Memoir Archives - Public Seminar

Interviews

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, When All the Men Wore Hats

When the writing writes itself

November 20, 2025 • by Elizabeth Mirabelle and Susan Cheever

I met Susan Cheever at the Carl Schurz Park dog run, on the Upper East Side, to discuss her latest book, When All the Men Wore Hats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2025). It’s her usual morning haunt: a place where she gives her beloved Corgi a bit of free-roaming exercise, ...

Susan Cheever on Her New Book, <em>When All the Men Wore Hats</em>

Health care

Her Choice

Honor Moore discusses the decision that shaped her life as a woman and a writer

December 9, 2024 • by Honor Moore and Elide Vincenti

In 1969, Honor Moore was a 23-year-old graduate student at Yale School of Drama when she made the profound decision to end an unintended pregnancy—an experience that would shape her life and work. In her memoir A Termination (Public Space Books), Moore reflects on this pivotal moment while embarking on ...

Event

Live at Public Seminar: John D’Emilio

Public Seminar celebrates the publication of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood

October 10, 2022 • by Public Seminar

John D’Emilio, a pioneering figure in the field of LGBTQIA+ history, will join Public Seminar Co-Executive Editor Claire Potter in a discussion of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood....

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

The Arts

When Diane Arbus Came to Central Park

The New York City story of a latchkey kid and a trailblazing photographer

November 30, 2021 • by Vicky Oliver

For me as a city kid, Central Park was a forbidden Eden. Even though I grew up a stone’s throw from the park, my parents forbade me to walk there, even chaperoned, even in broad daylight. And so, it’s all the more astounding that I recently found myself trotting—no, tearing over—to see ...

Gender

The Making of a Girl

New School Alum Melissa Febos uses memoir to understand the startling shame of becoming a woman in the eyes of others in this excerpt of her book Girlhood

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos

"I got my period when I was ten, and I’d been reading Judy Blume books for a while so I knew it was coming," said Tanaïs. "And when it came, I wasn’t prepared for it anymore." A 2011 American Association of University Women (AAUW) school survey shows that early development ...

Interviews

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

In this interview with Public Seminar, the memoirist discusses complex mother/daughter dynamics, enthusiastic consent, and finding clarity through the “privacy of the page.”

October 20, 2021 • by Melissa Febos and Madeleine Janz

New School alum and bestselling author Melissa Febos sat down (virtually) with Public Seminar intern Madeleine Janz to discuss writing about those you love most, complicated “almost” traumas, and the inherited shame of female adolescence. Febos’s newest book, an essay collection entitled Girlhood (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021), was on The New School’s Alumni Bookshelf this year and is available for purchase here. Madeleine Janz [MJ]: To ...

Unearthing the Complexities of Girlhood with Melissa Febos

History

The Secret Life of Colonel Sanders

My grandmother knew him

May 4, 2021 • by Yvonne M. Vissing

_____ “Things and folks ain’t always what they seem,” my Grandma Maudie often said. In small towns like Jeffersonville, Indiana, on the Ohio River, everyone seems to thrive on knowing everyone else’s business. One of the best gossip survival techniques of living in towns like that is pretending you are someone ...

Public Health

Flash Count Diary

Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life

October 17, 2019 • by Darcey Steinke

1 Night on Fire 2:11 a.m.: I wake, heart thwacking, as heat flows up from my stomach, courses behind my face, and radiates out through the top of my head. I watch a lamp with a pink shade drift out of my neighbor’s window and hover over my darkened backyard. An hour ...

Feature

Why Does a Historian Write a Memoir?

The adventures of a postmodern historian

September 27, 2017 • by Robert Rosenstone

Aurell shows that professional historians have produced some 450 works of autobiography or memoir, the bulk of them in the last few decades. "It is possible," he suggests, "that no other academic discipline can boast of such a high number of autobiographies written by its professionals." Perhaps, then, my work ...

Feature

The Communist and the Communist’s Daughter

A Memoir

September 6, 2017 • by Jane Lazarre

My father was a Communist Party organizer, a fervent believer in the political philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the intellectual foundation of what became a faith, ideas that had nurtured and inspired him since his adolescence in “the old country” of Kishinev, Romania. Or Russia -- he would always add -- Russia, Romania ...