In Another's Skin
/A Vicarious Journey…
A memoir is an invitation to invade another’s privacy; doors flung wide, walls torn down and hearts laid bare. It’s a human being given breath and blood and bone on the page through the harnessing of remembrances. They are a potential morass of rage, compassion, sorrow, humor and hope divulged with a precision of language that often leaves the reader unmoored.
When we are seeking connections through reading there is no better place to turn than to these acutely self-aware confessionals. As we pass our days with our breath held, only in the sharing of another’s story may we finally be able to exhale.
Some true-life narratives have the power to restore while others may destroy. The best of them will do both. They will transcend the memoirists own story to resonate with ours. They will tell the truths of the author and the reader; pulling forward something suppressed, giving voice to something unspoken.
Compiled here are stories from all walks of life, told in all manner of ways. They demonstrate that no matter how diverse the life story, we can all choose to place our foot on the path of another. Through reading, all things can be learned. Through reading we can all do better, we can all be better.
The Unknowns…
…people you need to know, stories that need to be told…
How We Fight For Our Lives – Saeed Jones
Jones tells the story of a young, black, gay man from the south as he fights to carve out a place for himself; within his family, within his country, within his own hopes and fears. Each piece of Jones’ story builds into a larger examination of power, vulnerability, love and grief. A portrait of what we will do for, and to, one another. This book will inspire all the feels!
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius – Dave Eggers
As a college senior, Eggers loses both his parents to cancer in the space of a few weeks and inherits guardianship of his eight-year-old brother. Eggers self-depreciating tone and narrative tricks suck the reader in. He allows us to remain wary of cheap sentiment, paying us the compliment of not presuming we will weep in awe of his saintly acts. And then just when you’ve lowered your guard, he will rip out your heart.
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life – William Finnegan
While this book is about a surfing life, it’s also about a writer’s life and a questers life. Carefully observed and precisely rendered with intense descriptive powers let loose on the particulars of surfing. A lovely correlation of how surfing, like good writing, is an act of vigilant observation.
Girl Decoded – Rana el Kalioulay
An Egyptian American visionary and scientist provides an intricate view of her personal transformation as she follows her calling – to harmonize our technology and how we connect with each other. Rana is a rarity in all the worlds she inhabits, primarily that of a Muslim woman in charge in the tech world. Her journey of self-discovery is told in tandem with the one of technological revolution.
Good Morning, Destroyer Of Men’s Souls – Nina Renata Aron
A memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckonings with psychology and history in order to understand the nature of addiction, codependency and the appetite for obsessive love. Pulverizing in its honestly, the author uses her story to slash through broken promises and empty apologies.
Notes From A Young Black Chef – Kwame Onwuachi
A glimpse into one man’s tale of what it’s like to be young, black and ambitious in America. An inspiring story of his fierce belief in himself and his path even as others tried to shape him into their preferred image. Told through the tantalizing and sumptuous lens of food and it’s preparation.
The Yellow House – Sarah M. Brown
The story of a woman who grew up in New Orleans reflecting on what it meant to lose her childhood home to hurricane Katrina. Dense with characters and stories, the author deftly situates each of her family members as Katrina looms and follows them as they scatter in the aftermath. Part oral history, part urban history and part celebration of personal history.
In Pursuit Of Disobedient Women – Dianne Searcey
As a reporter and head breadwinner, Searcey uprooted her family to move to West Africa. There she discovers women cleverly navigating extraordinary circumstances in a place forgotten by much of the western world. The author bears witness to these stories of women tossed about by life in ways unfathomable by most of us.
A Good Wife – Samra Zafar
At 15, Samra had big dreams for herself. Then with almost no warning they were wrenched away, and she was suddenly married to a stranger and leaving her family behind in Pakistan to move to Canada. Soon the walls of her new home become a prison, one rife with abuse and isolation. But Samra does not give up and fights to escape with her daughters, even at the risk of being cut off by her community.
Wild Game – Adrienne Brodeur
Mother and daughter relationships are complicated. Despite that understood fact, you may not be prepared for the story of this particular pair. One night, while she is a young teen, the authors mother confesses to an affair and enlists her to not only keep the secret but to lie on behalf of it. The story may seem trashy, but the telling is poignant and elegant.
Heavy – Kiese Laymon
A stellar memoir that explores the authors past thru a myriad of retrospective lenses. It is an artful rendering of a life and a reckoning not only with where he has been, but where he has come to be. Shattering in the ways that are beautiful as well as those that are terrible. A reminder that despite how vast our differences may be, the ways in which we consume our pain connect us.
Empty – Susan Burton
For almost thirty years, Burton hid her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that defined her adolescence. A relentlessly honest and fiercely intelligent documenting of the cycle of an eating disorder and how it never truly leaves you.
Becoming Dr. Seuss – Brian Jay Jones
While Dr. Seuss defined our childhoods with his whimsical work, the man behind the moniker, Theodor Geisel, had a far more radical side. The author doesn’t shy away from confronting some ugly stains from early in Geisel’s career, but allows for his moral evolution. A painstakingly researched and profoundly human look at the life of this icon.
The Heart And Other Monsters – Rose Anderson
In November 2013, Roses younger sister died of an overdose in the bathroom of her boyfriends’ home. To come to some kind of peace and understanding the author revisits their volatile childhood and the omnipresent rage of their stepfather. As the dysfunction comes into focus, so does the broader picture of the opioid crisis.
Once More We Saw Stars – Jayson Greene
A horrible and shocking accident results in the death of Greene’s daughter. Aware that his story will elicit shock and tears, he writes graciously of grief. An intensely moving and life affirming story about a young couple moving through the darkest depths of their pain together.
Hillbilly Elegy – J.D. Vance
A compassionate, discerning sociological view into what lies beneath the surface of what many of us think we know about southerners. We presume incorrectly. A thoughtful and poignant personal memoir that doubles as a cultural critique.
Inheritance – Dani Shapiro
A memoir about identity, paternity and family secrets that the author delivers via the staggering discovery she made about her father. A dogged and emotional journey into the past to find the truth. A calm and wise voice that lays out a beautifully written guide for whatever bombshells we might find exploding in our own lives.
Another Bullshit Night In Suck City – Nick Flynn
The author met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he’d received letters from this stranger/father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in prison for bank robbery.
Girl Walks Out Of A Bar – Lisa Smith
Exploration of a decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce and the road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspired with her predisposition to depression and self-medication to create an environment ripe for addiction.
The Obvious…
…people you may know, stories you may not…
The Liars Club – Mary Karr
A darkly comic memoir about childhood in a Texas oil town with a hard-drinking father, a spirited sister and an oft married mother whose secrets threaten to destroy them all. The story unfolds like some magical origami flower to reveal a wonderfully unsentimental tale that redeems the past as it’s captured on paper.
Born A Crime – Trevor Noah
Extraordinary memoir that observes South Africa in the years when apartheid crumbled. Noah’s droll humor and sharp intelligence are equally relentless in this book. Delivered with a deft hand, the book doesn’t shy away from exposing the incongruities and absurdities of growing up in racist state with a future in comedy. Vivid, moving and at times, hilarious.
Becoming – Michelle Obama
An intimate, and at times unexpected, memoir from by far the most intriguing first lady in a long while. Refined, no surprise there, forthright, a little surprise there, this memoir is gracious and generous in the telling. Her struggle to reconcile her past with her present, her hopes with her fears, brings her to the same level as we mere mortals.
Wild – Cheryl Strayed
A few years after the death of her mother, the scattering of her family and the obliteration of her marriage, Strayed makes the most impulsive decision of her life. To hike the Pacific Coast Trail 1,100 miles from the Mojave Desert to Washington State. Alone. The lack of ease in the authors life have imbued her with fierceness and humor and the women who emerges from this wilderness is not the same one that went in.
The Professor & The Madman – Simon Winchester
Hidden within the history of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary lies a fascinating mystery. William Chester, a prolific contributor to the project is dead set on visiting editor James Murray. After repeated refusals of this request Murray discovers Chester is more than a masterful wordsmith. He’s also a murderer living in an insane asylum.
The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks – Rebecca Skloot
In the story of a collision between ethics, race and medicine, Henrietta Lacks remained virtually unknown until her cells became one of the most important tools in medicine. Told from every conceivable angle, all of them fascinating, this book reads like a novel. Interesting coverage on the issue of who owns human cells. When they are in your body, it’s obvious. But once they been removed?
A House In The Sky – Amanda Lindhout
The story of a women whose curiosity led her to the most remote places and then into months of harrowing captivity. Determined to put her childhood violence behind her, Lindhout embarks on numerous backpacking trips. When she gets to Somalia she is quickly abducted and finds the fortitude to survive by visiting a house in the sky she has constructed in her mind.
Hunger – Roxanne Gay
This writer uses her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, denial and appearance. At its simplest, this a memoir about being fat – Gay’s preferred term – in a hostile, fat phobic world. At its most complicated it’s an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving examination of how our shared stories shape us.
Drinking: A Love Story – Caroline Knapp
A harrowing chronicle of a twenty-year love affair with alcohol. This startingly honest memoir lays bare the secrecy, myths and destructive relationships that go hand in hand with drinking. An insider’s view on what we outsiders have coined as “high functioning alcoholics”.
Running With Scissors – Augusten Burroughs
True story of a boy whose mother gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa with a tendency towards lunacy. Suddenly, at 12, the author is living in squalor surrounded by inappropriate company. To put it mildly. Foul, harrowing, compelling and at times manically funny.
Just Kids – Patti Smith
A poetic narration of this artists move to New York during the city’s creative heyday and the complicated love affair and lifelong friendship with famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The tone is flinty and hilarious and the authors observation of the counter cultural phenomena, astute. A vivid portrayal of a bygone era.
The Year Of Magical Thinking – Joan Didion
A record of the authors effort to survive the death of her husband and the near fatal illness of her only child. She spares us nothing in terms of honesty in her story of excruciating grief, confusion, shock and occasional derangement.
The Rules Do Not Apply – Ariel Levy
Levy upends her life and shakes out the contents for all to see as she searches for meaning within the grief after the death of her son. To repeat for clarity; meaning, not reason. Stark, wrenching and beautiful.
Sybil – Flora Rheta Schreiber
The story of a survivor of horrific childhood abuse who’s sudden and mystifying blackouts reveal the first case of multiple personalities ever to be analyzed. A best seller in its day with a fictional cadence, it still holds up today. A truly humanizing exploration of not only Sybil, but of all her alters.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal – Jeanette Winterson
An innately generous memoir that showcases the humor in the author’s mother’s eccentricities as well as the malignant cruelties imposed by her. While writing of this damaged woman, Winterson is able to unpack her own damage.
Unique Tellings…
…essays, diaries, letters and art…
Thick – Tressie McMillian – Essays
Eight piercing essays that take the reader on an exploration of beauty, media, culture, money and more. The author writes about all that is right and much that is wrong with this thing we call society. An invitation into the mind of a person with ferocious intelligence and fresh perspective in connecting the dots in illuminating ways.
The Shapeless Unease – Samantha Harvey – Diary…of sorts
A memoir about the authors year long experience of nocturnal unrest. Vivid descriptions of the sensation of being awake for days on end and the thoughts that press down on the mind in such a state. A beautiful and unsettling reflection of the things we all lose sleep over.
I’m Telling The Truth, But I’m Lying – Bassey Ikpi – Essays
Exploring shame, confusion, medication and relationships, the author looks at how mental health impacts every aspect of our lives. How we appear to others and more importantly to ourselves, it challenges the preconceptions about what it means to be “normal”. Poetic, humorous and heartbreaking in equal measure.
This Is One Way To Dance – Sejal Shah - Essays
Throughout this linked collection of essays, the author reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race. The book draws on the desire to map identity. A dance of words, this book flows through digressions, repetitions, transformations and incantations.
Between The World & Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates - Letters
Framed as a letter to his son, Coates documents the current crisis’s in America. Rather than paint the subject with a rose-tinted hue, he empathizes repeatedly that racial injustice has a permeance. He doesn’t shy away from the unanswered questions in this book, we are all aware that the world we inhabit is not and will never be that tidy. Written with tremendous power and enormous grief.
Good Talk – Mira Jacolo – Graphic Art
A graphic memoir in conversations about identity, inter racial families and the realities that divide us. This foray into eavesdropping is hilarious and fascinating.
Hold Still – Sally Mann - Photos
A unique interplay of narrative and image, these vignettes are strikingly unusual. Mann explores the subjects of her life and art; family, mortality, race and the landscape of home. The ambience is rich in creativity and grounded in nature.
So Sad Today – Melissa Broader – Essays
A chronicle of the authors battle with sadness in a wry and honest voice that may inspire the reader to crawl into their own despair. But we are reminded that humor often comes from the darkness; not as a result of sadness but in spite of it.
Buffering – Hannah Hart – Essays & Oddities
A sometimes cringe worthy, always poignant collection of narrative bits and pieces that reveal what makes this author tick. Plenty of wit, wisdom and reckless optimism on subjects ranging from family, faith, sexuality to self-worth. Buffering is the time you need to process…
