Personal Essays that Should be Read
Top 10 Personal Essays that Should be Read
: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Lucky, The Liars' Club, My Life in France, Truth and Beauty, Girl, Interrupted, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Eat, Pray, Love, Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
| Author | David Sedaris |
| ISBN | 0349113912 |
David Sedaris' move to Paris from New York inspired these hilarious pieces, including the title essay, about his attempts to learn French from a sadistic teacher who declares that every day spent with you is like having a caesarean section. His family is another inspiration. You Can't Kill the Rooster...
In a memoir hailed for its searing candor and wit, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was utterly transformed when, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman, she was brutally raped and beaten in a park near campus. What propels this chronicle of her recovery is Sebold's indomitable spirit - as she struggles...
| 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 | Julia Child |
| ISBN | 1400043468 |
The bestselling story of Julia's years in France--and the basis for Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams--in her own words.
Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television...
| 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...
| Author | Susanna Kaysen |
| ISBN | 0679746048 |
In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele--Sylvia Plath, Robert...
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
| Author | Barack Obama |
| ISBN | 1921351438 |
Nine years before the Senate campaign that made him one of the most influential and compelling voices in American politics, Barack Obama published this lyrical, unsentimental, and powerfully affecting memoir, which became a #1 New York Times bestseller when it was reissued in 2004. Dreams from My...
| Author | Elizabeth Gilbert |
| ISBN | 0143038419 |
A celebrated writer's irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.
Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an...
Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant
| Author | Daniel Tammet |
| ISBN | 1416535071 |
One of the world's fifty living autistic savants is the first and only to tell his compelling and inspiring life story - and explain how his incredible mind works.
This unique first-person account offers a window into the mind of a high-functioning, 27-year-old British autistic savant with...
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother
| Author | James McBride |
| ISBN | 1573225789 |
Touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.
Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared "light-skinned" woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve...
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
| Author | William Styron |
| ISBN | 0679736395 |
This very small volume was not an easy read. Mr. Styron eases us into his own story by relating stories of other writers and artists who experienced deep depression. Some made it through but most did not. His stories are liberally laced with a depth of understanding that he acknowledged could only come...
Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way
| Author | Shauna Niequist |
| ISBN | 0310598850 |
“The idea of bittersweet is changing the way I live, unraveling and re-weaving the way I understand life. Bittersweet is the idea that in all things there is both something broken and something beautiful, that there is a moment of lightness on even the darkest of nights, a shadow of hope in every heartbreak,...
| Author | Joyce Carol Oates |
| ISBN | 0618155872 |
This singular collection is nothing less than a political, spiritual, and intensely personal record of America’s tumultuous modern age, as experienced by our foremost critics, commentators, activists, and artists. Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important,...
| Author | Tobias Wolff |
| ISBN | 0802136680 |
This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily...
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
| Author | Nora Ephron |
| ISBN | 0307264556 |
With her disarming, intimate, completely accessible voice, and dry sense of humor, Nora Ephron shares with us her ups and downs in I Feel Bad About My Neck, a candid, hilarious look at women who are getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests, and life itself.
The...
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
| Author | David Sedaris |
| ISBN | 0965904830 |
David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother’s wedding. He mops his sister’s floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn’t...
| Author | David Sedaris |
| ISBN | 0316191299 |
David Sedaris's beloved holiday collection is new again with six more pieces, including a never before published story. Along with such favorites as the diaries of a Macy's elf and the annals of two very competitive families, are Sedaris's tales of tardy trick-or-treaters (Us and Them); the difficulties...
| Author | Melanie Steele |
| ISBN | 1475215665 |
13 Years in America is a story of hope, sacrifice, and the modern search for happiness that is at once a moving personal journey and a sharp, hard look at the American Dream.
After moving to the United States from Canada, a free-spirited young woman rejects the status quo and embarks on a journey...
走得越远,离自己越近 The Farther I Walk, The Closer I Get To Me
| Author | Hong Mei |
| ISBN | 7513313717 |
Hong Mei's (洪梅) debut travelogue, The Farther I Walk, The Closer I Get To Me (走得越远,离自己越近), takes readers on a meditative backpacking odyssey across the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent over the course of a year.
Hong is recognized as the first Chinese...
| Author | Alden Jones |
| ISBN | 0299295702 |
Through personal journeys both interior and across the globe, Alden Jones investigates what motivates us to travel abroad in search of the unfamiliar. By way of explorations to Costa Rica, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Burma, Cambodia, Egypt, and around the world on a ship, Jones chronicles her experience...
| Author | Tim Kreider |
| ISBN | 1439198705 |
In We Learn Nothing, satirical cartoonist Tim Kreider turns his funny, brutally honest eye to the dark truths of the human condition, asking big questions about human-sized problems: What if you survive a brush with death and it doesn’t change you? Why do we fall in love with people we don’t even...
| Author | Michael Meyer |
| ISBN | 0802716520 |
A fascinating, intimate portrait of Beijing through the lens of its oldest neighborhood, facing destruction as the city, and China, relentlessly modernizes.
Soon we will be able to say about old Beijing that what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn’t...
| Author | Stephen Kuusisto |
| ISBN | 0571196969 |
A haunting, brilliantly imagined memoir about coming to terms with near-blindness, this is the story of a 'lost man with a speck of something like seeing.' Born prematurely, Stephen Kuusisto has been fractionally sighted since a post-natal operation severely damaged his retinas. Yet he grew up pretending...
Bad Dyke: Salacious Stories from a Queer Life
| Author | Allison Moon |
| ISBN | 0983830975 |
Furry-style fox hunts, breaking into waterparks, and masturbating in trees. It’s all just part of the queer life of author Allison Moon.
This collection of 18 sexy, touching memoirs celebrates the humor and tenderness of falling in and out of love and in and out of bed.
"Allison...
The Ghosts Who Travel with Me: A Literary Pilgrimage Through Brautigan's America
| Author | Allison Green |
| ISBN | 1932010777 |
Curious about her enduring love for Richard Brautigan’s work, Allison Green embarks on a roadtrip tracing the route of his most famous work, Trout Fishing in America. As she travels, she examines the way we relate to the things that influence us—the ancestors who created us, the past that shaped...
Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry
| Author | Donald Hall |
| ISBN | 0618990658 |
Donald Hall’s remarkable life in poetry — a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 — comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.
Hall’s invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut,...
How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals
| Author | Sy Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0544938321 |
National Book Award finalist Sy Montgomery reflects on the personalities and quirks of 13 animals--her friends--who have profoundly affected her in this stunning, poetic, and life-affirming memoir featuring illustrations by Rebecca Green.
Understanding someone who belongs to another...
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...
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
| Author | Dani Shapiro |
| ISBN | 1524732710 |
The author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets—a real-time In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological...
| Author | Cynthia Ozick |
| ISBN | 0525481176 |
Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008.
Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl,...
