Summer reissue: poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. First published 10 February 2020. Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members – click here to learn more about how you can support us from as … Read more
Ruby Brunton’s late parents Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell founded New Zealand’s least ordinary theatre company, Red Mole. Now based in Mexico City, she reviews Martin Edmond’s memoir about his time with the group. It’s easy to romanticise the past, especially when the past you’re remembering is light-years from the current moment. As I read … Read more
Jordan Margetts, who is working on a masters comparing CK Stead and Philip Roth, reviews the second volume of Stead’s memoir. Not least among the neuroses and quiddities of novelists and poets is the lingering idea that they might actually get to cheat death. Not the death of the body, of course, but there’s a … Read more
It’s a popstar memoir. It’s also about one man’s immense compassion, writes Sam Brooks. Content warning: contains details of rape, sexual abuse and violence. On a whim, this past weekend I picked up Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The elegant epistolary novel, much lauded on its release 16 years ago, is set in mid 20th century America, … Read more
Nelson writer and photographer Ian Trafford on the fraught origins of his new book, Into the Unknown. Alick survived World War I by the skin of his teeth, and thus so did his illicit diaries, and now my book. I called my grandfather Papa as a child, and by the time I was born into … Read more
Announcing the winners of the 2020 New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. The supreme prize of the night, the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award, goes to Selina Tusitala Marsh for her super-personal picture book, Mophead. Mophead is memoir and clapback and wild doodle; it’s the story of what it felt … Read more
Catherine Woulfe reviews Upstream on the Mataura, a memoir by Gore flyfisherman Dougal Rillstone chronicling his journey along the Southland river. Dougal Rillstone is some guy you’ve never heard of, who grew up in Gore and is in love with a river. He also loves to fish for trout. He’s in his 70s. He fishes … Read more
An extract from The Quick and the Dead, the new memoir by Palmerston North pathologist Cynric Temple-Camp. Books editor Catherine Woulfe writes: Strong recommend for this medical memoir, the second by the most excellently-named Cynric Temple-Camp after his 2017 bestseller The Cause of Death. Ostensibly a collection of yarns and case studies, after a chapter … Read more
Sam Brooks reviews Auckland writer Lil O’Brien’s memoir Not That I’d Kiss A Girl, and finds it a valuable yet unclear story of the author’s struggle with her own acceptance. As queer people, we can be unnecessarily harsh on media that is about us, and by us. I think of the response to Looking, the … Read more
The world-famous best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, $34) This is the one that kicks off with the essay about the Tongan boys, which … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Know Your Place by Golriz Ghahraman (HarperCollins, $40) A memoir. Ghahraman wrote an essay for us when it released last week … Read more
Auckland writer Caroline Barron has a terrific book out today called Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death. Here, she writes about the memoirs that have been a balm, a lesson, or both. Throughout my life, I’ve sought solace between the covers of books, particularly memoirs. There, I’ve learnt how to take the … Read more
Linda Burgess and Michael Hurst with quite different takes on a new book by New Zealand-born actress, playwright and writer Barbara Ewing. Michael Hurst This is a memoir very much written from the perspective of the present; evocative, authentic, humorous and poignant. Barbara Ewing approaches her subject via a series of diaries she kept all … Read more
Poet essa may ranapiri says this review is one of the hardest things they’ve written. I spend two months with this book, following Witi Ihimaera’s journey, I see car tyres in country roads I see tears on lover’s faces, I feel the beating of the heart, as it strains against the western paradigm of heteronormativity. … Read more
We started picking a top 10 ourselves and puttered out at about #3, sick of the sound of our own voice. Bugger it, we thought, and sent for assistance. It’s been like Christmas ever since, an inbox flowing over with gorgeous, sincere little gifts. Here’s the nonfiction selection, in no particular order. Stand by for … Read more
Sam Brooks, noted critic of the Queer Eye juggernaut, reviews Over the Top, a memoir by the show’s most flamboyant star Jonathan Van Ness. The phrase “like Maya Angelou taught me” shows up two pages in. It doesn’t quite set the tone so much as prepares you for what’s to come. This is what we’re … Read more
Loved Linda Burgess’s essays for The Spinoff? Now she’s written a whole book of ’em. And it is, predictably, terrific. With love, Linda Burgess writes simply in her dedication. With love, and god there is so much of it here, in these essays, this “memoir of sorts”, you’ll get to the end and feel like … Read more
Sam Brooks, lifelong gamer, lost himself on a virtual battlefield in the days after his mother’s death. Here, he reviews a book by a kindred spirit: Lost in A Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do For Us, by psychologist Pete Etchells. The person who got me into video games … Read more
Before Rachael King was an author and a puller-together of literary festivals, she was a bass player in a heap of bands. At the start, she was a schoolgirl rocking in the Battling Strings, opening for the Chills and other 1980s Flying Nun bands, including Straitjacket Fits. Reading Shayne Carter’s memoir Dead People I Have … Read more
George Henderson reviews a rock memoir by Wayne Kramer, leader of the MC5, a 60s band who advocated “Dope, rock and roll, and fucking in the street.” “We have developed organic high-energy guerrilla bands who are infiltrating the popular culture and destroying millions of minds in the process” – John Sinclair, White Panther Party Programme, … Read more
The Monday Extract: A harrowing personal essay by Christchurch poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman from his new memoir. Even before I took LSD with a poet friend I was becoming unhinged. It was as if I just didn’t care; with a few cans of beer on board to dull the rational sites in the brain, dropping a … Read more
A semi-fictional memoir by Jackson C Payne, son of the late Bill Payne, an ex-con busted for drugs, winner of the 1993 Sargeson Literary Fellowship, author of a classic book about New Zealand gangs, and writer in residence at the Alhambra in Three Lamps. The year after he died they sprinkled his ashes at the house of … Read more
Philip Matthews reviews a new memoir of genius director David Lynch, who emerges from the book as a “happy neurotic”. Dougie heard the name and everything changed. If you watched last year’s mesmerising Twin Peaks reboot, Twin Peaks: The Return, you will know what I mean. If you didn’t, spoilers follow. We are deep into episode … Read more
“I am wary of reading any more feminist manifestos these days because they are very exhausting! Who the fuck just loves themselves all the time?”, writes Charlotte Graham-McLay, in her review of a brilliant new memoir hailed as a feminist manifesto but it isn’t, really. All I want famous women to talk about these days … Read more