Like the Duggar family I grew up without a TV. Yet their lives, more than mine, have been deeply shaped by television. Over two million people watched each episode of 19 and Counting, a reality show that ran from 2008 to 2015 featuring Jim Bob, Michelle and their very large homeschooling Baptist family. Despite the…
Post-war immigrant Paul Boers built a hugely successful greenhouse construction company in the Niagara region, throughout Canada and overseas. As his son Arthur testifies to in this unsettling memoir, though, there is far more to this man’s story than business success; their father-son relationship suffered through years of painful failure. With every book Arthur Boers…
In Blood from a Stone, Adam McHugh tells the story of his journey away from ministry – specifically, night-shift hospice chaplaincy – toward a new, unexpected career in the wine industry. When I learned the book’s premise, I assumed that McHugh’s memoir would take a serious, maybe even dour, tone. So I was delighted to…
On the first page of her recently published memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith says, “I want to be clear about something: This isn’t a tell-all.” Rather, she describes the book as more like a “tell-some” or a “tell-mine” or a “find-mine.” Yet the “mine” keeps changing, she says, “because I…
Last Saturday was called the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust, and the war which has exploded in Israel and Gaza is only just beginning. On my social media, I follow artists who support Israel and even more artists who support Palestine. Many of them are responding with wisdom and empathy and grief. But…
August 11 marks one year since the death of the writer and ordained pastor Frederick Buechner. His spiritual memoir The Alphabet of Grace was originally presented as a lecture 54 years ago. What possible relevance could this slim volume of scarcely one hundred pages have? In this insightful and poetic memoir, Buechner writes about an…
As a preteen, Elamin Abdelmahmoud – a political and cultural writer and podcast host – left Khartoum, Sudan to live with his family in Kingston, Ontario. In Son of Elsewhere, his interlinked essays explore the conflicted space between his place of origin and his new home. “I am interested in the constant calculus of how…
“I am in awe of the poetic power of the scriptures, how you can’t approach the subject of God without metaphor.” So writes Bono late in his wide-ranging and engaging memoir, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story. The artist cannot tell his story, or the remarkable story of U2, apart from Christian faith, or apart from…
The parents of 16-year-old Miriam have no income. She enters a relationship with an older man so she will be provided for. She becomes pregnant, but her relationship has given her more than daily provision. It has also given her HIV/AIDs. In order to not pass the virus onto her child, she does not nurse…
No one else spoke to me about my mother. Not my kindergarten teacher, not the kids in my class, not the neighbors, not people from our church. So begins this memoir, describing the confusion of Jane Griffioen as a four-year old, totally puzzled as to why her mother was taken away on a stretcher from…
I didn’t really want to read George Keulen’s memoir Big Breath In about his journey with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) and lung transplant. Don’t get me wrong – I love reading, and I enjoy a good memoir. But there’s something about people sharing their stories of these specific experiences that makes me feel vulnerable. I am…
Kate Bowler’s new memoir, No Cure for Being Human (And Other Truths I Need to Hear), is written in typical Dr. Bowler style. A history professor at Duke, she approaches this memoir with facts from her medical records, journals, and interviews that made up her diagnosis of terminal cancer at age 35. Yet it’s not…
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