Memoir

The appeal of a book called Horse Crazy risks being limited to those who are. Yet many moments in Sarah Maslin Nir’s restorative memoir will chime with readers indifferent to things horsey. Part love letter, part reportage, it niftily braids together her family history, the history of horses, and the stories of the humans on and around them. The result is a tender and at times funny book about belonging. Nir grew up between New York City and the tip of Long Island. Her parents — struggling professionals, ‘two doctors seeking to climb a ladder of affluence’ — had bought a Park Avenue apartment for $45,000 and a beach shack

Somewhere or other Martin Amis remarks that the reason we have very little idea of what it feels like to go into space is that no astronaut so far can write. If we know very well what it felt like to go through a tropical typhoon, that’s because there was a Joseph Conrad able to tell us about it. Something similar might be said about the experience of real stardom. Although many great actors have published autobiographies, with or without the help of ghost writers, there are vanishingly few that combine honesty with an ability to write. Since David Niven’s unreliable but brilliantly authentic autobiographies, such as The Moon’s a

You can’t say he didn’t warn us. In the final sentence of his previous book, Heat, a joyously gluttonous exploration of Italian gastronomy, Bill Buford announced that he would be crossing the Alps: ‘I have to go to France.’ And here he is, in Dirt, another rollicking, food-stuffed entertainment, determined to unearth, as it were, the secrets of haute cuisine. Lyon, being the gastronomic capital of France, is where he decides to dig in, having uprooted his family (wife, twin toddlers) to facilitate his investigations. Gourmets and gourmands will savour this account of his five-year adventure — and so will students of the author’s curious, compelling character. Famous in literary

This book made me almost weep with nostalgia, but heaven knows what today’s snowflakes will make of it. Fleet Street working conditions were horrendous — the offices were filthy, and covered in a thick pall of cigarette smoke. There’d be frequent wastepaper bin fires when someone threw a smouldering cigarette into a bin full of paper and a male journalist would pee on it to put it out. (Nobody had bottles of water on their desks in those days.) The noise was ear-splitting, with everyone shouting into their phones above the constant clatter of Remingtons. When the presses started to roll around 4 p.m., the whole building shook. ‘Actually,’ Julie

One hot summer’s morning, as a nine-year-old girl living on the rim of a Scottish loch in the hotel owned by her parents, Sue Black was unaware she was about to ‘leave those days of innocence behind’. A man delivering groceries sexually assaulted her. Many years later, Black imagines how this unspeakable childhood trauma might have been written into her very bones. Extreme stress can cause a temporary halt in the growth of a child’s arms or legs, which leaves a ‘Harris line’ that is visible on X-ray. This white mark would have said what she couldn’t. The abuse remained secret for a decade, and when she finally told her

Every so often the past makes a pass at you. An old school report, a train ticket, a curl from a first haircut falls out of an envelope and sends you tumbling back through the decades. For most of us these things are flotsam and jetsam, of momentary interest, but for Rachel Morris they are vital. It is partly that she works in museums, so is deeply invested in the past, and partly that her family history is so mysterious, fragmentary and ‘soaked in sadness’ that she relies on ‘things’ to help her piece together where she came from, and who she is. This book has two strands. First, it’s

Whatever would Robert Johnson, self-styled King of the Delta Blues, have made of the Black Lives Matter movement? His was certainly a life that mattered, but it was lived at a time when black lives mattered not a jot to white America. The circumstances of his death in 1938, at the age of 27 (he was probably poisoned by a jealous rival), demonstrate the disenfranchised existence of any peripatetic black performer in Depression-era USA. The murder was never investigated and his body was dumped in an unmarked grave. And that would have been that had he not recorded 29 songs that represented the paradigm of delta blues for pale young

John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion. Part Beat, part hippy, part punk, he was a gay, sexually active poet who tells us that he loved to do it ‘endlessly’. He was therefore very popular among New York’s avant garde, many of whom were gay and passive: ‘I was young and beautiful and that got me what I wanted, and all I wanted was sex. I had all the money I needed; my parents gave me an allowance and paid my bills.’ Such boyish candour sets the tone of this memoir, which is a feast of exuberant

In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex Halberstadt’s father — the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards — attests: ‘There is no more to be gained from sifting through the past than through cigarette ashes.’ Halberstadt, a Soviet-born American writer, doesn’t agree. Aged nine, soon after leaving Moscow with his family and defecting to the West, he began having a recurring nightmare in which he was chased by a ferocious bulldog, a dream that

A book about breaking confidences, not to mention friendships, rather begs the same in return. Reading Anne Applebaum’s brief memoir of the world going mad around her sparked a memory of my own. It is a couple of days after the Brexit vote, and several hundred of us have gathered in London for the memorial service of a recently departed friend. The ceremony was hardly over before Applebaum and her husband, the former Polish defence minister Radek Sikorski, started picking political fights with the other guests, including some very old friends. ‘Don’t go near Anne and Radek,’ one mutual friend said to me, signalling to the visibly furious couple: ‘They’re

What can we ever know about our family’s past? How do we love those closest to us when doing so brings us to the edge of insanity? Nicole Chung’s All You Can Ever Know and Sam Mills’s The Fragments of My Father explore both of these questions. Chung’s memoir takes on a sleuth-like quality as she describes the process of uncovering her birth family. Born weeks premature, she was put up for adoption by her Korean-American parents, who feared she wouldn’t survive. Throughout her childhood, the reasons behind her adoption were presented as solid and comforting: ‘The doctors told them you would struggle all your life. Your birth parents were

This is not a rip-roaring, gonzo gambling adventure. By page 66 this cautious, thoughtful author has still never played a hand of poker in her life. She has read, re-read, dissected and annotated poker textbooks. She has scribbled notes while trying to keep up with her power-walking mentor, the poker legend Erik Seidel, as he tells her she’ll need to develop the ability to be reckless. This is a swot’s progress, a fish-out-of-water experiment. It’s hard to imagine her taking on, say, Devilfish in Vegas. As she finally joins a charity tournament on page 115, I’ll admit to thinking, this had better go somewhere. And it does. Within 18 months