Also of interest ... in new memoirs
Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison; Speech-less by Matt Latimer; The Kids Are All Right by Diana, Liz, Amanda, and Dan Welch; City Boy by Edmund White&l
Nothing Was the Same
by Kay Redfield Jamison
(Knopf, $25)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Other memoirists have explored what it means to grieve, said Dinah Lenney in the Los Angeles Times. What the psychiatrist author of 1995’s An Unquiet Mind brings to recollecting the loss of her own husband is a deep understanding of the working of the mind, as well as a personal sense of the difference between grief and depression. Readers may “occasionally tire of Jamison’s self-absorption,” despite the elegant writing, but she has once again “turned herself inside out.”
Speech-less
by Matt Latimer
(Crown, $26)
Former White House speechwriter Matt Latimer sometimes seems bent on settling scores with “people no one has heard of,” said The Economist. True, he “writes well and is sometimes amusing.” He also includes some entertainingly rude things that, he claims, President Bush said about Barack Obama, John McCain, and others. But besides its biliousness, the most notable feature of Speech-less may be that it advances the bizarre belief that the reason Bush fell out of favor with voters is that he wasn’t conservative enough.
The Kids Are All Right
by Diana, Liz, Amanda, and Dan Welch
(Harmony, $25)
Four siblings “deftly pass the narrative baton” in this “tremendously engrossing” look back at how each survived losing both their parents during childhood, said Peter Cameron in O magazine. “Although the voice changes little from one author to the next,” every member of this well-to-do family from suburban New York “emerges as a complex and sympathetic character,” and I “came to love and respect” them all. I couldn’t put the book down.
City Boy
by Edmund White
(Bloomsbury, $26)
There’s so much sex and gossip in Edmund White’s latest memoir that it sometimes reads like the account of a rock groupie, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. White was a “self-hating” gay man in 1960s New York who dove in with abandon when the gay-rights revolution turned the city into a sexual playground. “There’s nearly as much” about White’s famous friends in City Boy as there is about his maturation as a novelist. Gay New York’s “star-spangled coming-of-age” is all here in “exacting and eye-popping detail.”

Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.