Recommend me memoirs/autobiographies!

[telophase]

Apparently I'm in the mood for them after reading Belinda Carlisle's and being about 3/4 of the way through Pat Benatar's.

I didn't like Ruth Reichl's or Augusten Burrough's memoirs much, for whatever reason.

Biographies are ok also.

Bonus points if it's a chef, or concerns the 1920s.

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Comments

[lnhammer]

It's set two decades before the 1920s, but The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard is one of the best memoirs I've read. If you like that, you can triangulate with Cherry by Sara Wheeler, a biography of CG, and The Last Place on Earth by Roland Huntford, in which CG figures as secondary character.

---L.

[lnhammer]

Er, ONE decade before. Brain fart.

[movingfinger]

Try High Bonnet by Idwal Jones.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Anthony Powell. No cooking, but wow, a nifty look at England in the twenties, in the first couple volumes.

Lord Bernier's autobio is also faboo. It begins a lot earlier, but in the twenties it intersects with Nancy Mitford, who as a young girl attended the wild parties at his estate, where gender choice was "come as you like it."

LM Montgomery's journals. Riveting.

A.J. Hall "The Escape Club." (1921, about escapers from POW camps in WW I.)

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Bill Buford's Heat. Funny, well-written book about his training as a chef; he ends up in Italy.

Michael Ruhlman's Soul of a Chef. This is the one with three sections, about the CIA cooking exam, the restaurant Lola, and Thomas Keller. It's great but none of Ruhlman's other books are as good.

James Herriot you've probably read already, but if not, he's fantastic. Sweet, funny, but unsentimental books about being a country vet in Yorkshire in the 30s and 40s. Interesting stuff about the historical practice of medicine, too. Start with All Creatures Great and Small.

Madhur Jaffrey's Climbing the Mango Trees. Though she grew up to be a chef, there's not much cooking here. It's a childhood memoir about growing up in India, very atmospheric.

Kenneth Branagh's Beginnings. Very funny account of his early career, mostly in theatre.

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

I've read all of these except for Branagh's, and they're all good.

Julia Child and Alex Prud'homme's My Life in France. This is what the Julia sections of the movie Julie and Julia were based on--after Julia Child died, her grandnephew went through vast numbers of letters that she had written home, and produced an amazing memoir.

Dr. Junichi Saga, Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan. In the 1980s, a doctor spent several years talking to the elderly people in his village, collecting memories of what life was like in the early part of the 20th century. Not really a memoir, but a great collection of real-life stories of a vanished time.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I like Samuel R. Delaney's The Motion of Light in Water. It's about being a black gay SF writer in the late sixties in the East Village, and also a rumination on how memoirs and memory do work and can work and can't work.

If you're in a mood for light and fluffy, Dan Savage's The Kid and The Commitment, while not the best books ever written, are nice light fluffy looks at the processes of adoption and wrestling with the idea of marriage.

Kate Braestrup's Here If You Need Me is an amazing memoir about how the death of her husband caused her to become a chaplain in the Maine Forestry Service. Forest rescue, introspection on life and death and faith, and there is no way for me to make this book sound as good as it is. Unfortunately her second memoir is terrible.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I didn't know she had a second memoir! What's wrong with it?

(I second all these recs.)

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

Also, a graphic novel: Forget Sorrow by Belle Yang. The author tells the stories of her father and grandfather in China during WWII and the Cultural Revolution. I found the ordering of events a little confusing, but it was nonetheless gripping and impossible to put down.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Relevant?

http://ask.metafilter.com/162212/Lets-eat-and-travel-without-leaving-home

[chomiji]

Have you read Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals? (I know Rachel has.)