reading notes

by Abigail Thomas
ISBN: 9780156033237
A Three Dog Life is not a sentimental book, a near-miraculous feat considering Thomas writes about dealing with her husband’s traumatic brain injury. Emotional yet practical, she’s no saint and not more of sinner than any of the rest of us.
The book is a meditation on impossible things that are in fact [...]

by Ann Patchett
ISBN: 0060572140
Patchett’s best friend was Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face. Yes, the one with the disfigured face, the one who died of a heroin overdose at age 39. This book is the story of their friendship.
In telling it, Patchett also tells their stories about becoming writers. They went to the [...]

by Lucy Grealy
ISBN: 0060569662
This is the kind of book that causes people to toss around the word heartbreaking. As a child, Grealy was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. Two and a half years were devoted to chemotherapy and radiation treatments; she survived but a sizable portion of her jaw did not.
The horror one [...]

by Danny Gregory
ISBN: 156898443X
A little more than two years after his wife was run over by a subway train and paralyzed, Gregory started to draw. One of the results is this book, subtitled “A New York Diary.”
So there are two things going on in this book: figuring out what to do when your life falls [...]

by Cynthia Kaplan
ISBN: 0688178502
This book, which is I suppose technically a memoir, reads more like a book of short stories. Or possibly a somewhat rambling and informal collection of personal essays. Subtitled “true stories,” it contains twenty of them, all around ten pages long.
For the most part her stories are funny and ring true emotionally [...]

by Mark Doty
ISBN: 0060931973
One thing this book does is hand pieces of your own childhood back to you. At least,
that was one of the effects reading this sharply observed memoir had on me. Do you
remember the sound of kicking one of those red bouncing balls out on the playground? I hadn’t thought about [...]