Carolyn Forché is now a celebrated American poet. But she was far from that on the day in the late 1970s when a car pulled up outside the remote California beach house that she was renting. The driver idled the engine, then finally turned it off. At that, Forché, alone in the house and busily typing, noticed the sudden silence and became apprehensive. In her gripping memoir What You Have Heard is True, she narrates what happened next.| Slant Books
In her memoir, called Y2K, Colette Shade accomplishes the feat of critiquing “millennial nostalgia,” beginning by reenacting the frenzied eagerness that prompted it. She stacks up like houses of cards the accumulations of places, people, products, and promotions that once entranced her, and then undercuts them, so that they flutter to the floor, wilted and weightless.| Slant Books