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If You Like...Educated: A Memoir |
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The Glass Castle: A Memoir
by Jeannette Walls
The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
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The Only Girl in the World: A Memoir
by Maude Julien
A memoir by a therapy specialist in manipulation and psychological control describes her harrowing upbringing by fanatic parents who raised her in isolation through traumatic disciplinary exercises designed to "eliminate weakness," recounting how she eventually escaped with the help of an outsider.
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Heart Berries: A Memoir
by Terese Marie Mailhot
The author recounts her coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest where she survived a dysfunctional childhood and found herself hospitalized with a dual diagnosis of PTSD and bipolar II disorder
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The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border
by Francisco Cantú
An award-winning writer and former agent for the U.S. Border Patrol describes his upbringing as the son of a park ranger and grandson of a Mexican immigrant, who, upon joining the Border Patrol, encountered the violence and political rhetoric that overshadows life for both migrants and the police.
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Ordinary Girls: A Memoir
by Jaquira Díaz
A biographical debut by a Pushcart Prize-winning writer traces her upbringing in the housing projects of Puerto Rico, her mother’s battle with schizophrenia, her personal struggles with sexual assault and her efforts to pursue a literary career.
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Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
by Stephanie Land
An economic-hardship journalist describes the years she worked in low-pay domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them. 75,000 first printing.
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Nickel and Dimed: On (not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Millions of Americans work full-time, year-round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them and record this sobering and thought-provoking report on the lives of American poor people and how job insecurity leads to poverty.
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Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
by Jessica Bruder
An award-winning journalist sets out on the road to explore the new phenomenon of “workampers” who are migrant workers made up of transient older Americans who took to the road after discovering that their social security came up short and their mortgages were underwater.
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Drinking: A Love Story
by Caroline Knapp
The author of Alice K.'s Guide to Life provides a moving and candid memoir of her twenty-year love affair with alcohol, explaining how and why she became an alcoholic and her struggle to live without an alcoholic crutch.
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Art and Madness: a Memoir of Love Without Reason
by Anne Richardson Roiphe
Chronicles the National Book Award-nominated author's 1950s early adulthood during which she was compelled to set aside her career goals to support her playwright husband and make painful sacrifices in service to a circle of male artists, including George Plimpton, Norman Mailer and William Styron.
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Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
by Gail Caldwell
A Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Strong West Wind traces her close friendship with the late fellow writer Caroline Knapp, describing their shared experiences with sobriety, a love of dogs and Caroline's battle with cancer.
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Truck: A Love Story
by Michael Perry
A whimsical memoir chronicles a year during which the author struggled to grow his own food, live peaceably with volatile neighbors, and fix his pickup truck, endeavors during which he fell in love, endured a wild turkey attack, and befriended a paraplegic and quadriplegic biker team.
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Look Me in the Eye: My Life With Asperger's
by John Elder Robison
In an entertaining and inspirational memoir of living with Asperger's Syndrome, the author describes life growing up different in an unusual family, his unusual talents, his struggle to live a "normal" life, his diagnosis at the age of forty with Asperger's, and the dramatic changes that have occurred since that diagnosis.
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Book of Days: Personal Essays
by Emily Fox Gordon
Collects the comic personal essays of the author of It Will Come to Me, including pieces on such topics as growing up as an faculty brat on the Williams College campus of the late 1950s, the role of truth in memoir, her husband's colonoscopy appointment and more.
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The Tender Bar: a Memoir
by J. R. Moehringer
A vivid memoir of growing up and coming of age with a single mother describes how the author received valuable life lessons and friendship at the neighborhood bar, an old-time New York saloon populated by a colorful assortment of characters who provided him with a kind of fatherhood by committee.
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Angela's Ashes: a Memoir
by Frank McCourt
The author recounts his childhood in Depression-era Brooklyn as the child of Irish immigrants who decide to return to worse poverty in Ireland when his infant sister dies.
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All Over But the Shoutin'
by Rick Bragg
In a critically acclaimed memoir, a correspondent for The New York Times recounts growing up in the Alabama hill country, the son of a violent veteran and a mother who tried to insulate her children from the poverty and ignorance of life.
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Rocket Boys: a Memoir
by Homer H. Hickam
The author traces the boyhood enthusiasm for rockets that eventually led to a career at NASA, describing how he built model rockets in the family garage in West Virginia, inspired by the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik.
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Bastard Out of Carolina
by Dorothy Allison
Ruth Anne "Bone" Boatwright, an illegitimate young girl, dreams of escaping her Greenville County, South Carolina, home, her notorious, hard-living family, and the unwanted attentions of her abusive stepfather, Daddy Glen.
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The Great Alone
by Kristin Hannah
When her volatile, former POW father impulsively moves the family to mid-1970s Alaska to live off the land, young Leni and her mother are forced to confront the dangers of their lack of preparedness in the wake of a dangerous winter season.
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