All posts tagged: memoir

The 5 biggest revelations from Sylvester Stallone’s memoir

The 5 biggest revelations from Sylvester Stallone’s memoir

Published by Daniella Wilson

Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Membership today. Join today Already a member? Log in Many people told Sylvester Stallone he’d never make it as an actor. In his new memoir, The Steps, the 80-year-old movie star recounts the litany of rejections, setbacks and just plain insults he faced on the road to becoming one of the biggest celebrities of the 1980s. As has become Hollywood legend, Stallone eventually figured out that if he wanted to see his face blown up to the size of a movie poster, he’d have to create the part himself. After writing the script for his breakthrough movie Rocky, he famously turned down multiple huge financial offers to give up the script so that another actor could play the titular boxer from Philadelphia. That story will get its own big-screen treatment later this year in Peter Farrelly’s aptly named biopic I Play Rocky. Stallone sets down his own memories of the struggle to get Rocky made in The Steps, with …

The truth about Soviet mail-order brides: Inside Katya Suvorova’s new memoir

The truth about Soviet mail-order brides: Inside Katya Suvorova’s new memoir

Published by Sam Flores

It’s never been a more terrifying time to be an undocumented immigrant in America. Despite countless protests and pushback, ICE agents continue to patrol the streets. In July, Colombian immigrant Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Biddeford, Maine, during a routine traffic stop. But what about the white-passing undocumented immigrants that seem to slip through the system? The ones who blend in so seamlessly (despite the thick accents of some)? We forget they are also legally not supposed to be here. Specifically, those from Eastern Europe, Russia and the former Soviet Union. And what about those young, desperate women who suggestively posed for the camera as the Soviet Union collapsed all around them, hoping to be chosen by an American man? Book Review Ungrateful Immigrant Daughter: A Memoir From the Child of a Mail-Order Bride By Katya Suvorova Alcove Press: 352 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. Katya Suvorova’s searing debut …

Tara Westover to Publish New Memoir in 2027

Tara Westover to Publish New Memoir in 2027

Published by Jenni Sidey

It’s been eight years since Tara Westover’s Educated made its mark on the book world, and now we’re getting a follow-up. Westover will publish Brothers and Sisters in 2027, an autobiographical story focusing on the period after the publication of her bestselling debut. The 2018 memoir documented Westover’s experience growing up in isolation in rural Idaho in a Mormon fundamentalist and survivalist family, one where hospital visits and Western medical care were strictly forbidden and all of their seven children were kept out of school. Westover was 17 the first time she stepped into a classroom, enrolling against her family’s wishes at Brigham Young University. She’d eventually go on to study at Harvard and earn a PhD from Cambridge University. Talk about beating the odds. Brothers and Sisters will address the backlash Westover faced in the wake of the memoir’s publication, after which she had to hire a lawyer; her family—including two brothers who initially expressed support for Westover’s writing and claims of repeated abuse by another one of her siblings—now deny Westover’s version of …

How Guadalupe Rosales preserves East LA girlhood in new memoir

How Guadalupe Rosales preserves East LA girlhood in new memoir

Published by Sam Flores

This story is part of Image’s September Image Makers issue, your guide to this city that refuses to be any one thing. For those of us in love with the past, libraries are magnetic. These quiet temples attract grown-ups hungry for books that preserve our childhood worlds. They also draw kids curious about places lost to time. When 11-year-old Guadalupe Rosales needed somewhere to escape, she hid at the East Los Angeles Library. As the long-haired tomboy wandered the stacks, the library’s spirits recognized that she was an old soul with a taste for nostalgia. Using their invisible arms, they ushered the girl to shelves lined with art, history and photography books, teaching Rosales how to appreciate the eerie, the tragic, the mysterious, the romantic, the ephemeral and the hard-to-find. These ghosts developed her artistic and archival instincts. The Midcentury Modern library where Rosales first inhaled the aroma of old books has changed. It’s still in East L.A., but its Maya-inspired replacement looks different. It’s also bigger. The Lorena Street Elementary student who once haunted …

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

Published by Jenni Sidey

The floor is being mopped when the phone rings, and the voice on it belongs to the other woman’s husband. It is 21 March 2020, the first night of spring, four days into lockdown on Martha’s Vineyard. By six the next morning the marriage is over, the house and the apartment have been offered up, custody has been surrendered without being asked for, and the man is on a boat off the island. Strangers by Belle Burden begins there, which is a problem the book has to solve, because almost every divorce memoir begins with the same scene and then asks the reader to care about a stranger’s grief for three hundred pages. It solves it in two ways, and both are worth being specific about. Where Strangers by Belle Burden Sits The divorce memoir is currently a crowded shelf. Leslie Jamison, Lyz Lenz and Maggie Smith have all published in the last few years, and the pipeline that produced this one, a Modern Love column expanded into a book, is by now a recognised …

Release of blockbuster Sonia Gandhi memoir in doubt after publisher ‘demands changes to Modi references’

Release of blockbuster Sonia Gandhi memoir in doubt after publisher ‘demands changes to Modi references’

Published by Daniella Wilson

The autobiography of Sonia Gandhi, the matriarch of India’s opposition Congress party, has become the subject of a controversy after its prospective publisher allegedly sought changes to passages about prime minister Narendra Modi. Belonging: A Journey of Love was first announced by Penguin Random House imprint Alfred A Knopf in August and slated for release on 10 November. The memoir traces Gandhi’s life from post-war Italy to her marriage to former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, the assassinations of her husband and his mother, former prime minister Indira Gandhi, and her eventual entry into politics. Penguin Random House India (PRHI) was expected to publish and distribute the book in the country but dropped it after negotiations with Gandhi’s representatives broke down. The breakdown was attributed to the publisher’s demands for “editorial changes and deletions” that Gandhi’s side rejected, according to the Indian Express. The publisher’s lawyers reportedly raised objections to several passages and sent lists of proposed changes to Gandhi’s representatives during negotiations that lasted at least two months. The discussions were initially “cordial” but …

Haruki Murakami to Publish a New Memoir This Fall

Haruki Murakami to Publish a New Memoir This Fall

Published by Jenni Sidey

Beloved Japanese author Haruki Murakami will publish a new memoir this fall. Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story will be published by Knopf, and it will be translated into English by Philip Gabriel. The memoir expands upon an essay published by Murakami in The New Yorker from 2019 called “Abandoning a Cat.” The memoir will focus on what it means to be a father, exploring the relationship between the author and his own dad. It’s further contextualized by the post-World War II era in Japan, and Murakami promises a signature cat story, too. Abandoning a Cat clocks in at only 80 pages, and it is not Murakami’s first foray into personal nonfiction. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is reflective work about the intersections of Murakami’s passions for running and writing, while the 2022 book Novelist as a Vocation explores his thoughts on being a writer. Murakami is a globally beloved voice whose career launched in 1979. Abandoning a Cat: A Personal Story will release October 20. The Book Riot Newsletter Join …

What Kind of Memoir Should You Write?

What Kind of Memoir Should You Write?

Published by Jenni Sidey

A first-time memoir writer who hasn’t read many memoirs has an extra hoop to jump through when figuring out how to structure her own. When I determined to write a memoir after having published several nonfiction books and a novel, I realized that memoir isn’t one of the genres I most often read. I got busy reading some right away. What I discovered is that there are many different ways to structure a memoir. Consider the following forms, with examples, that I found enlightening: 1. Memoirs in essays If you’ve already written some essays, or perhaps gotten some published over the years, consider adapting or collecting them into a cohesive volume. Examples: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives – a memoir in essays by Mary Laura Philpott (Atria Books, 2022). “It hit me,” she writes, “as we left our son again at the beginning of August, that I was standing at the beginning of a string of endings, proud and bereft at once.” This is from an essay in the middle of the book …

‘Unhelpful’: Top Democrats say Jill Biden’s memoir is reopening 2024 wounds

‘Unhelpful’: Top Democrats say Jill Biden’s memoir is reopening 2024 wounds

Published by Sam Flores

WASHINGTON — Democrats have spent nearly two years trying to move past the 2024 presidential election. Now, Jill Biden’s new memoir is forcing them to relive it. Her new book, “View From the East Wing,” which comes out Tuesday, is already drawing sharp rebukes from top Democrats, some of whom say it is a poorly timed and misleading account of the events that led to the demise of her husband’s presidency. “Unhelpful. … Ripping open a healing scab is never helpful,” John Morgan, a Florida trial attorney who was a major fundraiser for Biden’s 2024 campaign, told The Times. “In my opinion, she was the main problem. She loved the life and didn’t want it to end.” Those type of frustrations erupted last week as the former first lady began promoting her book, including in a sit-down interview with CBS News airing Sunday, in which she said she thought the sitting president was having a stroke as she watched the 2024 presidential debate. “I was frightened, because I had never ever seen Joe like that before or …

In new memoir, former Buddhist nun talks the pursuit of enlightenment

In new memoir, former Buddhist nun talks the pursuit of enlightenment

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Raised in the Baptist tradition in Oklahoma, a young Paldrom Catharine Collins was a seeker. Her search for spiritual truth led her to the Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhist monastery in New York, where she spent five years as Buddhist nun.  There, she changed her name, took vows, and tried to become a “perfect nun,” according to her new memoir.  Then she left.  Now in her mid-70s and an addiction counselor, Collins shares the complicated story of her time at the monastery in her upcoming book, “Girl in a Box: Seeking Enlightenment as a Tibetan Buddhist Nun,” which she calls a “love letter to the Tibetans.” “This book is for anyone who’s been on a spiritual search, or is thinking about going on a spiritual search, and for people who have been in some system and are feeling challenged by that,” said Collins in an interview with Religion News Service on April 20. “It’s as an inspiration to say, ‘Yeah, you can step outside of the system and still have the beauty of the teaching, …