Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Big Books Issue 2001
Next of Kin Rick Bragg Gives His Family Tree Another Shake in Ava's Man | By Frank Diller
Speak, Memory Bashed By Oprah and Other Tales From the Memoir Trade | By Wendy Ward
The Little Girls Understand . . . Perhaps little girls are behind the popularity of memoirs. Long before the American Girls books, bef...
First Persons A Sampling of the Best Modern Memoirs
I'm With the Band: Confessions of a Groupie Better than the recent ego-stoked memoirs of the musicians she aspired to, uhh, know, "Miss Pamela"'... | By Stacey Mink
Goodbye to All That First published in 1929, this memoir by the poet and novelist (I, Claudius) remains the most immedia... | By Mahinder Kingra
Autobiography of a Face Poet Lucy Grealy survived cancer and wrote a book about it, like other fortunate hundreds before and... | By Lee Gardner
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica Though dirt poor and living in total obscurity when she died in 1960, Zora Neale Hurston had spent d... | By Afefe Tyehimba
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness Kay Redfield Jamison undertook to write about her personal experiences with manic depression after s... | By Eileen Murphy
Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity Primo Levi's memoir of his 10 months in Auschwitz is a masterpiece of Holocaust literature--not simp... | By Sandy Asirvatham
Harpo Speaks! Whether Harpo Marx's 1961 autobiography qualifies as a memoir is open to question, given that there'... | By Adele Marley
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930, but his parents reversed the usual Irish-American immigr... | By Heather Joslyn
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness At the start of this Memoir of Madness, novelist William Styron is about to receive the prestigious ... | By Eileen Murphy
My Own Country: A Doctor's Story Born of Indian parents and raised in Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese could hardly find a place less his o... | By Eileen Murphy
William Styron
At the start of this Memoir of Madness, novelist William Styron is about to receive the prestigious Prix Mondial del Duca. That event, which should have been one of the high points of his literary career, instead marked the onset of a crippling depression that nearly drove Styron to take his life. This extraordinary slip of a book (the paperback is only 84 pages) looks at the condition from the inside: Although Styron provides a surprising amount of information on the biochemistry of depression, his most valuable contribution to writing about the disorder comes from his eloquence and honesty in talking about his feelings of worthlessness and fear. Although critics referred to this 1990 book as an "essay," it contains the elements of dramatic fiction, with readers alternately empathizing with and fearing for Styron as he struggles with his depression. In the end, his simple decision to seek help provides the book's climactic closing.
More Stories
Going Short (9/23/2009)
Some authors simply prefer compact storytelling over the novel's wordy road
Let's Get Short (9/23/2009)
City Paper's Big Books Issue 2009 takes a look at fiction's overlooked gems
Neverending Stories (9/23/2009)
Short stories continue to be where sci-fi writers explore their big ideas
The View From the Hill (12/26/2001)
Resevoir Hill Residents in Their Own Write
Home Front (11/7/2001)
In The Struggle To Renew Reservoir Hill, Housing Is The Biggest Battleground
Growing Pains (10/10/2001)
A Reservoir Hill Childhood, Yesterday and Today
