I don’t know why this is first dawning on me about my own taste in books. But as I review the list of authors I’ve talked with for this series, I realize I’m especially drawn to memoirs, novels and story collections in which the author or protagonist is at odds with one parent or both, and wrestles with feeling like a tremendous disappointment to them. …more

Every so often I receive an email from the New York Times reminding me of the Times’ Policy on Ethical Journalism, …more

I didn’t expect to like The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt, Jon-Jon Goulian’s memoir …more

When I tell people my greatest fears around writing memoir – namely of upsetting family members by writing about them and/or revealing to them less “virtuous” aspects of myself – this suggestion almost always arises: “Why don’t you just fictionalize?” …more

A lot of writers were upset by Neil Genzlinger’s anti-memoir screed in The New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago. …more

Nick Flynn wasn’t writing memoir yet in his early twenties—nor anywhere near publishing—when a memoirist’s worst nightmare came true for him. His mother read a fictionalized “story” he’d written in one of his college notebooks, about a woman struggling in ways that she was, too. Shortly after she found the notebook, Flynn’s mother mentioned her son’s story in the suicide note she left behind after fatally shooting herself. …more

For a brief second in my late twenties, I considered working topless. I knew a girl who did. She tried to persuade me to join her, saying it was easy and the money was great. I was having a particularly hard time, financially; that was part of it. …more

Novelist Darin Strauss hadn’t planned on writing Half A Life, his memoir about the most painful experience of his life: inadvertently killing a girl when he was eighteen, after she suddenly – possibly suicidally – swerved her bike in front of his car. …more

Even before a lending library copy of The Adderall Diaries arrived in my mailbox some time in the summer of 2009, I knew I’d be hooked. A colleague had recommended it, saying it was a gripping memoir that interwove threads of an edgy personal narrative and a murder trial. She was right. I plowed though the book in a day or two. …more

A few months ago, Emily Gould posted something on one of her blogs that got me choked up. She wrote about the difficult time she and her mother have been having since the publication of Gould’s memoir in essays …more

When I emailed Shalom Auslander, inviting him to help me summon the courage necessary to write first-person non-fiction my parents might not like, he wrote back: “Any time I can help drive a wedge between family members, I’m happy to try.” …more

As a writer of first-person nonfiction, I have lately been paralyzed with fear, mostly about hurting other people through the stories I tell. …more