Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir
10 best books like Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir (Beth Kephart): His Hideous Heart, The Liars' Club, Truth and Beauty, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir, On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard, What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me, Drinking: A Love Story, Lit
| Author | Dahlia Adler |
| ISBN | 1250302773 |
Thirteen of YA’s most celebrated names reimagine Edgar Allan Poe’s most surprising, unsettling, and popular tales for a new generation.
Edgar Allan Poe may be a hundred and fifty years beyond this world, but the themes of his beloved works have much in common with modern young adult fiction....
| Author | Mary Karr |
| ISBN | 0143035746 |
When it was published in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, as well as bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's—a...
| Author | Ann Patchett |
| ISBN | 0060572159 |
Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw...
Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls
| Author | T Kira Madden |
| ISBN | 1635571855 |
Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant...
| Author | Ruth Reichl |
| ISBN | 1400069998 |
Trailblazing food writer and beloved restaurant critic Ruth Reichl took the job (and the risk) of a lifetime when she entered the glamorous, high-stakes world of magazine publishing. Now, for the first time, she chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, during which she...
On Being Human: A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard
| Author | Jennifer Pastiloff |
| ISBN | 1524743569 |
An inspirational memoir about how Jennifer Pastiloff’s years of waitressing taught her to seek out unexpected beauty, how deafness taught her to listen fiercely, how being vulnerable allowed her to find love, and how imperfections can lead to a life full of wild happiness.
Centered around...
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence
| Author | Michele Filgate |
| ISBN | 1982107340 |
*Most Anticipated Reads of 2019 by Publishers Weekly, BuzzFeed, The Rumpus, Lit Hub, The Week, and Elle.com*
Fifteen brilliant writers explore what we don’t talk to our mothers about, and how it affects us, for better or for worse.
As an undergraduate, Michele Filgate started...
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me
| Author | Adrienne Brodeur |
| ISBN | 1328519031 |
A daughter’s tale of living in the thrall of her magnetic, complicated mother, and the chilling consequences of her complicity.
On a hot July night on Cape Cod when Adrienne was fourteen, her mother, Malabar, woke her at midnight with five simple words that would set the course of both of their...
| Author | Caroline Knapp |
| ISBN | 0385315546 |
The roots of alcoholism in the life of a brilliant daughter of an upper-class family are explored in this stylistic, literary memoir of drinking by a Massachusetts journalist.
Caroline Knapp describes how the distorted world of her well-to-do parents pushed her toward anorexia and alcoholism....
| Author | Mary Karr |
| ISBN | 0060596988 |
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—Mary Karr’s sequel to the beloved and bestselling The Liars’ Club and Cherry “lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).
Mary Karr’s bestselling, unforgettable sequel...
Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
| Author | Dani Shapiro |
| ISBN | 0802121403 |
"Everything I know about life, I learned from the daily practice of sitting down to write."
From the best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, meditation on the...
| Author | Mary Karr |
| ISBN | 0062223062 |
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.
For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning...
| Author | Dani Shapiro |
| ISBN | 0061628344 |
“Devotion’s biggest triumph is its voice: funny and unpretentious, concrete and earthy—appealing to skeptics and believers alike. This is a gripping, beautiful story.” —Jennifer Egan, author of The Keep
“I was immensely moved by this elegant book.” —Elizabeth Gilbert,...
Miracles and Other Reasonable Things: A Story of Unlearning and Relearning God
| Author | Sarah Bessey |
| ISBN | 1501155466 |
In her most personal book yet, popular speaker and bestselling author Sarah Bessey invites us into her long—and sometimes miraculous—road to recovery after a terrible accident and shares how it changed everything she believed about God.
Sarah Bessey was in her sweet spot: a popular...
| Author | Mark Doty |
| ISBN | 0060928050 |
The year is 1989 and Mark Doty's life has reached a state of enviable equilibrium. His reputation as a poet of formidable talent is growing, he enjoys his work as a college professor and, perhaps most importantly, he is deeply in love with his partner of many years, Wally Roberts. The harmonious existence...
| Author | Marion Roach Smith |
| ISBN | 0446584843 |
A recent study revealed that the Number 1 thing that baby boomers want to do in retirement is write a book....about themselves. It's not that every person has lived such a unique or dramatic life, but we inherently understand that writing memoir-whether it's a book, blog, or just a letter to a child-is...
| Author | Judith Barrington |
| ISBN | 0933377509 |
Since Writing the Memoir came out in early 1997 it has sold roughly 80,000 copies and is consistently praised as "the best book on memoir out there." It is thought-provoking, explanatory, and practical: each chapter ends with writing exercises. It covers everything from questions of truth and ethics...
| Author | Natalie Goldberg |
| ISBN | 1416535020 |
I’ve been doing Julia Cameron’s morning pages since November last year. The idea is that you freewrite three pages: anything - everything - that comes to mind. In February I felt I was ready to move on to some morning writing that was a bit more structured, and use some prompts.
I love Natalie...
| Author | Adair Lara |
| ISBN | 0578012456 |
The bottom line: Writing a memoir is just like writing a novel, only you don’t have to make anything up.
I subtracted one star for her weird gender bullshit. (I would have subtracted two, but it all takes place on one page and afterwards it's never heard from again.)
She says that men...
| Author | Meredith Maran |
| ISBN | 0142181978 |
Everything an aspiring memoirist needs to know, in one readable volume, a follow-up to the acclaimed writers’ handbook Why We Write
For the many amateurs and professionals who write about themselves—bloggers, journal-keepers, aspiring essayists, and memoirists—this book...
| Author | Susan Bell |
| ISBN | 0393057526 |
The Artful Edit explores the many-faceted and often misunderstood—or simply overlooked—art of editing. Brimming with examples, quotes, and case studies that include an illuminating discussion of Max Perkins's editorial collaboration with F. Scott Fitzgerald on The Great Gatsby, this book...
Congratulations, Who Are You Again?
A Good Housekeeping Book of the Month
This funny and wise new memoir from Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, will inspire laughter and hope for anyone who’s ever been possessed by a dream of what they want to be when they grow up.Little-known author Mark Twain once...
Several Short Sentences About Writing
| Author | Verlyn Klinkenborg |
| ISBN | 0307266346 |
Most of what you think you know about writing is useless. It’s the harmful debris of your education—a mixture of half-truths, myths, and false assumptions that prevents you from writing well. Drawing on years of experience as a writer and teacher of writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg offers an approach...
| Author | Harrison Scott Key |
| ISBN | 0062351494 |
Harrison Scott Key was born in Memphis, but he grew up in Mississippi, among pious Bible-reading women and men who either shot things or got women pregnant. At the center of his world was his larger-than-life father—a hunter, a fighter, a football coach, "a man better suited to living in a remote frontier...
Writing Places: The Life Journey of a Writer and Teacher
| Author | William Zinsser |
| ISBN | 0061729027 |
“William Zinsser turns his zest, warmth and curiosity—his sharp but forgiving eye—on his own story. The result is lively, funny and moving, especially for anyone who cares about art and the business of writing well.”
—Evan Thomas, Newsweek
In Writing Places,...
Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect
Running on Empty is the first self-help book about Emotional Neglect: an invisible force from your childhood which you can't see, but may be affecting you profoundly to this day. It is about what didn't happen in your childhood, what wasn't said, and what cannot be remembered.
Do you sometimes...
Frozen Dinners: A Memoir of a Fractured Family
| Author | Elaine Ambrose |
| ISBN | 1612542840 |
After World War II, the United States innovated and evolved economically in order to rebuild itself, which resulted in great success in new or growing industries. As most families began to enjoy the new pastime of evening television, one of these new industries to emerge was that of the frozen TV dinner....
Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir
| Author | Lisa Dale Norton |
| ISBN | 0312382928 |
Rich, funny, and moving personal narratives depend on a few key moments in time to anchor the story and give it impact. Shimmering Images teaches the aspiring memoirist how to locate key memories using Lisa's technique for finding, linking, and fleshing out those vibrant recollections of important...
What Would Dolly Do?: How to Be a Diamond in a Rhinestone World
| Author | Lauren Marino |
| ISBN | 1538712989 |
A colorful homage to country music matriarch Dolly Parton that captures the unique humor, no-nonsense wisdom, flash, and sass of one of America's most iconic stars.
One of twelve children raised in a shack in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, Dolly Parton grew to become an international...
Breaking Ground on Your Memoir: Craft, Inspiration, and Motivation for Memoir Writers
In Breaking Ground on Your Memoir, Linda Joy Myers (President of the National Association of Memoir Writers) and Brooke Warner (Publisher of She Writes Press) present from the ground up—from basic to advanced—the craft and skills memoirists can draw upon to write a powerful and moving story,...
