This Is How

This Is How

Rating:  This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More for Young and Old Alike, by Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin’s Press (2012), 240 pages. Fans of Dry, Running With...
Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa

Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa

Rating:  Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa, by Peter Godwin. Grove Press (1996), 418 pages. “I think I first realized something was wrong when our next-door neighbor, oom Piet Oberholzer, was murdered. I must have been about six then.” Is this not a just-right...
Let’s Take the Long Way Home

Let’s Take the Long Way Home

Rating:  Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship, by Gail Caldwell. Random House (2010), 190 pages. Let’s Take the Long Way Home is Caldwell’s story of her friendship with the writer Caroline Knapp who died of cancer in 2002....
Stitches

Stitches

Rating:  Stitches:  A Memoir, by David Small. W.W. Norton & Company (2009), 329 pages. This memoir is the biggest surprise of the year for me. I had not intended to read Stitches as I’m not much of a graphic book fan, but the nonstop rave reviews it kept...
Sickened

Sickened

Rating:  Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, by Julie Gregory.  Bantam Books (2003), 246 pages. This is the most one-of-a-kind memoir I’ve ever read. It is incomparable in its horror—even within the subcategory of memoirs featuring...