I’ve only been reading memoirs with any sense of purpose for the last couple of years. I applied to the Lesley MFA program hoping to get into the fiction genre, but I also applied to their nonfiction genre track, “as a backup,” I thought at the time. It turns out that I am much better at nonfiction, which was pointed out to me at the time of my acceptance into that genre at Lesley. Looking over the two writing samples I sent in after the fact, I have to agree.
That doesn’t come out of nowhere. I learned much about writing from reading top-tier rock journalism, with the staff of the long-defunct Creem Magazine being my most essential teachers-by-example. Through a longstanding fascination with Native American history, I have also come to love the writing of Peter Matheisson, Mari Sandoz, and Dee Brown.
As a student of nonfiction, I have been given a number of great books to read by people who know the genre much better than I do. The majority of the titles on this list came from my teachers: one is by a teacher of mine. There are a few things here that I’ve found on my own. Every one of these books has taught me something about the craft of writing.
This list is not in any particular order.
- All the Strange Hours by Loren Eisely
A surprisingly lyrical, if dark, recounting of his life by the pre-eminent popular science writer of the 1960s.
- Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
Perceptive and harrowing, this coming of age story by a woman who lost half of her lower jaw to cancer while in her early teens offers no easy answers or pat endings.
- Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
Elegantly written recounting of a woman’s complex relationship with her mother. It’s a model for anyone’s work in the area of memoir.
- Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures by Kyoko Mori
Blunt and controversial story about the author’s conflicted relationship with her home country, her father, and her stepmother, and also tells of her self-discovery and new life in America.
- She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Important to me on many levels, I read it as I was beginning the process of my own transition. I recognized many things about myself in its pages. It gave me courage.
- Violence Girl by Alice Bag
This book thrives for me through Alice’s eye and fierce honesty, on its lens into the earliest days of the LA punk scene, and her upbringing in an East LA barrio. Uncompromising and powerful.
- The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Memoir as queer theory tract. Iconoclastic and deeply felt excavation of a relationship, a life, and our culture.
- Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
One of the greatest voices of the twentieth century brings you into the trenches with him when he fought for the Anarchists (and against the Fascists) in the Spanish Civil War. Gorgeous and heartbreaking.
- Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven by Susan Richards Shreve
Written with vulnerability and honesty, this book captures the discomfort and self-destructive awkwardness of adolescence.
- The House at Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood by Helene Cooper
Account of a privileged childhood lived in a land about to be plunged into a disastrous civil war that would change everything the author knew of the world.
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