#Autobiography and memoir

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The ultimate grift: Scientology. After 45 years in the church, Mike Rinder became disillusioned and walked out. He talks about daily life in the organisation, being disciplined in ‘the Hole’, and his hopes of reconnecting with his children. Mike Rinder was so entrenched in the “aristocracy of Scientology” that Tom Cruise gave him birthday presents – a fancy watch and a set of Bose headphones. He earned promotion after promotion within the Sea Organization, a sort of executive order, was flown around the world and entrusted with taking Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley on a private tour of the Los Angeles museum devoted to Scientology’s founder, L Ron Hubbard. But after more than 45 years in the notoriously secretive church – which he now regards as “a mind prison” – he broke out.

Fifteen years on, he has written a book about his time inside. Some of the details are eye-watering, but what Rinder, 67, really hopes is that A Billion Years: My Escape from a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology will act as a rescue operation for his two adult children who remain in the church. Before Scientology took up all his time and energy, Rinder enjoyed reading Wilbur Smith novels, and his own book starts like an adventure story. In 2007, he walked out of the church’s office in central London and ducked into a doorway. He was 52. He carried £200 in cash, a credit card and his passport. As a church executive he had pursued people who tried to leave, so he knew what to expect. “I needed to get out of sight, remove the batteries from my phones, use only cash and stay on the move,” he says. When he was certain that he wasn’t being followed, he caught the tube to the National Portrait Gallery, where he sat on the grass outside and let his heart rate slow to its regular beat. “I went OK, now what? What am I going to do? For the first time that I could remember, I wasn’t answerable to anyone.”

[aaronjhill]

DEATH For me, it will be nice to never experience pain again. Like Sam, I am not afraid. I am resigned to my fate, whatever it is that ultimately kills me and whenever it happens, realizing that I do not have any say in the matter really. There is still a lot I want to do. I want to accomplish a few items on my list of priorities. Unfortunately, I do not have the energy to do much. Hopefully, this can and will be sorted out by my many doctors. I believe that I will be leaving a lot left undone, sadly. I have lofty, ambitious dreams.

[ms-cellanies]

So it seems that Alan Rickman loved acting, in films & on stage, but he wasn’t always a fan of the films he watched.  I do agree with him on The Piano.  Truly an excellent film.  

[biglisbonnews]

Aphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson review – a revealing memoir about mothers and daughters A trip to Kythera for the Australian author and her mother results in this unsparing and intimate look at their intense and often unhappy dynamicGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailWhen Susan Johnson began planning her return to Kythera, the Greek island of her youthful summers, she knew it would be different this time around. The Australian writer first “fell fatally and irrevocably in love with Kythera” in the 1970s on a trip “that set the course for the rest of my life – as a writer, as a perennial exile, as a person”.Returning as a 62-year-old, she was also now travelling with her 85-year-old mother, Barbara. What Johnson could not forecast was the extreme emotional climate that would buffet them both.Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningAphrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson is published by Allen & Unwin ($34.99) Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/03/aphrodites-breath-by-susan-johnson-review-a-revealing-memoir-about-mothers-and-daughters

[lets-get-lit]

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. 

- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

[typewriter-worries]

I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy

[ Text ID: I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.]

[uwmspeccoll]

Marbled Monday

We're jumping back in to Marbled Monday with a splash! This wavy teal, gold, and cream marbling was stumbled upon while we were doing some record clean-up in our compact shelving area. It is a Spanish Wave pattern that is created by wiggling the paper while putting it onto the surface of the water bath that holds the marbling pigments. This particular iteration of the pattern is quite wigglesome, suggesting that the person doing the marbling was moving the paper in a somewhat irregular way rather than in a steady back-and-forth motion.

The book is volume 1 of Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin. Our copy is a second edition from 1818 published by Henry Colburn. Volumes 1 and 2 are about the life of American printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), while volumes 3 and 4 contain his correspondence, and volumes 5 and 6 contain "posthumous and other writings." We only hold volumes 1 and 2 of the 6. Most of Franklin's life story published here is an autobiography, with additional writing about his later years contributed by his grandson, who was the illegitimate son of Franklin's illegitimate son as well as a failed diplomat and real estate speculator, William Temple Franklin (1760-1823). Temple Franklin, as he was known, became his grandfather's secretary at the age of 16 and was named his literary heir.

View more Marbled Monday posts here.

-- Alice, Special Collections Department Manager

[poisonedsequin]

Becoming by Michelle Obama

[mysharona1987]

[dk-thrive]

“Memoirs so often beg the question, “Why would you want to tell me all this?”

— Critic of 2012 New Yorker piece on Les Goddesses, in Maggie Nelson’s “Like Love: Essays and Conversations.” (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

[historicity-was-already-taken]

In the past I have been highly critical of the fact that so much Holocaust memory is constructed through the autobiographical/memoiric writings of men, like Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. And I remain critical, because that male canon obscures the experiences for women.

I've understood for a while that women write for their families while men write for history, but I've finally figured out how to put words to another piece of it. Because women perceive their individual experiences to have been unimportant, or as a tiny part of a whole, their writings are much harder for laypeople to understand.

One of the most moving Warsaw Ghetto resistance memoirs I've read so far has been I Remember Nothing More: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance by Adina Blady-Szwajger. Towards what I'm going to call the first ending of this memoir (pg. 153), she writes:

When I finished the last page of my memoirs, I went back to the beginning. I read them through-and suddenly realized that something was wrong. I had wanted to bear witness to the true events of those times, but I had done it very awkwardly. Over the last forty-five years, the world has changed, new generations have grown up, and everything that happened has faded in the mists of history ... Everything has changed - even the streets I wrote about are no longer on the map of contemporary Warsaw. So much of what I wrote has ceased to be clear and comprehensible ... We have crossed the barrier of shadows, and one by one we are leaving. The young are left behind. And it would be a good thing if something of those years remained for them. And so we need to explain, not just to reminisce. I don’t know whether I am able to. I am not a professional writer, or a chronicler. But I must try ...

This type of ambivalence towards one's right to record their memories over such a traumatic past is a typical presence in women's Holocaust memoirs, but so is the issue Blady-Szwajger so eloquently points out above: the memories recorded are niche, interpersonal; recording events and landscapes and individuals which have not penetrated collective memory, and remain obscure to laypersons. At the time, the massacre of a Ukrainian shtetl was the most memorable moment in a writer's life, but from the lens of us, as students of history, it may be a blip in the larger history of Einsatzgruppen actions at the beginnings of Operation Barbarossa.

Because male writers are much more likely to understand themselves as purveyors of history, and not simply as small, modest pieces of a collective, many of their writers include attempts to contextualize events they personally experienced within the larger history of World War II and the Holocaust. Whereas women, simply remember.

[biglisbonnews]

What we’re reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in March Authors, critics and Guardian readers discuss the titles they have read over the last month. Join the conversation in the commentsIn this series we ask authors, Guardian writers and readers to share what they have been reading recently. This month, recommendations include a searing poetry collection, a brilliant history of dancefloors and unputdownable novels. Tell us in the comments what you have been reading.*** Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/31/what-were-reading-writers-and-readers-on-the-books-they-enjoyed-in-march

[pygartheangel]

GOOD & PLENTY: “My Name Is Barbra” Book Review

Chronology of Streisand's 19 films