It’s often said that fact is stranger than fiction but as I’m a big fiction reader I don’t often test that theory. All that changed when I read Life From Scratch by Sasha Martin. Martin is well-known for her blog, Global Table Adventure, where, in the span of four years she cooked a meal from every country in the world. That alone is accomplishment enough to fill a memoir but ... Read More...
The Undertaker’s Daughter
Kate Mayfield takes readers into the world of her childhood in The Undertaker’s Daughter, a memoir that combines the unique circumstances of growing up in the 1960s in a small town in Kentucky while living above a funeral home. Through her we learn about a life and family held tight by the rituals of death. For Kate and her siblings, life was an odd combination of normalcy and ... Read More...
Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy
I have always believed my mother would live forever. While I have never said goodbye to my father without the thought crossing my mind that I might never see him again, my mother has seemed indestructible, fixed in my consciousness like a gnarled and stately tree that has taken root there. If she is ripped away at this moment in my life, she will take her roots with her and I ... Read More...
The Madwoman in the Volvo
I don’t generally begin a review by telling people to stop reading but if you are a man hand the laptop/iPad to your better half and go watch ESPN because I’m about to talk about a book about m-e-n-o-p-a-u-s-e. And, really, not even we women want to talk about it so I’m saving you a world of hurt. Now go away. Yes, it’s a natural part of life but while pregnancy is something ... Read More...
Mother’s Day: Glitter and Glue
Glitter and Glue is a memoir that begins with Kelly Corrigan deciding to take a year off and travel around the world with her friend Tracy in order to break her post-college real world slump. The plans she’d so carefully laid out were not working as she’d hoped, leaving her in a low paying non-profit job and living with her grandmother. The pragmatic advice from her mother ... Read More...
Levels of Life
You put two things together that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless. With these beautiful words Julian Barnes leads us into Levels of Life, his latest work. He begins with glimpses at the history of balloon aeronautics—when the act was still ... Read More...
