CategoryMEMOIR

1. Once upon a time, around 2014, I began writing What’s Mine. It will be a novel about someone whose home gets invaded by this annoying person, I wrote to my agent. It turns out this annoying person may be the true owner of this home. How does the main character find out what is rightfully his, how far does he want to go back into history, and would he be willing to share? “Don’t worry,” I...

When school’s out for summer, I’ll often reach for feel-good teacher memoirs like Teacher Man by Frank McCourt (2005), or Freedom Writers Diary by Erin Gruwell (1999), later for the screen in a 2007 film starring Hilary Swank. Although I’ve gotten weary and disheartened by so many memoirs by young, inexperienced white people changing BIPOC students’ lives overnight, my hunger for “teacher...

Last November, I made a birthday cake from scratch for my daughter, and both of my darling kids pitched in to help. My son wanted to help mix the ingredients and make the strawberry reduction for the frosting, while my daughter, ever the artist, wanted to frost and decorate the finished product. It was a blissful afternoon that resulted in a delightfully fluffy vanilla cake with decadent...

Campbell McGrath is among South Florida’s most revered poets recognized with the MacArthur Genius Award, a Kingsley Tufts poetry Award and by admirers from Robert Pinsky to Elizabeth Alexander. His newest collection is Fever of Unknown Origin and on this edition of The Literary Life, we celebrate its publication with a reading at the Coral Gables location of Books & Books. Introducing...

On the first anniversary of her death I am thinking, as I often do, of Melissa Bank, author of The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing and The Wonder Spot. She and I met in graduate school in 1985, while pursuing MFAs in fiction.When we werent struggling over our writing, we read and critiqued each others work: Why wasnt it smarter/funnier/lovelier/subtler/clearer? Would anyone other than our...

I wroteThe Loverto encounter an alternate version of myself. Who would I have been had I made different choices? Like Allison, the primary narrator ofThe Lover, I am a half-Jewish Canadian who moved to Tel Aviv for graduate school. Like her, I was a blossoming academic; like her, I was in love with ancient Jewish texts, with a particular fascination with the lives of words. And like Allison, I...

How I Became A Modern Bootlegger

My name, like many Ethiopian names, has a story. When I was conceived, my mother had long been suffering from endless bleeding and pain that she later learned were caused by uterine cancer. The bleeding stopped and the pain went away soon after I was born, so she named me Mihret: mercy. She wanted Mihret AbGods mercybut that was often used for boys, so she opted for the shorter version...

Robert Gottlieb, the great American editor who died last month at the age of ninety-two, often said that there were two ways of being a publisher: to follow, i.e., give the people what they knew they wanted; or lead: show them what you knew they ought to want. Bob was brilliant at both. He was the last and arguably the most successful of the editor-publishers, those larger-than-life characters...

There was a secret in my family when I was growing up. We could talk about it at home, but we couldnt mention it to anyone else, not even to other relatives. In 1954, at the age of sixteen, my father was diagnosed with Hansens disease, commonly known as leprosy, and sent to a federal institution for treatment in Carville, Louisiana where he stayed until 1963. Leprosy is perhaps the most...