Memoir

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo began looking out for his mother early in life. In his new memoir, Elsewhere, Russo writes not only of his mother, but of the vanished world that shaped her. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls the book "gorgeously nuanced."

John Powers reviews the author's memoir of his time in hiding — the result of a fatwah calling for his murder after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Charles Rowan Beye has been married three times -- to two women and a man. Now, over age 80, he looks back on his life and asks, "What was that all about?" Critic Maureen Corrigan says Beye's memoir, subtitled "A Gay Man's Odyssey," is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon.

Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned -- years after his father died from AIDS -- that his father was probably gay.

In his new memoir, David McGlynn describes how his teenage years were disrupted by violence. McAllen was a swimmer who turned to evangelical Christianity in college. A Door in the Ocean is a compelling coming-of-age story marked by random tragedy and biblical tracts, church coffee and chlorine.

Roger Ebert tackles lowbrow and highbrow topics alike in his memoir; critic John Powers says the chronicle is sunny and hopeful — just like Ebert himself.

In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to waker her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.

Amy Chua, a professor of law at Yale, has written her first memoir about raising children the "Chinese way" — with strict rules and expectations. Maureen Corrigan predicts the book will be "a book club and parenting blog phenomenon."

Fresh Air's resident book critic selects her favorite reads from the year, including Patti Smith's moving memoir, a feminist slant on election season, a new history of labor unions.

Gabrielle Burton's near lifelong obsession with Tamsen Donner — the wife of the leader of the fatal expedition — has produced a haunting novel, Impatient with Desire, and a must-read memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are unforgettable.