#non-fiction memoir

[kjscottwrites]

And, importantly, share some recs!

[cryptonature]

It's finally time! I've been excited to post about this FOREVER. Here is the cover for my new memoir about loving nature and struggling with depression. I'm very proud of this book and I adore this cover.

Artist: Tuesday Riddell

(Visit the link in my bio for more info.)

[haveyoureadthispoll]

[watchoutforintellect]

easily becoming, through an open eye, monstrous and beautiful.

Patti Smith, from Woolgathering

[filmcourage]

Every Writer Should Visualize Their Story As A Movie - Viki King

Watch the video interview on YouTube here.

[gennsoup]

Trying new things is the best thing I can do for myself as an artist. In fact, it's the best thing any artist can do. It's always hard. And you fail hard a lot of the time. But if you're not failing, you're not learning.

Anna Akana, So Much I Want to Tell You: Letters to My Little Sister

[paperbaacks]

review:

“There is a Quichua riddle: El que me nombra, me rompe. Whatever names me, breaks me. The solution, your course, is "silence." But the truth is, anyone who knows your name can break you in two.”

in the dream house genuinely left me speechless.

i don't read a lot of memoirs, or even non-fiction to begin with, so picking up this book was definitely a trust exercise. i was desperately hoping i won't get bored halfway through and stop. truth it, i couldn't put it down.

the writing is genuinely brilliant and engaging and i found myself tearing up at parts of it because of how much the story hits you right in the gut. the narrative styles are so so unique too that by the end you, as the reader, begin to fear the dream house. it's anything but that—it's a house of horrors and the woman in it is a monster.

i don't know how to rate a memoir—how do you rate someone's heartbreaking lived experiences on a scale of one to five? that seems so inadequate and laughably juvenile. so this is just to say: what a stunning book, what a gorgeous piece of writing!

[t-leaves]

Hogwarts Poll: Tokyo Drift

If I've forgotten something please let me know in the notes and reblog if you fancy it <3

[messedupmouth]

[oliviam112]

rachel cusk and her essays are something else. i haven’t been so engrossed in a collection of essays since, olivia liang’s funny weather: art is an emergency

[i-am-the-page-turner]

With Quiet On The Set being all the rage, I can't recommend enough, Jennette McCurdy's Book, I'm Glad My Mom Died. I can't stress enough how much change needs to happened in the entertainment industry in regards to child actors. Jenette's book really explores her experience growing up in the industry in her personal memoir, providing the best first hand experience on the industry.

Get it free on Audible with this link: Try Audible Premium Plus and Get Up to Two Free Audiobooks

[cryptonature]

I'm so excited about my book launch and I'm pairing that excitement with something else I love… receiving/sending mail! Interested in a signed bookplate?

For a limited time, I'm sending signed bookplates to folks who mail proof of pre-order and a self-addressed, stamped envelope to:

Jarod K. Anderson

PO Box 837

Delaware, OH 43015

[haveyoureadthispoll]

A queer hijabi Muslim immigrant survives her coming-of-age by drawing strength and hope from stories in the Quran in this daring, provocative, and radically hopeful memoir. When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher--she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can't yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don't matter, and it's easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya? From that moment on, Lamya makes sense of her struggles and triumphs by comparing her experiences with some of the most famous stories in the Quran. She juxtaposes her coming out with Musa liberating his people from the pharoah; asks if Allah, who is neither male nor female, might instead be nonbinary; and, drawing on the faith and hope Nuh needed to construct his ark, begins to build a life of her own--ultimately finding that the answer to her lifelong quest for community and belonging lies in owning her identity as a queer, devout Muslim immigrant. This searingly intimate memoir in essays, spanning Lamya's childhood to her arrival in the United States for college through early-adult life in New York City, tells a universal story of courage, trust, and love, celebrating what it means to be a seeker and an architect of one's own life.

[watchoutforintellect]

Careful how you bare yer soul Careful not to bare it at all

Patti Smith, from Woolgathering

[carlyjohelm]

lil excerpt from a new piece called Hypochondriac

[readingtostaysane]

first love: essays on friendship by Lilly Dancyger

rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐(4)

review below the cut

-----------------------------------🖤🖤------------------------------------

“Does a first sisterly love set the bar for a lifetime of friendships?”

A book about friendships, a book about identity, a book about pain and womanhood, a book about love. This is what Lilly Dancyger offers us in this touching memoir.

First love starts out as a love letter to her younger cousin, who the author loved deeply, and who was killed before she reached adulthood. We see how the pain changed her and shaped her future, but we also see how she kept on loving, how she remained close with her girl friends and how they were so important in her journey through her grief.

“I wanted to pull these women to me and hold them there, keep them in my sight where I knew they were safe, keep them within arm’s reach where I could pat the backs of their hands and smooth their hair and tell them they were loved.”

Friendships are about the most important relationships we have in our lives, especially as teenagers, especially as girls, as women. And Dancyger has so much respect for teenagers, she writes about those years of her life with such tenderness, with such love, but also she doesn’t deviate from the pain that surges during those tenuous years.

She even gives the Plath and the sad tumblr girls their flowers, which I appreciated. She connects these sad girl with the sadness one of her friends went through which later developed into severe depression until she ended her life. And it is touching that despite these being very different types of sadness, she delivers each of them with respect, not diminishing one to uplift the other. She allows teenagers to be sad, but she also wonders if this sad literature doesn’t correlate to the increasing suicide rates we’ve seen in the past years. And of course, she talks about her friend for pages upon pages until she mentions her depression, not reducing her to a tragedy.

I loved getting lost into her friend group and felt myself comparing her relationships with those I’ve had over the years. And although I’ve never even stepped foot in New York, didn’t have even a fraction of the troubled life she had, deep down my relationships with my own girls were the same: filled with memories of love.

In a world where female friendships are so looked down upon and sometimes even mocked, said to be rooted in jealously and hate. Dancyger paints a completely different picture, one that is much more accurate. Friendships are complex and so are we, and we change, we drift apart but still the memories remain, the shapeshifting that we allow to happen with these friendships remain and we cherish them, whether we want it or not.

In the end we return to Sabina, her cousin, the reason behind this book, and it’s beautiful how she closes this memoir.

“I spent years preparing myself to write a crime story, waiting for the desire to know more about Sabina’s murder to bubble up in me. I expected it, but it hasn’t arrived. When I finally sat down to write about Sabina, the story that came out was not about murder at all. It was a love story.”