Biography & Memoir

Woodson won the National Book Award for young people's literature in 2014 for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and is a finalist for another NBA this year. Originally broadcast Dec. 20, 2014.

Patti Niemi has been a percussionist for the San Francisco Opera Orchestra since 1992. She speaks with Fresh Air's Sam Briger about performance anxiety, muscle memory and her memoir, Sticking it Out.

As the wife of a Navy fighter pilot, memoirist Rachel Starnes has had much of her life — including where she lives and how often she gets to live with her husband — determined by his career.

Robert F. Kennedy is often remembered as a liberal icon who worked to heal racial strife, decrease poverty and end the war in Vietnam. But early in his career, biographer Larry Tye notes, Kennedy was a hard-edged anti-communist who worked for red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy, authorized the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr. and supported American intervention in Vietnam. Tye chronicles Kennedy's transformation.

After starring in Broadway shows like The Music Man and Candide, Cook struggled with addiction, then staged a successful second career as a cabaret singer. Her new memoir is Then and Now.

In Susan Faludi's new memoir In The Darkroom she investigates the enigma that always has been her father, and considers the various strains of gender, ethnicity, religion and family that, perhaps, go into making someone who they are.

Writer Claire Hoffman describes her childhood living in a community devoted to Transcendental Meditation. She was meditating at the age of 3.

While serving as a State Department adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, J. Kael Weston instigated a military mission that resulted the death of 31 service members. His memoir revisits the tragedy of war.

In his new memoir, Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History Of L.A. Punk, John Doe of the band X brings together his own essays and stories from other musicians and scene-makers of that time. A conversation with Doe, with his bandmate Exene Cervenka, and with Dave Alvin of the Blasters who played with X for a short time.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.

Alex Abramovich was in his 30s when he looked up a guy who had bullied him in grade school. In his new memoir, Abramovich writes about reconnecting with Trevor, now the head of a motorcycle club.

At the height of her addiction to heroin, Tracey Helton Mitchell lived in an alley and sold her body. Now she works as an addiction specialist helping others. Her new memoir is The Big Fix.

Sue Klebold says she wishes she'd asked her son Dylan "the kinds of questions that would've encouraged him to open up." Published 17 years after the massacre, her new memoir is A Mother's Reckoning.

Grey explains how he brought his decadent Cabaret character to life on both the stage and screen, and reflects on coming out as gay after years of living closeted. His memoir is Master Of Ceremonies.

Journalist, novelist and playwright Thulani Davis traces her roots in My Confederate Kinfolk: a Twenty-First Century Freedwoman Discovers Her Roots. Among the revelations Davis uncovered was that her ancestors include a Scots-Irish clan of cotton planters as well as Africans from Sierra Leone.

In her memoir Whatever ... Love is Love, Bello describes the evolution of her "modern family," which includes her romantic partner (a woman), her adolescent son and her son's father.

Charles and David Koch have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to bring their libertarian views into the mainstream. In a new book, Daniel Schulman looks at the roots of their ideology.