Last week I wrote a list of all the memoirs I can remember reading. Since I’m a library girl more than a book buyer, and I don’t keep a record of books I’ve read, I know my list is very incomplete. But the titles I recall must be the ones most worth remembering. I’m sure more titles will come to mind as we share and discuss in this group.
So far I have over 100 titles.
These titles represent many—but probably not all—of the types of memoir on offer. There are hostage tales like Stolen Lives and A House in the Sky. Travel memoirs like A Walk in the Woods, Wild, and Eat, Pray, Love. Dysfunctional family tales like The Glass Castle, Educated, and Running with Scissors. Grief memoirs like The Year of Magical Thinking and A Grief Observed.
Some memoirs explore regional and social issues, like Hillbilly Elegy and Nomadland. Others explore mental health and brain disorders, like Look Me in the Eye and Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness. There are scores of memoirs about losing or finding faith, like Surprised by Joy or The Cloister Walk, or growing up in in weird religious groups, like Jesusland. Some memoirs about these topics get turned into movies: Girl, Interrupted, Prozac Nation, and Boy Erased, for example.
There are memoirs built around personal experiments, like The Year of Living Biblically and Know-It-All. Memoirs about place—Notes from a Small Island—and places with strange characters: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. There are animal memoirs (Marley and Me, and James Herriot’s books about life as a country vet), occupation memoirs (Maid, Teacher Man), and illness memoirs (When Breath Becomes Air, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).
The best-selling memoirs are usually those written (or ghost written) by celebrities. If you’re a major/controversial/influential/hilarious celebrity willing to bare it all (or at least pretend to), you’re sure to find an eager publisher and a rapt audience. I have fewer celebrity memoirs on my list, but a few stand out: Michelle Obama’s Becoming, and Mia Farrow’s What Falls Away.
Finally, there are creative nonfiction books that aren’t exactly memoirs, because they explore other people’s lives, but share the same up-close intensity you find in a great memoir. I’m thinking of Jon Krakauer’s books, like Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, both made into riveting movies.
The wonderful thing about memoirs is getting to live inside someone else’s head for a while, doing things you might never want, dare, or be able to do in your own lifetime. You can do this through novels, too, but it’s not quite the same. I love knowing the adventure I’m experiencing in a memoir actually happened, and I get not only a front row seat, but a peek inside the memoirist’s mind as her story unfolds.
What are your favorite kinds of memoirs? What are your least favorite? Can you think of other types I haven’t mentioned? (I’m sure I missed a few.)
Thanks for jumping in!
Becoming is so well written! It just made me want to listen to more of her stories. For very different reasons, I was interested in reading Nearly Normal and some of North of Normal, written by Cea Person who survived some very gritty childhood experiences and has done so many things in her life, from fashion model to house painter to bathing suit designer to author. I have met her socially over many years and she just did not fit with the outward beautiful people image.
I enjoy Dan Rather’s blogs and books which feed an interest in politics and old-fashioned journalism.