Tag: memoir

Beautiful Country: A Memoir by Qian Julie Wang

For the first three-quarters or so of this book, I was absolutely enthralled. Qian Julie Wang tells the story of her relatively prosperous, if politically oppressed life in Northern China before her Ba Ba emigrates to America, followed by herself and her Ma Ma five years later. They overstay their visas, becoming undocumented while Ba …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2021/09/14/beautiful-country-a-memoir-by-qian-julie-wang/

A Devil to Play by Jasper Rees

A friend whose son plays the French horn was struck by the quality of Jasper Rees’ writing and sent me a copy of A Devil to Play, thinking that I would enjoy this memoir of renewing acquaintance with a musical instrument abandoned in Rees’ final years of school, and of course she was completely right. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2017/07/22/a-devil-to-play-by-jasper-rees/

Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson

Just shy of halfway through Life Among the Savages, Shirley Jackson relaxes and lets her characters — her immediate family, for this is a memoir — tell their stories without too much authorial interference. Before that, the set pieces feel a bit like set pieces, and it has a sense of an author putting on …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/09/04/life-among-the-savages-by-shirley-jackson/

Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology And My Harrowing Escape by Jenna Miscavige Hill & Lisa Pulitzer

Having just finished a bunch of Orwell, this was both mind-boggling and horribly sympathetic. She describes growing up in a state of repression more suited to communism or a paranoid dictatorship a la North Korea than to any religion that purports to help people self-actualize. I applaud her for having the intelligence to see that …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2015/07/24/beyond-belief/

Names for the Sea by Sarah Moss

“It’s time for me to read Names for the Sea,” I told the friend who had sent me a copy. Some books are like that, resting placidly in the to-be-read pile for months before suddenly announcing, somehow, that it is time to read them. And indeed it was; despite a personal schedule that veers from …

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/09/28/names-for-the-sea-by-sarah-moss/