Latest news with #memoir
ABC News
5 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Martha Wainwright on music, mothering and finding her voice
Martha Wainwright is descended from extraordinary songwriters on both sides of her family. Her mother was folk musician Kate McGarrigle and her father is Loudon Wainwright III. Despite a lifetime of witnessing painful family truths delivered through song, she made it her life's work too. A few years ago her beloved mum was diagnosed with cancer while Martha was pregnant with her first child. As Kate succumbed to her illness, she passed the baton of life onto Martha's premature baby boy. Martha recently wrote a memoir about life inside her famous musical family. Further information First broadcast in May 2022. Stories I Might Regret Telling You is published by Simon & Schuster.
Washington Post
19 hours ago
- General
- Washington Post
How kind can a leader be? Jacinda Ardern makes the case for compassion.
Against the backdrop of the braggadocio and threats that permeate today's political discourse, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern uses her new memoir to make a clear and compelling case for compassion. 'A Different Kind of Power' is the story of an accidental leader, a woman who overcame persistent self-doubt to become her country's 40th prime minister, committed herself above all to caring for her fellow citizens, and then chose to quit when she felt her resilience wane. While Ardern rejects the 'anti-Trump' label, her new book is an implicit repudiation of the strongman style of leadership that has taken hold around the world.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Ex-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reveals late Queen Elizabeth's hilarious parenting advice for raising a child in the public eye
Jacinda Arden, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, has revealed the hilarious piece of parenting advice that Queen Elizabeth II once shared with her. In an exclusive extract from her memoir A Different Kind of Power as seen in The Guardian, the politician, 44, remembered being seven months pregnant when she met the monarch at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London in April 2018. The 44-year-old, who had been elected as New Zealand's Prime Minister the previous year, attended the Queen's Dinner on the first night of the meeting. She wore a mustard yellow gown to the formal occasion which had been specially made by New Zealand designer Juliette Hogan to accommodate her growing bump. As a nod to her country, the politician paired the dress with a traditional Māori cloak woven from flax and covered with feathers layered on top. Writing in her memoir, which will be published on June 3, Ms Ardern recalled walking through the halls of Buckingham Palace with her husband Clarke Gayford. The monarch, who was 91 at the time, then greeted the couple in the Blue Drawing Room. Ms Ardern was one of four leaders who had been offered a 20-minute private meeting with the monarch. 'She had, of course, raised children in the public eye,' Ms Ardern wrote in her memoir, 'so in our private meeting I asked if she had any advice. ''You just get on with it,' she said simply. She sounded so matter of fact, just as my grandma Margaret might have. 'I squeezed the package I was holding, a gift for the queen. It was a framed image of her during a royal tour to New Zealand in 1953, her head back in a full relaxed laugh. You just get on with it. Of course you do.' Just two months later, Ms Ardern would become only the second elected head of government to give birth while in office. She gave birth to her daughter Neve Te Aroha in June 21, 2018, retuning to work as Prime Minister in early autumn. The only other elected leader to give birth in office was Benazir Bhutto. Although she was unelected, Ms Ardern looked up to Queen Elizabeth as she gave birth to Prince Andrew and Prince Edward after she took to the throne. Reflecting on her meeting with the late Queen on the Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme ahead of her funeral, Ms Ardern said: 'One of the things on my mind alongside being a new prime minister was being a prime minister and a mum. 'And when you think about leaders who have been in that position, there were so few to look to. Ms Ardern addresses a press conference after news of the Queen's passing in September 2022 'So I said to her, "How did you manage?", and I remember she just said, "Well, you just get on with it". And that was actually probably the best and most factual advice I could have.' Ms Ardern attended the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on September 19, 2022 with her husband by her side. Having previously lived in London, the New Zealand politician said she was not surprised by the magnitude of the public's response to the Queen's death. 'I've seen what London looks like day-to-day, and what it feels like day-to-day, the hustle and bustle,' she told Laura Kuenssberg. 'And to see it just stand still, but do so so poetically, is a very moving thing to witness. The Queen was here for her people, and now her people are there for her.' Ms Ardern was made a dame by the Prince of Wales at Windsor Castle on October 16, 2024 for her services to politics.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Tessa Hulls On The Weight Of History, The Power Of Comics, And Winning A Pulitzer Prize
Tessa Hulls, writer/artist of Feeding Ghosts (Macmillian, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize ... More for Memoir Earlier this month, Tessa Hulls was working her usual contract job as a sous-chef in the private legislative dining lounge at the Alaska state capital in Juneau when she started getting an unusually high volume of text messages on her phone. She glanced at them between tasks. Had she been nominated for some kind of award? Eventually, one of the legislators came up to her, put his arm over her shoulder, and told her, 'No, you weren't nominated. You just won a Pulitzer Prize!' Indeed, when the awards were announced on May 7, Hulls' memoir, Feeding Ghosts (Macmillan, 2024), became only the second graphic novel to win the prestigious award. The first, more than 30 years ago, was Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman. Like Maus, Feeding Ghosts is an intense blend of intergenerational family trauma and world-historical events. Tessa's maternal grandmother, Sun Yi, worked as a journalist in Shanghai in the 1940s and had a front row seat for the Communist revolution. Falling under increasing surveillance by the authorities, she eventually fled to Hong Kong with her daughter, Tessa's mother, but succumbed to mental illness from which she never recovered. The book explores Tessa's discovery of both the public and private history that her family had fled, told in expressionistic black and white drawings over nearly 400 pages. Page from Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (Macmillian, 2024) Feeding Ghosts succeeds as a both work of narrative and a work of art, made a bunch of best-of- lists, and has won or been nominated for a stack of major awards including the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the Ainsfield Wolf Prize, the Libby Award, and the Will Eisner Award. While Maus winning a Special Citation Pulitzer in 1992 felt almost like the institution was condescending to recognize that 'wow, comics aren't just for kids anymore!', the award for Feeding Ghosts in the memoir category in 2025 seems like appropriate recognition for an undeniably serious and accomplished work, regardless of the medium of expression. 'I've always been a visual artist and a writer,' Hulls explained in a phone interview earlier this week. 'Writing was the scaffolding, but I came up as a visual artist. My main career was painting, but I started to realize that writing was a more important part of what I was doing.' Hulls says she left home as a teenager to embark on a life of restless travel, alternating stints in cities with long, solitary forays into the wilderness. Her biography on her website describes her as 'a compulsive genre hopper who has worked… as an illustrator, lecturer, cartoonist, editor, interviewer, historian, writer, performer, chef, muralist, conductor of social experiments, painter, bicycle mechanic, teacher and researcher.' Eventually she came to understand that her wanderlust was a symptom of a deeper ambiguity she carried with her. Writer/artist and adventurer Tessa Hulls 'I grew up with my grandmother and my nuclear family and knew something horrific had happened to her, but it was never really talked about and I didn't have the context of Chinese history to understand what had brought her to that point. All I knew is that I had a complicated relationship with my mom and I literally ran away from it to become this globetrotting adventurer.' Shortly after she turned 30, Hulls said she realized she would never have peace until she faced her family drama. She got back in touch with her mother to explain that she had to tell this story, no matter how hard or how long it would take. The journey ended up lasting nine years, during which time Hulls had to internalize the craft of both journalists and historians to come to grips with the full scope of the subject. It drained her enough that she has sworn she will never do another book, notwithstanding the remarkable success that Feeding Ghosts has enjoyed. 'I had to learn a lot of history to understand how my grandmother's story was nestled within the broader strokes of what was happening in China,' she says, admitting that she used the scholarship as an excuse to delay dealing with the emotional issues she knew she would eventually have to explore. While she was working on the book, she became an 'accidental graphic journalist,' covering the CHOP uprising in Seattle where protesters occupied the neighborhood around a police precinct for several weeks in response to the George Floyd killing in 2020. 'I had always understood how comics are a powerful tool for explaining context and being able to visually show the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm,' she says. 'I could see that the information about CHOP that was going out on social and other media didn't contain the context to make sense of it.' She used her personal knowledge of the neighborhood and the protests to inform her coverage. Her comics-style reportage became a critical firsthand source of information and breaking news. 'I think that experience really showed me the power of comics journalism, and it also made me really wary about the reductive way that complex information is filtered through social media. It both caused me to embrace and pull back from what that sort of mode of journalism could be.' In Feeding Ghosts, the disconnect between Sun Yi's training and instincts as a journalist, and the requirements of the increasingly totalitarian Communist regime to make reality conform to their narrative, literally drove her insane. Hulls acknowledges the parallels with her experience covering an event like CHOP, which is now described in the consensus discourse as an event where Seattle descended into chaos and anarchy, rather than a demonstration of solidarity around social justice. 'That was one of the threads that I became really fascinated by,' she says. 'The ways people become paranoid. People choose to sever ties and we all living within our own realities. That's so much a talking point that we forget that there is a huge amount of collateral damage that happens within interpersonal relationships when people withdraw into their own realities.' When Feeding Ghosts was finally published after nearly a decade of intense work, Hulls says she felt a sense of liberation in finally having the story out in the world. She says the recognition and awards, while surprising (at least in the case of the Pulitzer, which does not publish a shortlist of works under consideration and only announces the winner), were validating of the journey. 'In the aftermath of this complete shock of winning a Pulitzer, I think what I've been reflecting on and really feeling is this sense of Oh my God, my grandma did it! She saved my mom, and she saved me. And this prize has given me a feeling of safety that goes so far beyond my personal circumstances where it feels like it has allowed me to put down a fear that my family has been carrying for three generations.'
BBC News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Grieving mother from Maidenhead wins book award for memoir
A woman who has grieved the death of a child, lived with cancer and a struggled with IVF has won an award for her Mayling from Maidenhead, Berkshire, titled her book "The Future is Rosie" in honour of her late said she was "super proud of it" after she won the People's Book Prize Beryl Bainbridge Award earlier this 2004, Ms Mayling set up Rosie's Rainbow Fund, a charity supporting very sick and disabled children and their families. Her 11-year-old daughter Rosie died from vasculitis, a rare condition that destroys blood vessels by causing inflammation, on 14 May Mayling said she remembers Rosie "was a completely well child", adding that the family still does not understand how she became her daughter's death, she said the family "were sent back to our normal life but the bottom had fallen out of our world"."There's an awful lot in the book, it's not only about grief, there's an awful lot more," said Ms author explained it covers how she founded the charity, her "five-year journey with IVF", how she has raised her children and lived through breast cancer. 'Joy to be found' Speaking to Radio Berkshire, she said: "I hadn't originally intended for it to be a book, it was just my life, the rollercoaster of my life."It didn't really ever cross my mind that anyone would want to publish my story."She said friends and family encouraged her to write the book and diaries she has kept throughout her life helped her revisit her memories. "It was quite difficult and I just had to face my demons and get on with it," she said, describing finishing the book as "a bit of an epiphany"."I believe that despite anything that you go through, whether you go through the worst possible grief or the worst possible journeys and ups and downs, that actually there is joy to be found at the end of it," she said. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
