Back in 2012, some years before her husband, Donald Trump, was elected President of the United States, Melania Trump tweeted a picture of a beluga whale, its glistening white head emerging from the water, its toothy maw open in a half grin. “What is she thinking?” the Slovenian-born onetime model captioned the image. Over the … Read more
Melania Trump’s memoir, Melania, will be released next week, a newsworthy event given her status as both a former and possibly future first lady. That means media outlets will want to cover the book and, if they can, score an interview with the author. CNN, for example, reportedly reached out to Trump’s publisher two months … Read more
Charlotte Shane was twenty-one and a graduate student when she started selling private sex shows on a Web site called Flirt4Free, in the early two-thousands. “I was a disaster on-screen: green, graceless, with a body too long and too soft,” Shane writes in “An Honest Woman,” in which she chronicles the nearly two decades she … Read more
Several months after the writer Lucy Jones gave birth to her third child, she purchased a compound microscope, swabbed her underarm, and set out to grow her own bacteria. This might seem like a weird thing to do, but motherhood makes you weird. Since having children, Jones had observed a series of changes in herself: … Read more
Nicholas Kristof started his journalism career as a teen-age reporter for the News-Register, an Oregon county newspaper where he was paid twenty-five cents a column inch. He spent his pocket money on books about how to turn that gig into a career: a textbook on news editing, “The Best of Life,” accounts of White House … Read more
When she died at a hundred and one in January of 2019, Diana Athill had publicly chronicled both ends of her long life in a series of nine memoirs. The first of these, “Instead of a Letter,” was published in 1963 and recently rereleased in the U.S. as part of the NYRB Classics series; it … Read more
“Should I be allowed to make this said?” Blake Butler writes in his new memoir, “Molly.” By the time he asks, it’s too late. He has already written more than two hundred and seventy pages; no turning back now. The question of allowance, of permission to expose, bubbles beneath so much writing, but it is … Read more
