A Midwesterner writes about the peculiar stillness of a region that does not get caught up in the excitement of the future — where proximity to family makes it impossible to forget that you will grow old and die.
Hall's elegy for his New Hampshire grandfather, who saved every piece of hardware from demolition — a portrait of Yankee thrift that is also a meditation on what we keep and why.
Wolfe's account of the world of custom cars and the teenagers who build them — an early exercise in New Journalism that takes the subculture seriously as art and social statement.
Nabokov's crystalline recreation of a Russian childhood — the precise rendering of memory's textures and colors, and the impossibility of recovering what has been perfectly loved.
Momaday retraces the Kiowa people's journey from the Montana headwaters to the Oklahoma plains — an interweaving of personal memory, tribal history, and the sacred geography of the American Southwest.
Herr's hallucinatory Vietnam dispatches — a new kind of war writing that took the interior weather of combat seriously, capturing not just what happened but what it felt like to be inside the American war machine.
Angelou's account of growing up Black in Stamps, Arkansas — a portrait of childhood shaped by racism, silence, violence, and an eventual, hard-won sense of self.
Kingston reconstructs the story of her aunt, who drowned herself in the family well after giving birth to an illegitimate child — meditating on female transgression, family silence, and the cost of forgetting.
Walker's account of her pilgrimage to find the unmarked grave of Zora Neale Hurston — an act of literary resurrection that asks who gets remembered and who gets buried.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Didion's fractured account of the late 1960s — the Manson trial, rock bands, personal breakdown — as a portrait of a narrative that refused to cohere.
Rodriguez recounts the experience of learning English as the child of Spanish-speaking immigrants — the intimacy lost when Spanish receded to the home and English became the language of public life.
Ehrlich arrives in Wyoming to film a documentary, stays to become a rancher, and finds in the spare landscape and spare speech of the West a cure for grief and an education in necessity.
Dillard watches a total solar eclipse from a hilltop in Washington state and discovers in two minutes of totality something that undoes her — and that she can barely bring herself to describe.
A meditation on the Bronx drugstore of Ozick's childhood as the site of her education as a writer — and on the connection between the smell of ink and the desire to make something endure.
Manchester returns in memory to the battle of Okinawa, where he was wounded as a young Marine, and asks why he cannot hate the Japanese — and what the Pacific War made of him and his generation.
A meditation on suicide — why people choose it, what stops them, and what it reveals about the relationship between hope, pain, and the will to continue in a world that offers no guarantees.
Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant
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Updike's meditation on inhabiting a male body — the particular experiences of physicality, sexuality, and mortality that mark the male life from youth to old age.
Oates explores her childhood compulsion to enter abandoned farmhouses in upstate New York — meditating on what emptied spaces contain and what the imagination makes of lives that have left no other trace.
Bellow meditates on the photographs and images that have formed his inner life — and on memory, loss, and the strange power of the visual to outlast the people it depicts.
