Books Archive
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
There's a moving scene in Justin Cronin's Mary and O'Neil. O'Neil has just witnessed the birth of his first child. Alone in the hospital in the middle of the night, he makes calls to his relatives. Then he remembers his parents:
His parents have been dead for sixteen years, but he ...
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Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
You may have noticed that I've inherited the blogger's love of lists.
Today I'm going to list 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I've enjoyed reading. In most cases, that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.
Over time I want to ...
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Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008
I'm currently enjoying Body Parts, Hermione Lee's collection of essays on life writing. Just as Mark Bostridge's Lives for Sale did about four years ago, this book is renewing my recently waning interest in reading about biography. Here's a quick snippet:
[M]ost biographical facts are open to interpretation. But they do ...
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Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
I like this sketch by the Two Ronnies:
Apart from making me laugh, it reminds me of two things.
First, it reminds me that the way we're used to doing things, and the way that initially seems to make most sense, isn't the only way to do it. There's nothing absolute about ...
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Thursday, September 4th, 2008
It's strikingly common for works which merge fact and fiction to include some form of paratextual apology or explanation that fusses over the work's precise status.I've already touched on this when discussing Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman, whose 'Author's Note' tries to draw a line between the book's ...
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