Memoir Book Reviews

Have you ever met someone who has almost accidentally cut off his leg with a chainsaw, set himself on fire trying to light a cigarette, who was thrown from a tractor, and lived to tell about it? Meet Forbes Skinner, author of The Ituni Experience: The Trials of a Chainsaw Logger. In his memoir, Skinner comes across as a very determined, stubborn, intelligent, naïve, and unlucky man. Many readers may be unfamiliar with Skinner’s country, Guyana, and about chainsaw loggers. They won’t be for long. One of the most fascinating aspects of The Ituni Experience is the inside look […]

Addiction memoirs are an interesting genre, because really they’re all variations on the same basic story. A person gets involved in their drug of choice, hits rock bottom in a myriad of ways, and then climbs their way back up. The very fact that there’s a book implies that the addict has pulled his or her life together to a degree, so by design the book is uplifting, even when telling tales of degradation. Given that there isn’t a lot of difference between the nuts and bolts of an addiction memoir, it really needs to have a unique spin in […]

What if Tomorrow Never Comes? is the tragic and moving story of Neil David Schwartz, an attorney in Los Angeles whose daughter passed away from a rare form of cancer in her late twenties. In the middle of this trying time, his wife died in her sleep – literally, it would seem, of a broken heart. To say this is a sad story is putting it mildly. It would be impossible to come away from this book unmoved; both by the strength exhibited by all involved, the sheer frustration that one family could be afflicted by all of this, and […]

‘Infinite Book 3: My Truest Fiction’ is a memoir of author David Christopher Lawrence, a sufferer of paranoid schizophrenia, and his life surrounding his experiences with it, episodically. The book is part of the ‘Infinite Book’ series and is implied to have a later follow-up that details more aspects of the author’s experiences and recovery, completing his memoirs.

The author views his ‘illness’ as a part of him that cannot, and should not be silenced (“cured is the wrong word, integrated is the right one”), instead embracing the “truths” that are revealed to him by his voices and inner revelations, […]