Jessica Ferri

“I have never been able to stop wondering where my friends’ money came from, nor to stop thinking that at one time a sort of droit de seigneur might have been exercised to give one of them my girl. For 16 years I lived pretty much as this latter person, distrusting the rich, yet working for money with which to share their mobility and the grace that some of them brought into their lives.” - from New Directions' F. Scott Fitzgerald: On Booze, which I reviewed at The New Inquiry.

I reviewed Mark Whitaker's memoir, My Long Trip Home, for The Barnes and Noble Review.  Read it here!

Mark Whitaker, the first black editor of Newsweek and current managing editor of CNN Worldwide, explains that it was the memoir of another prominent biracial man, Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama, that inspired him to write his own father's story in My Long Trip Home. He goes on to clarify that his memoir will be very different because, unlike President Obama, he knew his father "for half a century, for better or, as was so often the case, for worse."

Meghan O'Rourke, former poetry editor of The Paris Review, has written a beautiful, brave memoir about losing her mother to cancer. I reviewed it for The Second Pass.