Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life
10 best books like Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life (Abigail Thomas): Heating Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, The Chronology of Water, Once More We Saw Stars, The Balloonists, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion, The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Holy the Firm, The Boys of My Youth, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers
| Author | Beth Ann Fennelly |
| ISBN | 0393356485 |
The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these...
| Author | Lidia Yuknavitch |
| ISBN | 0979018838 |
This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the reader through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces...
| Author | Jayson Greene |
| ISBN | 1524733539 |
Two-year-old Greta Greene was sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when a brick crumbled from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious. She is immediately rushed to the hospital. Once More We Saw Stars begins with this event, leading the reader into...
| Author | Eula Biss |
| ISBN | 1931236070 |
Poetry. "Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"-Martin Espada....
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary
| Author | Sarah Manguso |
| ISBN | 1555977030 |
“[Manguso] has written the memoir we didn’t realize we needed.” —The New Yorker
In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay. In it, she confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for twenty-five years. “I wanted to end each day with...
The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion
| Author | Meghan Daum |
| ISBN | 0374280444 |
Winner of the 2015 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction
"Daum is her generation's Joan Didion." —Nylon
Nearly fifteen years after her debut collection, My Misspent Youth, captured the ambitions and anxieties of a generation, Meghan Daum returns to the personal...
| Author | Vivian Gornick |
| ISBN | 0374528586 |
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love
All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can...
| Author | Annie Dillard |
| ISBN | 0060915439 |
In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and the will of God. In Holy the Firm she writes about a moth...
| Author | Jo Ann Beard |
| ISBN | 0316085251 |
Rarely does the debut of a new writer garner such attention & acclaim. The excitement began the moment "The Fourth State of Matter," one of the fourteen extraordinary personal narratives in this book, appeared in the pages of The New Yorker. It increased when the author received a prestigious Whiting...
| Author | Dinty W. Moore |
| ISBN | 0984616667 |
Unmatched in its focus on a concise and popular emerging genre, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction features 26 eminent writers, editors, and teachers offering expert analysis, focused exercises, and helpful examples of what make the brief essay form such a perfect medium...
In these insightful, compassionate, gutsy, and heartbreaking personal essays, Stielstra, whose essay “Channel B” was recently featured in Best American Essays 2013 edited by Cheryl Strayed, explores the messy, maddening beauty of adulthood with wit, intelligence, and biting humor.
The...
A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother
| Author | Rachel Cusk |
| ISBN | 0312311303 |
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book, A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother is multi-award-winning author Rachel Cusk's honest memoir that captures the life-changing wonders of motherhood.
Selected by the New York Times as one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years
The experience...
| Author | Sarah Manguso |
| ISBN | 0374280126 |
At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life...
Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir
In this powerful and provocative new memoir, award-winning author Lauren Slater forces readers to redraw the boundary between what we know as fact and what we believe through the creation of our own personal fictions. Mixing memoir with mendacity, Slater examines memories of her youth, when after...
| Author | Wendy C. Ortiz |
| ISBN | 1892061708 |
Wendy C. Ortiz was an only child and a bookish, insecure girl living with alcoholic parents in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her relationship with a charming and deeply flawed private school teacher fifteen years her senior appeared to give her the kind of power...
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays
| Author | Eula Biss |
| ISBN | 1555975186 |
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity
Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies....
Some Bright Morning, I'll Fly Away: A Memoir
| Author | Alice Anderson |
| ISBN | 1250094968 |
The incredible true story of one woman's journey to relocate the place inside herself where strength, hope, and personal truth reside.
After Hurricane Katrina, Alice Anderson has returned home to assess the damage to her beloved Mississippi coastline and the once-immaculate home she’d...
| Author | Nicole Walker |
| ISBN | 1934832545 |
"There is no other writer like Nicole Walker for weaving a fabric that incorporates all the threads of her reality: the scientific and the poetic, the trivial and the dire, the mundane and the apocalyptic, all held together by her deep pleasure in the operations of language itself." —Katharine Coles...
