
Memories aren’t linear. Shame doesn’t subside with each confession. That is the world inside Kelle Groom’s memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl.
An archive of our reviews of memoirs, essay collections, and other works of creative nonfiction.

“That perhaps being amidst the undesecrated beauty of the wilderness meant I too could be undesecrated, regardless of what I’d lost or what had been taken from me, regardless of the regrettable things I’d done to others or myself or the regrettable things that had been done to me. Of all the things I’d been…
Set amid the dark, dingy streets of Boston where the homeless sleep on park benches or regroup in shelters to survive another day, Nick Flynn has one last opportunity to engage his father, a homeless, self-proclaimed novel writer.
Certain names in twentieth century music will always ring as champions. Born a little too late, I’ve never paid much attention to Jimi Hendrix’s music so when I stumbled across this biography, I decided to correct this wrong.
Paul “Ace” Frehley is alive and with no regrets. His rock and roll story is one of interest for musicians, aspiring guitarists and the KISS army— the multitude of fans.
How does home define a person? Does it seep into skin; into speech; into society? Lacy Johnson’s Trespasses: a Memoir explores these questions as she examines her struggle to escape home in order to discover it.
Any fan of Kevin Smith will immediately feel right at home with his fondness for four letter words…
In his memoir, In the Memory of the Map (University of Iowa Press, 2012), Christopher Norment introduces readers to cartography, otherwise known as map-making. Norment translates his experiences into written word through revealing his own map of life in pursuit of the trail ahead. It is through this picturesque book that readers are given a…
Graduate of Yale and Columbia Journalism School, Ted Morgan recounts his service to the French army in his memoir, My Battle of Algiers (Smithsonian Books, 2005).