Memoirs

Memoir, we are told, is the new growth genre within publishing. It used to be the preserve of the famous and successful, but now it has expanded to include anyone with a story to tell, whether heartwarming and inspirational or downbeat and miserable (but eventually inspirational). Many of these memoirs are New York Times bestsellers and can change the weather in the industry, helped by their prominence within such high-profile book clubs as Reese Witherspoon’s and Oprah’s. But what if the story in a memoir’s pages is exaggerated or simply fabricated?  Turning one’s life into invention may not be so much a lie as a gift for fiction, but when it comes to this area, it is deeply frowned upon from all sides.

We all know we’re supposed to draw a line between the artist and the art. The veteran English essayist Geoff Dyer himself once had cause to remind me, mid-enthusiastic gabble, that his book on D.H. Lawrence was, in fact, “a conceit.” But as a reader often more interested in the lives of writers than their works, I must confess the idea of a full-blown memoir – finally! – from Dyer had me excited. I was not disappointed.

Harvey Weinstein has a memorable walk-on role in Keith McNally’s memoir I Regret Almost Everything. Taking a break from being New York’s most celebrated restaurateur, McNally wrote and directed a film called End of the Night that was screened at Cannes in 1990. Its auteur hoped that Weinstein, who distributed the previous year’s Palme D’Or-winning picture Sex, Lies, and Videotape, would warm to it. He was blunt: “I didn’t like your film and I’m not going to buy it.” As McNally swallows the shot, there’s a chaser. “But I’d still like to come to the after-party.” McNally admires Weinstein’s honesty, if little else. So I’m going to be straight, too. I didn’t enjoy I Regret Almost Everything. This is a shame, because the ingredients are promising.

In 2024, a Swiss company called FinalSpark claimed to have built the world’s first computer processor fired by human brain cells. To do this, the company evidently took small samples of living brain tissue, and — so the press release says — “connected them to specialized electrodes to perform computer processing and digital analog conversions to transform neural activity into digital information.” Frankenstein undertones aside, the whole FinalSpark initiative raises the issue of how far a computer can be humanized, made not only to respond with factual accuracy but with something approaching emotional intelligence.

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.

A recent controversy rocked the literary world when coverage of author Blake Butler’s memoir, Molly, about his late wife, notable poet Molly Brodak, hit tabloids and spun for the worst. The coverage sparked debate over the ethics of writing about relationships, as online attackers made accusations that the widower weaponized Brodak’s private life and exploited her death for fame or revenge.   Claims gained ground that it was a “shameless cash grab,” “literary revenge porn,” or that it shouldn’t have been published due to privacy concerns, since the memoir reveals Butler’s discovery of his late wife’s affairs after her passing.

Biological differences exist between men and women. Hamas lacks a justifiable reason to kill Israelis. Joe Biden won the 2020 election fair and square. Vaccines work. These are truths which, depending on the political class you’re speaking to, you can no longer say in public. Reading Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me, I thought, “We should add ‘the Free Britney Movement was wrong’ to the unspeakable truths list.” Two years into her freedom, Spears should celebrate her memoir as her umpteenth comeback. She should be sitting down with Oprah, confessing what really led to her 2007 breakdown, and releasing a new album pegged to The Woman in Me.

Exclusive! * Exclusive! * Exclusive! An advance excerpt of the forthcoming tell-all memoir from the battle lines of America under siege by the world’s bravest investigative journalist, Jim Acosta. ‘Will the president tell the truth?’ I generally like to start with questions like that because, at a time when American is occupied by the spirit of Donald Trump, it always throws his spokesmen off base. It’s asking questions like that that made me Chief White House Correspondent for CNN. It’s a big job. But it’s the job I was born for. Some people have a sense of destiny. I guess I am one. I have always been known for my courageous truth-telling. It’s one reason my colleagues in the press corps idolize me.

I’ve Served My Time in Hell By John F. Kelly This memoir by Trump’s resigned White House chief of staff takes its title from the Vietnam-era GI mantra: ‘When I die, I’m going straight to heaven because I’ve served my time in hell.’ The former Marine Corps general likens his tenure at the White House to ‘simultaneous waterboarding and colonoscopy.’ At one point he was so depressed that he tried to hang himself from a chandelier in the East Room, but was interrupted by a tour group. He chafes at criticism that he failed to moderate Trump’s wilder impulses.

Great novelists come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing they all share is a status of half-belonging. If they had no foot in the world at all, they could hardly understand it; if they completely belonged, they could hardly understand what was distinctive. One of the pleasures of this excellent biography is fully appreciating the peculiar, liminal, not-quite-successful position Powell wrote from, and described with great exactness. In half a dozen social and professional milieux, he was a tolerated, perhaps useful minor presence, like a spare man at dinner. From the standpoint of a rather failed editor, screenwriter, soldier, socialite, he stood by and watched the world. In each case, one suspects, the subjects hardly realized they were being observed.