Tag Archives: autobiography

A Year in Books/Day 214: Me

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  • Title: Me Stories of My Life
  • Author: Katharine Hepburn
  • Year Published: 1991 (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)
  • Year Purchased: Summer of 2010
  • Source: My momma
  • About: Dear Kate: You were such an iconoclast. I know, I know; what an over-used word. I’m not proud of trotting out something so stale, especially in reference to
    English: Photograph of the actress Katharine H...

    English: Photograph of the actress Katharine Hepburn in the 1932 play The Warrior’s Husband. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    someone as amazing as you were. Really, though, what choice do I have? What else is there? Rebel, nonpareil, maverick? Nonconformist, idol, icon? Legend, paragon, nonesuch? They’re all too pale, weak, humourless. You were too kick-ass to be so neatly boxed-in, anyway. Now let’s get to business. Continue reading →

A Year in Books/Day 169: Almost There The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman

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  • Title: Almost There The Onward Journey of a Dublin Woman
  • Author: Nuala O’Faolain
  • Year Published: 2003 (Riverhead Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2005/2006
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: I love O’Faolain’s straightforward and elegant prose style, proof that readability does not have to equal simplicity. Almost There is a follow-up to Are You Somebody, her searing and evocative first memoir. I loved it so much that I was truly giddy when I found this volume in the middle of a stack of clearance books. She is one of those naturalist prose-poets of the everyday, recounting the events of her turbulent life with warmth, grace and a total absence of pity or dramatics. Her candor is believable. True or not, it is a remarkable feat for a memoirist to achieve-and not once, but twice. To feel the full import of her story, and the rare beauty of her spare writing, I suggest reading the books back to back.
  • Motivation: Are You Somebody is one of my favourite contemporary memoirs.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 55: “I had waited to go on in a small dressing room, almost paralyzed with fear, because I knew my reputation and my family’s and Nell’s was going to be changed by the interview, and my standing with colleagues and bosses and former lovers and the nuns who’d taught me-anyone I could think of. But there really is such a thing as grace. It’s the word I want to use, anyway, for a rightness of behavior that kicks in out of nowhere.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 168: An Unfinished Woman

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  • Title: An Unfinished Woman
  • Author: Lillian Hellman
  • Year Published: 1969/This Edition: 1999 (Little, Brown and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: The Children’s Hour. The Little Foxes. Another Part of the Forest. Watch on the Rhine. The lady knew how to craft plays strong enough to withstand not only their first march across the footlights, but so brilliant as to be timeless decades later. In An Unfinished Woman-the first of three memoirs written in her twilight years-she breaks off pieces of her jaded public persona until something of the real Lillian shows through. Exactly what is anybody’s guess, but the feeling of rightness is there. Her writing is so forceful and engaging, and seemingly forthright, that it is easy to forget that any writer’s autobiography is by nature (if to varying degrees) a study in fiction. Writers are their own best characters, after all. She weaves such a fine story that the ratio of unadulterated fact to pure fiction to soaring imagination is basically immaterial. Her tale, her viewpoint, is riveting. Facts may be found elsewhere; this book is where the entertainment is located. It won the National Book Award. The foreword to this edition is by the incredible Wendy Wasserstein.
  • Motivation: I love plays. Love love them. As in, I want to go steady with them kind of love. Got it? They are my second favourite written medium. I also love weird, strong, talented, crazy-ass smart, contrary women.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 43: “I would like to say these many years later that I remember his questions. But I don’t, and for a good reason: he had already decided on whatever he meant to write and the questions were fitted to his decisions. So most of the time we didn’t know what he was talking about.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9

A Year in Books/Day 158: Bloomsbury Recalled

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  • Title: Bloomsbury Recalled
  • Author: Quentin Bell
  • Year Published: 1995 (Columbia University Press)
  • Year Purchased: 2002/2003
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: The author was the younger son of Vanessa and Clive Bell, two central figures in the Bloomsbury group (which was really just a loose network of friends, family and acquaintances). His aunt was, of course, novelist Virginia Woolf. Bloomsbury Recalled is his brief but excellently engaging memoir of the fascinating adults who formed his parents’ social and professional circles from WWI to the start of the next  great international conflict at the end of the 1930s. The little boy who grew up in a sticky web of conflicting personalities and crossed goals became an accomplished polymath with a distinctive, intelligent and highly amusing voice. His relaxed nature, probing wit and compelling birthright give this book a sparkle that the average Bloomsbury retrospective sorely lacks.
  • Motivation: Bloomsbury? Check. A relatively unbiased insider’s view? Check. Writers, artists and theorists? Oh my! Seriously, this book covers one of my favourite literary periods. That is reason enough.

    English: Portrait of Clive Bell

    English: Portrait of Clive Bell (Photo credit: Wikipedia). The author’s father.

  • Times Read: 3
  • Random Excerpt/Pages 11 & 12 : “I was not alarmed. I was convinced that I was not really consumptive; also, apart from the cough and high temperature, I did not feel at all ill. I enjoyed some fierce arguments with a clergyman, managed to do a little painting, and embarked upon historical research on the principality of Monaco for which I was totally unqualified.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

A Year in Books/Day 147: Bare Blass

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  • Title: Bare Blass
  • Author: Bill Blass
  • Year Published: 2002 (HarperCollinsPublishers)
  • Year Purchased: 2010
  • Source: My lovely momma
  • About: The loosely structured autobiography of the great American fashion designer is a fun, quick and riveting read. His perspective on national and international society of the mid-to-late 20th-century is considerably more interesting that what I expected. His retelling of his journey from the Indiana boy he never quite left behind to sophisticated man-of-the-world is complex, humorous and compelling, with detours that I never suspected. Yet, his writing voice is exactly what you would expect: barbed, candid, and smooth. By story’s end, it is obvious why he was welcomed with open arms by high society. Bonus: The book includes his apparently famous recipe for meatloaf.
  • Motivation: It was $1.00. My mom knew that I would find it interesting, as I am  a fashion history hobbyist. Well played, Momma. Well played.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 72: “Actually, what I was shooting for was swagger-a cross between Damon Runyan and the Duke of Windsor, or what fashion editor Sally Kirkland, after seeing my first show, called “the Scarsdale Mafia look.” I loved the expressive masculine style of the thirties. I didn’t give a damn about tastefulness.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 110: Ansel Adams An Autobiography

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  • Title: Ansel Adams An Autobiography
  • Author: Ansel Adams
  • Year Published: 1985/This Edition:1996 (Little, Brown and Company)
  • Year Purchased: 2000/2001
  • Source: Barnes & Noble clearance rack
  • About: Iconic is an over used word and idea. Very few people truly and permanently achieve that status. Ansel Adams, the Californian known for his crisp black and white nature photography, certainly deserves the label. His expansive, down-to-earth and gruff nature flies off the page, making 82 years of wide experience seem fresh, lively and interesting. For eight decades, he witnessed the extremes of a rapidly changing America; as a pioneering artist and activist, he was responsible for much of that transformation.

    A photo portrait of photographer Ansel Adams, ...

    A photo portrait of photographer Ansel Adams, which first appeared in the 1950 Yosemite Field School yearbook. Deutsch: Portrait des Fotografen Ansel Adams, erstmals 1950 im Jahrbuch der Yosemite Field School erschienen. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

  • Motivation: I love to learn what drives and shapes creative people and their processes.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 55: “The snapshot is not as simple a statement as some may believe. It represents something that each of us has seen-more as human beings than photographers-and wants to keep as a memento, a special thing encountered. The little icons that return from the photo-finisher provide recollections of events, people, places; they stir memories and create fantasies. Through the billions of snapshots made each year a visual history of our times is recorded in enormous detail.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2

A Year in Books/Day 108: On the Other Hand A Life Story

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  • Title: On the Other Hand A Life Story
  • Author: Fay Wray
  • Year Published: 1989 (St. Martin’s Press)
  • Year Purchased: ??
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: Fay Wray was much more than the beautiful blonde love interest of King Kong. She was multi-talented, whip-smart and determined; she made the tough transition from silent films to talkies while still in her early twenties; she fell in love with men of true intellect and ability (including the tragic Academy Award winning writer John Monk Saunders, her first husband). She was as ridiculously lovely at 90 as she was at 20, which I think speaks to certain rare inner qualities. She was working on a follow-up autobiography at the time of her death on August 8, 2004.
  • Motivation: If you’ve ever seen Fay Wray on film-or even a still photograph (see below)-you have the answer.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 56: “I rode a supposedly runaway horse and lay across the saddle, my head hanging down on one side of the horse, one foot tied to the stirrup on the far side. A crew member behind the camera shook his head, asking me silently not to do it.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9 1/2
    Publicity photo of Fay Wray for Argentinean Ma...

    Publicity photo of Fay Wray for Argentinean Magazine. (Printed in USA) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 91: An American Childhood

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  • Title: An American Childhood
  • Author: Annie Dillard
  • Year Published: 1987 (Harper & Row, Publishers)
  • Year Purchased: 1987
  • Source: My Mom.
  • About: Dillard’s impressionistic memoirs of growing up in Pittsburgh between the years 1950-1962.
  • Motivation: This is one of the definitive books of my girlhood. I nicked it from my Mom’s shelf in late autumn or early winter of 1987; I never gave it back. Why I honed in on this particular volume on that long-ago day is somewhat foggy, although I’ll venture to say that it was due to a combination of the title and boredom. I was in the midst of my own, although very different, American Childhood. What remains in my mind, as brilliant and clear as ice, is curling up on the floor next to my bed and reading it straight through in a couple of hours. Already a budding writer, with scores of stories, poems and plays to my name, I desperately wanted to be able to write like that: simply, divinely, forcefully. It’s twenty-five years later and my writing voice, developed long ago yet still tightening, transitioning, is nothing like Dillard’s; it contains no trace of my pubescent infatuation with her wordplay. What remains is a sense of gratefulness to one of my many literary heroines, one that I needed at an age when so many dreams scatter and fade away. Her book is a fine thread in the narrative of my formative years.
  • Times Read: 3 or 4 (all back in 1987/1988)
  • Random Excerpt/Page 51: “By the time I knew him, our grandfather was a vice-president of Pittsburgh’s Fidelity Trust Bank. He looked very like a cartoonist’s version of “vested interests.” In fact, he almost always wore a vest, and a gold watch on a chain; he was short and heavy; he had a small white mustache; he smoked cigars. At home, his thin legs crossed under his belly, he read the financial section of the paper, tolerant of children who might have been driven, in the long course of waiting for dinner, to beating their fingertips on his scalp.”
  • Happiness Scale: In importance and satisfaction to my young self,  is incalculable.

A Year in Books/Day 81: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame

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  • Title: Mortification Writers’ Stories of Their Public Shame
  • Editor: Robin Robertson
  • Year Published: 2003 (Harper Perennial)
  • Year Purchased: 2007/2008
  • Source: This was a gift from my Mom.
  • About: This volume offers up seventy first-hand, real-life stories of writers’ deeply humiliating encounters with the public. Names as luminous as Margaret Atwood, Edna O’Brien and Chuck Palahniuk grace the pages with their always-humorous tales of woe and embarrassment.
  • Motivation: My Momma loves to indulge the writer in me (which, to be real, comprises a good chunk of who I am). She knows how to make her girl happy!
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page xi: “While there are occasional undercurrents of seriousness in these stories-a desire for something between expiation and exorcism, perhaps-their main intention it to make us laugh, while feeling a strong sense of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. It is greatly to the credit of all the contributors that they have embraced their mortification so warmly-returning to the scene of the crime and leading us, hot-faced, through their hell.”
  • Happiness Scale: 8

A Year in Books/Day 74: ‘Tis Herself

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  • Title: ‘Tis Herself An Autobiography
  • Authors: Maureen O’Hara with John Nicoletti
  • Year Published: 2004 /This Edition: 2005 (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks)
  • Year Purchased: 2005
  • Source: Barnes & Noble
  • About: The autobiography of Hollywood’s most famous Irishwoman was a long time coming. She was 84 at publication. Tucked inside amongst the expected (but interesting) stories of living and working with lots of larger-than-life stars are some stellar, little-known accomplishments that help to flesh out her legacy, leaping from legend to true trailblazer between covers. It’s worth a read for that alone (and the stunning photographs).
  • Motivation: Maureen O’Hara is one of my favourite actresses (and co-redhead). Her talent and ridiculously unattainable beauty graced so many of the movies I loved as a kid (and still do). I obsessively watched them over and over whenever they were on television (and still do). She injected her characters with intelligence, strength, spirit and wit-making her one of the best role models a girl (or grown woman, ahem) could ask for. I loved her then (and still do). Now go watch ‘The Quiet Man’.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 83: “I went downstairs and asked Wilmon to go get Will. He found him in a drunken stupor right where the lady had said he would be, at a whorehouse in a seedy part of the city. He’d apparently been there for days, bragging and shooting his mouth off. We had been married less than sixty days.”

    Maureen O'Hara in a screenshot from the traile...

    Maureen O'Hara-Image via Wikipediawhorehouse in a seedy part of the city. He'd apparently been there for days, bragging and shooting his mouth off. We had been married less than sixty days."

  • Happiness Scale: 10