Brain on Fire is the memoir of Susannah Cahalan, a New York Post reporter who at the age of twenty-four began experiencing symptoms of psychosis. These ranged from episodes of paranoia to personality changes to more neurological findings such as grand mal seizures and visual changes. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and alcohol withdrawal by different professionals until finally being admitted to the hospital following a series of seizures. Cahalan herself has little memory of the time after this point; she reconstructed most of […]
Like most people, he lied best by omission….
Mary Karr’s award-winning memoir of her early childhood in 1960s East Texas reads like a novel. This poet knows how to spin a yarn, and in this case, a mostly true story that focuses on the years she was about 6-8 years old. Mary and her older sister Lecia lived in a dysfunctional household, to say the least. At the center was their mother, an alcoholic who was battling depression and rages, the origins of which are revealed at the very end. Karr is an […]
The one where I’m glad I didn’t decide to walk to Canada…
One of my closest friends hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) a few years ago. She’s an experienced hiker; she did the Appalachian Trail a few years prior to that. (And we’re talking through-hike. All eleventy million miles of it. Both the AT and the PCT. This is something I would never do. I don’t pee outside, let alone hike. I’m not really sure how it is we’re friends.) Anyway, my hiker friend happened to be visiting while I was reading Wild, and I asked […]
Perhaps not Staggering Genius, but Heartbreaking and Profound
After reading his The Circle and then his latest, Your Fathers, Where Are They…?, I decided it was high time to go back to Egger’s first major work and see what all the fuss was about. Written when he was a mere twenty-two, this memoir/novel describes a difficult life starting with the death of both his parents from cancer within a month or two of each other, when Eggers is just 21, his younger brother Toph is just eight, his sister Beth is in law […]
If you’re at all familiar with Anthony Bourdain, you’ll know what you’re in for when you crack open this book. Biting humor, liberal cursing, and some of the most eloquent food porn I’ve ever read. I haven’t checked out any of his other books yet, so I was going in based on the public persona I’ve seen from TV (The Taste is my show, y’all.). I wasn’t surprised in the least that I loved and devoured this book. I’m never going to be anywhere need […]
's CBR6 Review No:20 ·
Genres: Biography/Memoir, Non-Fiction ·
Tags: #food, #memoir, anthony bourdain, medium raw ·
Shame Spirals and Taxidermy
This is one of those memoirs that makes you laugh out loud and then feel bad about laughing at some of the brutally honest things that Jenny Lawson reveals about her childhood, her relationship with her husband, and her battles with anxiety. I thought a lot about my friend, Fernanda, who was famous in college and after for writing extremely funny letters about her most embarrassing moments and how there’s a certain knack for revealing this information—walking the line […]
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