BEAUTIFUL NEW MEMOIRS

Here are some of the most beautiful recollections captured as memoirs, published within the past year. Each takes the common genre and crafts it into a different kind of self portrait with lives lived through music, food, anthropology, activism, war, wandering, and even paradise.
 

1) Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove

By Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson & Ben Greenman (Grand Central Publishing, 2013)

Memoirs are, by nature, journeys back to one’s roots. “Mo' Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove” is both a journey back and a journey forward, written by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, (aka ?uestlove, BROther ?uestion, Questo, Brother Question and Qlove) co-founder and drummer of the alternative hip-hop band, The Roots, (aka the last hip-hop band on earth), together with journalist, writer, and New Yorker editor, Ben Greenman. A child of the 70’s, whose daddy was a 1950’s doo-wop singer, Questlove spins through his life like he spins through his DJ repertoire, with lush layers, stops and starts, scratches and pops, driving the beats, from early nursing on Curtis Mayfield’s sweet-sharp funk to the birth and evolution of The Roots, to performing with and producing for artists as varied as Jay-Z, Amy Winehouse, Madonna, and Dave Chappelle. His professional life is a frenetic swirl as he simultaneously leads Jimmy Fallon’s Late Night band, DJs, composes, produces, arranges, and stirs multiple project pots. You don’t just read, you share Questlove’s recollections in “Mo’ Meta Blues,” like you were sitting on his front porch shooting the breeze.
 

2) All Good Things: From Paris to Tahiti: Life and Longing

By Sarah Turnbull (Harper Collins Publishers, 2013)
 

Australian writer, Sarah Turnbull’s life almost isn’t fair.... it’s far too beautiful for one person to deserve. She first shared her idyllic history in her bestselling memoir, “Almost French” (Gotham, 2004), and now she tempts our envy once again as she continues her story in “All Good Things: From Paris to Tahiti: Life and Longing.” Can life get any better? What’s next after paradise? Well, this time, Turnbull’s charmed life encounters a few bumps and scrapes to remind her, and us, that she is a mere mortal.
 

3) A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life

by James Bowen  (Hodder and Stoughton, 2012)

Like a feline version of “Marley and Me,” “A Street Cat Named Bob: And How He Saved My Life” is a memoir about a man’s deep and inspiring friendship with a furry creature. The story of the magic they create together is nothing short of genius, and has already moved millions of readers around the world.

4) Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites

Kate Christensen (Doubleday, 2013)

A “blue plate special” is a bargain meal that changes every day, but the term doesn’t give full justice to the rich complex and passionate memoir, “Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites,” by acclaimed novelist, Kate Christensen. As far as food is concerned, hers is a life we can well relate to. Food nourishes Christensen’s soul, as well as her body, as it soothes and excites her mind, it fuels her creativity, and it makes her happy.

“To taste fully is to live fully,” sums up her philosophy, and Christensen likes to dive deep and live big. She calls food “a subterranean conduit to sensuality, memory, desire.” If food is your passion, you will love this book, but even if it is not, you will come love Christensen and her beautiful way of breaking bread with your mind as she shares her moving life story with you. In good company with MFK Fisher, Laurie Colwin, and Ruth Reichl, Christensen’s food is at once a real life framework, a metaphor, and an ingredient for a literary work of art.

5) I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2013)

“Everything I love most happens most every day.” Howard Norman's quote, from his recent memoir, “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place,” is a perfect example of BeautifulNow sentiment, finding beauty in every “now.” Sometimes easier said than done, especially when life serves up the tough stuff. Norman’s life is a twisted yarn, sometimes free strands looping through beautiful places like the Arctic tundra, Point Reyes, and rural Vermont. He spent years translating Inuit folk tales. “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place” is what an Inuit soapstone carver says when he turns into a goose who is now compelled to migrate south. Sometime the yarn bunches and knots, like when a poet and her young son succomb to murder-suicide in his home. In times of darkness and light, strangeness and simplicity, Norman finds art and art finds Norman.

6) A Million Years with You: A Memoir of Life Observed

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2013)

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is a brilliant mind we know from her glorious observations of the natural world. Her most well-known book, “The Hidden Life of Dogs,” is but one of her many keen and sensitive explorations of animal psyches that far surpass anything written by credentialed scientists. In her most recent book, “A Million Years with You: A Memoir of Life Observed,” Marshall Thomas observes her own life through the same set of scopes. She looks back on her own origins, growing up in the 1950’s, in what is now known as Namibia, where she first connected with the intrinsic wisdom of animals. She shares her adventures as she conducts fieldwork on anthropological expeditions in the Kalahari Desert, and as she moves through dangerous territories in Uganda. As with most memoirs, you get a taste of this author's struggles, transformations, and joys, but “A Million Years With You” puts a special set of spectacles on your nose, like 3D glasses, giving you quite an extraordinary read.

7) Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father

Alysia Abbott (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013)

“Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father,” by Alysia Abbot is really a double-memoir of a father and daughter. It is the story of an openly bisexual activist, Steve Abbott, as he raises his daughter alone, immersed in the gay cultural revolutions of the 1970’s and 80’s, in San Francisco, after his wife died. And it is the story of a two-year old motherless child as she grows up in a world of wild living, cutting-edge art, and thought.

The two live a magical life together, full of love, tenderness, and heaps of fun, devoid of structure and anything remotely considered as normalcy. They grow apart, as most parents and children do, as Alysia finds her own identity as an adult, then come together again when Steve needs her the most, in his final AIDS-ravaged days.

The book’s richness comes largely from a treasure trove of Steve’s journals, letters and writings, expertly extracted, spun, and woven into this beautiful story of two lives in an important time.
 

8) The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village

by Anna Badkhen (the Penguin Group, 2013)

The world is like a carpet if you see it as flat, as a complex weave of millions of colored knotted threads, as something upon which you tread. The world is a carpet if a carpet is the center of your life, as it is for many Afghanis. “The World is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village,” by Anna Badkhen, shares her life during the time she spent as a correspondent in the middle or war-throttled Afghanistan.

One of the most riveting beauties she found in the midst of the common nightmares was the common thread of carpets. Bombs might be exploding, life might be draining through the hot rocky ground, freedoms might be squeezed out of them, but the people of Oca, a desert village southwest of Kabul, continue to make beauty out of colored wool and silk threads.

It takes a full year to make a carpet. The lives of the women turning the threads into blossoms, leaves, and intricate trellisworks, unfurl, as their carpet takes shape. Badhken’s writing is exquisite as she spins their stories out for us, passing through four seasons. Their existence is as multi-colored and multi-patterned as their weave, with families, friends, and Taliban, creating contrast and complexity. After twelve months, the carpet is sold, and a new one begins amidst the siege, as it has done for centuries, with no end in sight.
 

9) Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream

by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra  (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2013)

Another double-memoir, “Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream,” by Deepak Chopra and Sanjiv Chopra, tells their story of their immigration to America from India and their journeys as they become thought-leaders in mind/body health and wellness. It is another tale of immigrant struggle and victory. But the specific blend of experiences and circumstances that made up the Chopra brothers’ lives make it “not just another memoir.”

First set against the backdrop of post-war India, then thrust into the shockingly different American culture, they developed a beautiful fusion of eastern and western science, art, and philosophy. They marinated in both ancient spiritualities and modern technologies. Deepak’s version of the mix made him one of the world’s most followed mind/body spiritual teachers. Sanjiv is an esteemed professor at Harvard Medical School.
 

10) Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog: Sniffing Out the Perfect Plot in Provence

By Jamie Ivey (Summerdale Publishers Ltd, 2012)

This isn’t the first time Provence has lured a pair of city slickers and sucked them into French rural bliss, and it likely won’t be the last. But “Ten Trees and a Truffle Dog: Sniffing Out the Perfect Plot in Provence,” by Jamie Ivey, isn’t about the olive oils or the lavender fields or the ratatouilles so prevalent in all over those other expat-Provence-love-stories. It’s all about the truffles. Jamie and his wife are obsessed. Fates were sympathetic and presented them with a truffle-oak dotted plot of land. But they needed a house. They needed a canine truffle expert. They need to find the truffles. And so the fun begins. This is a delicious, clever, humorous memoir, told with heart and sparkle.