If, as Will Shakespeare once said, all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, then Jayadev John Richardson’s vivid and highly accessible autobiography, The Rod and the Rose lifts the curtain on a personal drama that is operatic in scale. The path of his life has formed an arc so extraordinary that we ideally need to track it from the upper circle. Don’t worry, you won’t need rose-tinted spectacles.
Category: Memoir
A review of Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
If memoir is your ticket. If you’re a sucker for a life story that only uses the crayon colours it loves best. If you wonder what kind of woman reared the author of The God of Small Things (1997 Booker winner) and The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017 longlist), there’s an autobiography on the shelves, calling your name. It’s time to run, not walk, to the library or bookstore and snag your copy. Tell your partner and kids you’re going offline for the next three hundred pages.
A review of Ground to Stand On by Sandra Djwa
Sandra Djwa’s autobiography, Ground to Stand On: A Canadian Literary Life, is like an in-depth conversation with a brilliant, accomplished new friend.) Women like myself who entered higher education in the 1960s and 1970s will identify with her struggles in male-dominated academia, and her experiences with American professors who viewed Canada as second-rate.
A review of Loving my Enemies and Other Outlandish Pursuits by Angie Wright
Angie Wright’s memoir Loving My Enemies and Other Outlandish Pursuits highlights the cultural and ideological diversity of the American South and illuminates the long history of dedicated and courageous work on many fronts for social justice. Even more so, the book shares how Angie learns through time that becoming more effective in her life’s work is intertwined with and inextricable from her personal growth and healing.
A review of Three Walled World by Ellery Capshaw
Act one opens with scattered recollections of her family, well set in the preternatural twilight of childhood memories alongside the more straightforward development of her early acting. From a class where she may have been half the age of the second youngest to serious auditions, one travels with Capshaw through the tempest of a life lived too early.
A review of A Different Kind of Power by Jacinda Ardern
In A Different Kind of Power Jacinta Ardern gives some space to the ad hominem criticism she received while trying to bring about a fairer and more humane society in which no one was left behind. After first becoming a Member of Parliament in New Zealand, in 2008, she rose to the Prime Ministership, serving from 2017 to 2023. Her reader-friendly book is humorous in places, frank about her experiences as a woman and a mother, and a good introduction to present-day New Zealand.
A review of Fit Into Me by Molly Gaudry
So many of Gaudry’s sentences, from the very first – “Because most nights during the final semester of my MFA at George Mason University, while recovering from a mild traumatic brain injury, I fell asleep watching Prison Break on my laptop in bed.” – to the penultimate sentence – “Because words, imagined in the greatest yearning, as a means of finding love, defining it; as a means of shaping it (This is how it feels, this is where it hurts) and sharing with others its permutations, astonishments, exaltations, and erosions.” – seem to offer an explanation for some unstated condition.
A review of I Wrote This for Attention by Lukas Gage
When Gage talks about his “gnawing, pathological hunger to prove my worth,” he’s at his most compelling precisely because, as the memoir closes, you come to understand the internet is his ribcage. But as with everything internet-coded, he flees the potentially parasocial, the baring himself, for the lark, burned by the internet and approval hunger. By the final line we become him in his post-divorce trip to Iceland, looking up from the grief only to find “the Northern Lights—the one constant in this strange, icy night—were gone.
A review of It All Felt Impossible: 42 Years in 42 Essays, by Tom McAllister
There’s something special about finding within a book ourselves, to see pieces of us reflected back to us on a page; there’s something special, too, about getting a peek into a world that feels far removed from our every day, about an escape that teaches us something about someone fully unlike ourselves. For me, Impossible bridged this line between selfishness and empathy, between the joy at shared experience and the curiosity at learning about someone who’s nothing like I am.
A review of Elis – Irish Call Girl by Anna Rajmon
Rajmon is as sharp and thoughtful as she is hilarious – in telling her story, she misses nothing regarding her experience. The picture she paints of the Irish prostitution scene is a comprehensive and complex one – from how accommodation is obtained, to how advertising is organized, to how meetings are arranged, to how travel from location to location is organized, to the power dynamics between sex workers, ‘clients’ and ‘agencies’ (‘pimps’ would be a more accurate term) – Rajmon lays it all out in black-and-white.