60′s Nostalgia memoirs of growing up black
Both of these books are about growing up poor and black in the segregated south. That's proof that what was incredibly boring and mundane while you were living it as a child can years later become...
View ArticleBlind veteran finds his voice by writing
When I came back from Vietnam I wasn't doing too well, and writing the memoir helped me organize my thoughts. Putting my thoughts on paper was elevating for me. It was quite therapeutic. I needed it at...
View ArticleGood hair in the melting pot
My dark brown hair grew longer, and curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. Home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966, my great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always...
View ArticleSelf-image changes in step with society
by Jerry Waxler Henry Louis Gates, author of the memoir “Colored People,” grew up in Piedmont, a small town in the northeastern corner of West Virginia. The town was geographically in a hollow, and...
View ArticleHis Relationship to Girls Changed in this Scene
Henry Louis Gates grew up in a small town in West Virginia in the 1950s where he was taught he shouldn't associate with girls until he married one. Then a fractured hip landed him in a hospital in a...
View ArticleIs memoir a genre? Consider these matched pairs.
After I finished, I noticed a similar book near the top of my reading pile, "Black, White, and Jewish," by Rebecca Walker. Previously, I might have rejected it on the premise that one memoir about...
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