyteller. His gripping graphic narrative weaves in and out of the violent, disruptive…
The ordeal of being married (twice) to John Bellany
Misery memoirs are in vogue. There is much misery in this harrowing account of married life with John Bellany (1942–2013)…
The futile gang wars of New York
I’ve interviewed a lot of rappers over the years and always feel a little grimy when I find myself nudging…
The misery of policing the US–Mexico border
Francisco Cantú’s mother is surprised when he announces he’s joining the Border Patrol and going to work in the Arizona…
Laura Freeman reads her way out of anorexia
It is hard to be honest about anorexia. The illness breeds deceit and distortion: ‘It thrives on looking-glass logic. It…
The best way to escape my abusive family was to write novels
Early on in Amy Tan’s 1989 bestseller, The Joy Luck Club, a Chinese concubine slices a chunk of flesh from…
It’s not a wave’s crest, but its translucent interior that surfers dream of
Surfing has come of age. Like rock and roll, it was once strictly for young people, edgy and alternative and…
How Lucky Lucan begged me for money shortly before mistakenly murdering the nanny
A Moment in Time reminded me of the sort of British expatriate women I used to meet in the south…
Despite her inability to talk or swallow, Genevieve Fox brims with joie de vivre
A good, solid life-threatening illness can be the making of a writer. This has certainly been the case for Genevieve…
Never had it so good: British novelists in the 1980s
In 1990, the BBC’s adaptation of David Lodge’s culture-clash novel Nice Work won an award at a glitzy soirée in…
A master of Norwegian wood
Ole Thorstensen has been a carpenter for 25 years. A master craftsman, in fact. He is busy working on a…
What will Katie Hopkins do next?
In her memoir Rude, the former Mail Online columnist Katie Hopkins reveals her true self. She does this by accident,…
Secrets of an abused aristocratic childhood
Charles Duff’s memoir tells a sad tale of cruelty and betrayal with spry wit rather than bitter resentment. Notwithstanding the…
Art and aspiration
When Adam Gopnik arrived in Manhattan in late 1980 he was an art history postgrad so poor that he and…
Descent into hell
It’s awful, but the surname Rausing (once synonymous only with the Tetrapak fortune) now summons up a terrible stench in…
Creature comforts
As naturalist, educator and writer, John Lister-Kaye was for many years a voice in the wilderness. In 1976, when nature…
Homer Simpson meets Homer
Milan Kundera has said that Homer’s Odyssey was the first novel. I’m not so sure — the verse kind of…
Manning up
Is this the best book I’ve ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is, I thought, the first…
Watching from the wings
The story of Sweetpea Slight is a footnote to a footnote in the annals of British theatre. Even her name…
Some insights into autism
The Reason I Jump, by the autistic Japanese teenager Naoki Higashida, was a surprise bestseller in 2013. Rendered as a…
In grandmother’s treasure-chest
Juliet Nicolson examines women’s lives and changing fashions through a rich hoard of buttons for all occasions
The King of Greece tells it like it really was
Athens Viewed from Mars, this is a sunny, peaceful city. Up close, however, things ain’t what they used to be.…
Diana Athill finally accepts ‘Old Woman’ status, aged 98
There’s something reassuring about 98-year-old Diana Athill. She’s stately and well-ordered, like the gardens at Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, her…
