As an eight-year-old in comfortable, solid, suburban California, Michael Cunningham felt compelled to make art before he quite understood what it was, or could do: a painting of souls ascending to heaven,... Read more »
A little-known autobiography from Lindsey Graham published in 2015 sheds light on his complicated record of acknowledging and addressing racism in South Carolina. Graham, born in 1955, came of age in a... Read more »
When Laverne Cox was eight years old and growing up in Mobile, Alabama, she saved up her pocket money and bought herself a fan decorated with Japanese geishas. The fan became her... Read more »
Every aspect of a family’s life will seem normal to the small children within it; only hindsight can bring what was abnormal into relief. Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s earliest years were spent on the run... Read more »
Hu Anyan’s memoir about working in the Chinese gig economy began life as a blog before being turned into a wildly successful book that has sold nearly 2m copies in China. It... Read more »
Brian Dillon lost his parents early, his mother when he was 16, his father at 21. He writes of them in passing here, as he did in his first book, In the... Read more »
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s memoir describes a life shadowed by Jim Crow segregation and racism, but lit up by hope. That the social conditions of her early life did not destroy her family, as... Read more »
At the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and... Read more »
In the introduction to this new instalment of Alan Bennett’s diaries, which run from 2016 to 2024, the author worries about what to write: “I have said everything before. At 90 it’s... Read more »