Memoir
The strain of keeping mum
Are all children of famous parents told they must have a book in them? Since Allegra Huston’s wonderful memoir Love…
Family matters
What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so…
Giving the game away
This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a…
Brains and beauty
There’s a kind of writing about LA that I am a sucker for. Gossipy, lyrical, with a surface of affectless…
The pain of forgetting
‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of…
Tough-minded and tender-hearted
Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the…
Taking French leave
With more than a dozen acclaimed novels to her name, not to mention short stories, poetry, a memoir and a…
A rude awakening
Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not…
The reluctant style guru
Alexandra Shulman says that she had ‘no desire to write an autobiography’ — so instead she has written about her…
Keeping faith
Imagine being on indefinite lockdown, imprisoned in a dark, underground, 6’ x 12’ cell, freezing in winter, boiling in summer…
The forsaken mermaid
Lamorna Ash came to the fishing port of Newlyn in south-west Cornwall to write a memoir. This is not unusual.…
A stranger to herself
How can you recover the teenage girl you were? Not just recall the memories and recount the events — this…
Trying not to get killed
Recollections of My Non-Existence is the Rebecca Solnit book I have been waiting for. I was born four years after…
Straight to number one
Pop music has always been, to those who love it, to some degree tribal or factional; fans like to carve…
An age-old problem
‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…
Escape into music
Were this a less good book than it is, it would be called How Bach Can Help You Grieve. As…
Apple of discord
Forty-seven years ago, Virago paperbacks, with their stylish green spines and hint-of-the-transgressive colophons of a red apple with a bite…
No stone unturned
Andrew Ziminski is the man who rebuilt the West Country. For 30 years, this skilled stonemason has renovated some of…
Can we have a pet instead?
When you’re not a mother it’s hard to imagine what motherhood is like. Anyone you know who becomes one assures…
Homage to Pieter the great
There is a vogue at the moment for books which use art as a vehicle for examining the writer’s wider…
From the lake of dreams…
Kapka Kassabova’s previous travel book, Border, was rightly acclaimed and won several prizes. The author travelled to the edge of…
… to endless wakefulness
The insomniac may come to dread the night’s solitude, but the next day poses the greater challenge. That’s when you…
Deborah Orr rages against her small-town upbringing
Unlike a lot of people in the media, I didn’t personally know Deborah Orr, but I know many who did,…
Reasons for remembering things: the refugee’s last resort
A family memoir is a dangerous thing to write: one has to balance between keeping one’s subjects happy and the…
The other half of Wham!
Have you heard the story about the time that Andrew Ridgeley, the 1980s heart-throb, refused to answer the door to…
