Wilton Library: Biography and Memoir: December 2025

Recent Releases

The Quiet Ear: An Investigation of Missing Sound: A Memoir
by Raymond Antrobus

Raymond Antrobus was first diagnosed as deaf at the age of six. He discovered he had missing sounds--bird calls, whistles, kettles, alarms. Teachers thought he was slow and disruptive, some didn't believe he was deaf at all. The Quiet Ear tells the story of Antrobus's upbringing at the intersection of race and disability. Growing up in East London to an English mother and Jamaican father, educated in both mainstream and deaf schooling systems, Antrobus explores the shame of miscommunication, the joy of finding community, and shines a light on deaf education. A singular, remarkable work, The Quiet Ear is a much-needed examination of deafness in the world.

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts
by Margaret Atwood

In Book of Lives, Canadian author Margaret Atwood brings readers a long-awaited, “marvelously witty” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir. In pages bursting with bohemian gatherings, her magical life with the wildly charismatic writer Graeme Gibson and major political turning points, we meet poets, bears, Hollywood actors and larger-than-life characters straight from the pages of an Atwood novel. As we travel with her along the course of her life, more and more is revealed about her writing, the connections between real life and art – and the workings of one of our greatest imaginations.

When All the Men Wore Hats: Susan Cheever on the Stories of John Cheever
by Susan Cheever

A sympathetic and illuminating account of The Stories of John Cheever, and the intersecting life and work of legendary American writer John Cheever, as told by his eldest daughter. In her 1984 book Home Before Dark, published two years after her father's death, Cheever wrote movingly about her father and the secrets he kept, but here, years later, she tells the story of the remarkable stories themselves, six of which appear in full in the book's appendix.

The Uncool
by Cameron Crowe

In the 1970s, writer/director Cameron Crowe was an up-and-coming teenaged rock journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and touring with the likes of Led Zeppelin and the Allman Brothers. Although peppered with upbeat road stories, Crowe’s memoir seamlessly weaves in more emotional passages about close relationships, his older sister’s suicide, and his later fame as a filmmaker.

Vagabond: A Memoir
by Tim Curry

There are few stars in Hollywood today that can boast the kind of resume Emmy award-winning actor Tim Curry has built over the past five decades. He's had dozens of roles across movies, TV shows, and musicals; lent his instantly recognizable voice to dozens of voice roles, audiobooks, and videogames; and he's changed the lives of countless fans in the process. Now, in his memoir, Curry takes readers behind-the-scenes of his rise to fame from his early beginnings as a military brat with difficult family dynamics, to his formative years in boarding school and university, to the moment when he hit the stage for the first time

Next of Kin: A Memoir
by Gabrielle Hamilton

Gabrielle Hamilton's gift for pungent dialogue, propulsive storytelling, intense honesty, and raucous humor made her first book, Blood, Bones and Butter, a classic of modern memoir. In Next of Kin, she offers a keen and compassionate portrait of the people she grew up with and the prevailing, but soon-to-falter, ethos of the era that produced them. A personal account of one family's disintegration, Next of Kin is also a universal story of the emotional clarity that comes from scrutinizing our family mythologies and seeing through to the other side.

We Did OK, Kid
by Anthony Hopkins

Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins delights with a memoir that is “quiet and restrained but with some darker stuff going on underneath” (Booklist). The introverted only son of working-class Welsh parents who worried about his apparent aimlessness, Hopkins eventually found his way to amateur theater and then the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, all to his own great surprise. For such a venerated artist, his writing is as humble, candid, and thoughtful as the book’s title would suggest.

Clint: The Man and the Movies
by Shawn Levy

A revelatory portrait of Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood, the most prolific and versatile actor-director in movie history and an imposing icon of American culture. To read the story of Clint Eastwood is to understand nearly a century of American culture. No Hollywood figure has so completely and complexly stood inside the changing climates of post-World War II America. At age ninety-five, he has lived a tumultuous century and embodied much of his time and many of its contradictions. But his roles and his films, however well cast and convincing, are two-dimensional in comparison to his whole life.

Run the Song: Writing About Running About Listening
by Ben Ratliff

Run the Song is the story of how a professional critic, frustrated with conventional modes of criticism, finds his way back to a deeper relationship with music. When stumped or preoccupied by a piece of music, Ratliff starts to think that perhaps running can tell him more about what he's listening to--let's run it, he'll say. And with that, the reader in turn is invited to listen alongside one of the great listeners of our day in this wildly inventive and consistently thought-provoking chronicle of a profoundly unsettling time.

Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution
by Amanda Vaill

The saga of the gifted Schuyler sisters, Angelica and Liza, embroiled in turmoil, triumph, and tragedy at the very heart of our country's founding. Drawing on deep archival research, including never-published records and letters, Amanda Vaill interweaves this family drama with its historical context, creating a narrative with the sweep and intimacy of a nineteenth-century novel. Full of battles and dinner parties, murky politics and transparent frocks, fierce loyalty and betrayals both public and personal, Pride and Pleasure brings two extraordinary American heroines to life.

Contact your librarian for more great books!