His new book is My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir.
One of his six favorite memoirs, as told to The Week magazine:
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan DidionRead about the other memoirs on Whitaker's list.
When I was working for my college paper in the 1970s, Joan Didion was the kind of hip and observant "new journalist" we all wanted to be. Yet nothing she ever wrote about the outside world was more memorable than this dispatch from the interior land of grief, following the sudden death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne.
The Year of Magical Thinking is one of Douglas Kennedy's top ten books about grief and Norris Church Mailer's five best memoirs. It is a book that made a difference to Samantha Bee.
--Marshal Zeringue