Biography & Memoir

Mike Birbiglia explores his ambivalence about parenthood in the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. Stein collaborated on the memoir, contributing her side of the story through poems, published under the name J. Hope Stein.

Dew, who died May 22, wrote intimately about family relationships in both fiction and nonfiction. She spoke to Terry Gross in 1994 about The Family Heart, her memoir about learning her son was gay.

Growing up in San Francisco in the '70s, Alia Volz's family ran a booming weed-laced brownie business. "I had this understanding of my family as an outlaw family from the very beginning," she says.

What does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood? That's the question LGBTQ activist Jennifer Finney Boylan set out to explore her new memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.

In 2014, wilderness explorer Roman Dial experienced every parent's nightmare when he learned that his son, then 27, was missing in a remote Central American rainforest, thousands of miles away.

Hotchner, who died Feb. 15, met the famed novelist in '48, and went on to adapt several of his works for TV. Hotchner's memoir, Papa Hemingway, detailed their friendship. Originally broadcast in 1999.

Eilene Zimmerman's new book is about her ex-husband's death from the effects of cocaine and opiod addiction. He was a high powered, wealthy lawyer, and the father of two children. Until his death she didn't know about his addictions.

Amy Rigby was a sheltered Catholic teen from the Pittsburgh suburbs when she moved to New York City to attend Parsons School of Design and fell in love with the '70s punk scene.

This week, we're listening back to some favorite Fresh Air interviews from the past decade. In 2016, Springsteen reflected on how he and his music were shaped by home, roots, family and community.

Julie Andrews and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton have written over 30 children's books together. Now they've collaborated on a new memoir about Julie Andrews' Hollywood years, which began when she was invited to Disney studios to play Mary Poppins.

As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.

Allison Moorer's talks about coming to terms with the murder-suicide of her parents when she was 14, over thirty years ago, and how music helped.

The recent biopic Rocketman painted a Hollywood version of Elton John's life, but a new memoir, Me, comes straight from the artist himself. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was determined to enter the music business, in spite of some misgivings about rock 'n' roll in his household. As he tells Fresh Air, "My dad, of course, hated it."

Jack Goldsmith's new memoir centers on his investigation into his stepfather's involvement in the 1975 disappearance of the mob-connected labor leader Jimmy Hoffa.

Twins, singer-songwriters, and LGBTQ icons Tegan and Sara talk about their tumultuous high school years. It's the subject of their new memoir and a new recording.

Tan France is the fashion expert on the Neflix series 'Queer Eye.' He grew up in a traditional Muslim family in England.

Amber Scorah has written a new memoir about being a 3rd generation Jehovah's Witness, leaving her faith, and then dealing with a tragedy without her faith to turn to.

John Waters reflects on his morbid fascinations as a boy, and what it's like to be an aging rebel. He has a new memoir.

When New York Times media columnist David Carr died suddenly of previously undiagnosed lung cancer in 2015, he left behind a legacy as a journalist, a mentor and a father.