Memoir

Allende has published her first work of non-fiction, Paula. It's about her 28 year old daughter, who fell into an irreversible coma. Paula began as a letter to her dying daughter and turned into an autobiographical work about Allende's childhood in Chile, her exile in Venezuela and her move to San Francisco.

McNamara has written a book, In Retrospect, which contains the long awaited admission that he felt U.S. policy in Vietnam was wrong and the war was unwinnable. He details the behind-the-scenes decision-making that escalated the war, and the atmosphere of the times which made policymakers feel they had no choice but to do so.

Kenyon died Saturday of leukemia. She and her husband, poet Donald Hall, had both been struggling with cancer for years. Many of their works were inspired by their battles with the disease. Their last book of poems, entitled Constance, is about Hall's surgery and recovery. We replay our 1993 interview with the couple.

Writer Scott Peck and his father Colonel Fred Peck. The younger Peck has written his first book, All American Boy, a memoir of his life growing up in an abusive home with his step-father and the rebuilding of his relationship with his father after a fourteen year estrangement. Peck was thrust on the national scene in May 1993 when his Marine Colonel father spoke against gays in the military to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Col. Peck went on to say his oldest son, Scott, was gay, and though he loved him, he should not be able to serve in the military.

Terry Gross talks with the Croatian writer about her book Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream. Part memoir, part short story collection, the book chronicles the writer's transplanted life as a lecturer in Middletown, Connecticut, a world away from the brutal Balkan war.

Writer Jan L. Waldron was 17 when she gave her baby daughter, Simone, up for adoption. Waldron's own mother was adopted, and in turn left her children when Waldron was eleven. In Giving Away Simone: A Memoir, Waldron tells of the parting and then meeting again with her eleven-year-old daughter, now renamed Rebecca. Rebecca is the fifth generation of women in the family to be abandoned by their mothers; in reuniting with her, Waldron is determined to break that cycle of leaving.

Dr. Jody Heymann is a physician, and author of the new book Equal Partners: A Physicians Call for a New Spirit of Medicine. She chronicles her own story of turning from physician to patient overnight after suffering a seizure and consequent brain surgeries. The extremes of care she received revolutionized her perception of a physician's role in patient treatment.

Fresh Air commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition by Anne Frank. The book is a newly expanded edition of the famous text which Anne's father Otto Frank, the only survivor, published.

Peter Leschak battles forest fires in the Northwoods and the West. He’s not a smoke jumper; he’s a grunt-hiking to remote locations, putting out fires sometimes on his hands and knees -- spark by spark. For the rest of the year, he writes. His new memoir is called Hellroaring.

Lee has written two volumes of poetry, Rose and The City in Which I Love You. He's won many awards for his work, including the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. He's just completed a memoir about his family's refugee experience in America, The Winged Seed. Lee was born in Indonesia; his parents were from China, where his father had been private physician to Mao. After escaping Southeast Asia, the family ended up in a small town in Pennsylvania, where his father headed an all-white Presbyterian church.