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 »
Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from... Read more »
‘There is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and... Read more »