Writers and Editors

Reading lists

Here are reading lists for various types of memoirs. There's another page for articles and sites about Writing memoir, biography, or corporate history and yet another for Telling your story (as personal history -- writing your life story or a family history, leaving lessons learned). As time permits, I'll post reading lists of memoirs of interest in various categories -- both as good reading material and as models for those who are practicing life writing. Let me know if any other titles are good candidates, or if any titles appear on the wrong lists. Happy reading.
• Coming-of-age memoirs
• Memoirs and personal accounts of vocation, avocation, occupation, profession, calling
• Memoirs of ordinary people (and lives lived outside the limelight)
• Memoirs of friendship, family, and other relationships
• Short pieces of memoir writing
• Food memoirs and biographies
• Memoirs of coping with chronic, rare, or invisible diseases, including mental health problems
• Memoirs of, and other books about, caregiving
• Links to life-story-related sites, articles

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COMING-OF-AGE MEMOIRS
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• Allison, Dorothy. Bastard Out of Carolina (semi-fictionalized)
• Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
• Baker, Russell. Growing Up
• Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son
• Barber, Phyllis. How I Got Cultured: A Nevada Memoir (a Mormon childhood in Nevada)
• Barnes, Kim. In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (a warm remembrance of growing up in 1970s Idaho, rebelling against her Pentecostal Christian parents as a teen)
• Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
• Beard, Jo Ann. The Boys of My Youth
• Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Graphic (comic) coming-of-age memoir of comic strip artist whose father was high school school teacher, director of the family-owned funeral home (hence Fun Home), and closeted homesexual.
• Benjamin, David. The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked (nostalgic memoir of the joys of boyhood in 1950s Wisconsin)
• Burch, Jennings Michael. They Cage the Animals at Night (story of survival of a Brooklyn-born boy whose ill mother left him at an orphanage, said she'd return, and never did)
• Caplan, Cynthia. Why I'm Like This: True Stories
• Carr, Mary. The Liar’s Club
• Charyn, Jerome. The Dark Lady of Belorusse (the Bronx in the 1940s)
• Childers, Mary. Welfare Brat (growing up poor in the Bronx in the 1960s)
• Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the young James Joyce of the hip-hop generation.”~Walter Mosley
• Coetzee, J. M.. Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (South Africa)
• Cofer, Judith Ortiz. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
• Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time A Memoir
• Conway, Jill Ker. The Road from Coorain
• Crews, Harry E. A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
• Crowell, Rodney. Chinaberry Sidewalks (growing up poor and white in east Texas, with parents who fight but love each other).(Jonathan Yardley's review, WashPost 1-14-11)
• Cunningham, Laura Shaine. Sleeping Arrangements
• Davidson, Sara. Loose Change: (three women coming of age at Berkeley in the 1960s)
• DeMuth, Mary E. Thin Places
• Dillard, Annie. An American Childhood, available in a collection of her three most popular works: Three by Annie Dillard: The Writing Life, An American Childhood, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (the latter, beloved of many who write about nature, described in Bill Harper's Stop Often 'n' Frequent )
• Edise, Faith & Nina Sichel, Eds.. Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global
• Ellroy, James. My Dark Places (crime writer explores mother’s murder)
• Fisher, Antwone Q. Finding Fish: A Memoir
• Flynn, Laura M. Swallow the Ocean (a memoir of life in San Francisco in the 1970s, as two sisters learn their mother's paranoid schizophrenia explains her strange behavior)
• Fowler, Connie May. When Katie Wakes: A Memoir
• Fuller, Alexandra. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood
• Gates, Henry Louis. Colored People: A Memoir
• Gildener, Catherine. Too Close to the Falls. This outstanding memoir, written from the child's viewpoint, tells of an unconventional childhood near Niagara Falls, NY--where, as an overactive 4-year-old, she is put to work in her father's pharmacy. Full of characters and charm.
• Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Wait Till Next Year (the historians 50s girlhood, bonding with her father over the Brooklyn Dodgers and her mother over books)
• Hampl, Patricia. The Florist's Daughter. "Nothing is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life," writes Hampl, about her parents.
• Hickam, Homer. Rocket Boys (luminous memoir of 14-year-old in late 1950s who saw building rockets as a way out of a West Virginia mining town--made into a movie)
• Holloway, Monica. Driving with Dead People
• hooks, bell. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
• Hotchner, A.E.. King of the Hill (St. Louis during the Depression)
• Jordan, June. Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood
• Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Kalish, Mildred Armstrong. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
• Kimmel, Haven. A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana (a funny, tender ode to childhood in a tiny town), followed by She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana
• Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
• Knopp, Lisa. Flight Dreams: A Life in the Midwestern Landscape
• Kusz, Natalie. Road Song (fascinating account of a girl's -- and family's -- survival in rural Alaska, despite life-threatening deformity by wild animals and the 'eccentric' world view of an unforgettable father)
• Lauck, Jennifer. Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found. Stunning memoir in the amazing, authentic-feeling voice of a child experiencing trauma. Available on CD: talks on memoir writing and to therapists who treat posttraumatic stress disorder (in which Lauck outlines the path she took to process, and transcend, the trauma).
• Livingston, Sonja. Ghostbread a "lyrical memoir on what it means to hunger, showing that poverty can strengthen the spirit just as surely as it can grind it down" (Goodreads review).
• Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
• Lyden, Jackie. Daughter of the Queen of Sheba (NPR journalist's memoir of her mother's manic-depressive episodes)
• Martinez, Domingo. The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir (about growing up as one of the "in-between people" (who could pass as white) in Brownsville, a neglected rural barrio just north of the Mexican border)
• Mathebane, Mark. Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa
• McCarthy, Mary. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
• McCourt, Frank. Angela’s Ashes (Irish poverty)
• McLain, Paula. Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses (foster care)
• Moehringer, J.R. The Tender Bar. This journalist's tender memories are associated with Uncle Charlie, a dysfunctional family, and a gin mill in Manhasset, a "lovely evocation of an ordinary place filled with ordinary people."
• Monette, Paul. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story
• Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi (black in the South in the 1940s and 1950s)
• Murphy, Dervla. Wheels Within Wheels (as an only child living in rural Ireland, Murphy had an urgent desire to travel--and she wrote many books about her travels. Now, 35 pages into this beautifully written memoir set initially in Ireland, I am ready to put a deposit on a trip to Ireland, she describes it so enticingly.)
• Myers, Alyse. Who Do You Think YOu Are? (a dark and moving memoir of bad parenting in a working-class Jewish family in Queens in the 1960s)
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak Memory
• Pelzer,David. The Lost Boy: A Foster Child's Search for the Love of a Family
• Rhodes-Courter, Ashley. Three Little Words (depicts the author's nine years in the foster care system with more than a dozen "so-called mothers")
• Rios, Alberto. Capirotadas: A Nogales Memoir (an Arizona border town with an interesting cultural mix)
• Robinson, Holly. The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. The charming story of a military brat whose father abruptly and inexplicably takes up breeding then little-known gerbils in the 1960s, keeps his obsession a secret from the Navy, discovers that the gerbils are useful for research, and becomes a major supplier of gerbils bred for research (that Holly’s younger sister dies from cystic fibrosis is another thread to the story).
• Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
• Roth, Marco. The Scientists: A Family Romance (about growing up in a "rarefied corner of New York City Jewish society," in a family denying or hiding the truth: that his father, Eugene Roth, brother of Anne Roth Roiphe and the uncle of writer Katie Roiphe, was dying of AIDS. "A brave and honest examination of shifting cultural values, liberal hypocrisy, and privileged guilt" (The Coffin Factory and other reviewers)
• Russo, Richard. Elsewhere: A memoir (the novelist writes movingly and with humor of growing up the only child of a difficult single mother in an industrial white working class town that has seen better days)
• Ryan, Terry. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less
• Sartor, May. Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s
• Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (Satrapi’s graphic memoir of growing up in Tehran, Iran, from ages six to fourteen, during the Islamic Revolution -- in powerful black-and-white comic strip images. "Marjane’s child’s-eye view of dethroned emperors, state-sanctioned whippings, and heroes of the revolution allows us to learn as she does the history of this fascinating country and of her own extraordinary family."
• Serotte, Brenda. The Fortune Teller's Kiss (growing up the youngest child in a clan of Sephardic (Turkish) Jews in the Bronx, as a child belly dancer who catches polio, as predicted by her fortune-telling grandma)
• Smith, Mary Tyrone. Girls of Tender Age: A Memoir (a bittersweet memoir of childhood in a blue-collar neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, with an autistic older brother who couldn't bear sounds, combined with the mystery of a serial pedophile and the murder of a young girl.
• Simon, Kate. Bronx Primitive (growing up in a Jewish immigrant family)
• Sontag, Rachel. House Rules (a memoir about surviving and escaping life in a dysfunctional family ruled by a father who bullied and humiliated his children and his wife)
• Stevens, lan. On Borrowed Words: A Memoir of Language (how language and literature shape identity)
• Strauss, Jean. Beneath a Tall Tree (about adoption)
• Stringer, Lee. Sleepaway School )(about his years at Hawthorne Cedar Knolls, a school for kids at risk)
• Walls, Jeannette. The Glass Castle
• Webber, Thomas. Flying Over 96th Street: Memoir of an East Harlem White Boy
• Wilkins, Joe. The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on The Big Dry (growing up in the unforgiving, harsh world north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana in a drought-afflicted area called the Big Dry, a land that chews up old and young alike)
• Wilsey, Sean. Oh the Glory of It All (Wilsey mines for humor his memoir of growing up lonely in the lap of luxury--his "confusing, bittersweet childhood is, like the book itself, just the right mixture of comic and tragic")
• Wolff, Geoffrey. The Duke of Deception: The Memories of My Father (about their con-man father Duke Wolff)
• Wolff, Mishna. I'm Down: A Memoir (vignettes of growing up white, trying, like her father, to assimilate into Seattle's black culture)
• Wolff, Tobias. This Boy’s Life (about life with his abusive stepfather)
• Wright, Richard. Black Boy

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"So much happens to us all over the years. So much has happened within us and through us. We are to take time to remember what we can about it and what we dare. That's what taking the time to enter the room (called "Remember") means, I think. It means taking time to remember on purpose. It means not picking up a book for once or turning on the radio, but letting the mind journey gravely, deliberately, back through the years that have gone by but are not gone. It means a deeper, slower kind of remembering; it means remembering as a searching and finding. The room is there for all of us to enter if we choose."
~~ Frederick Buechner , “A Room Called Remember” from the book Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

Memoirs of regular people
(and lives lived outside the limelight)
(See also the list of recommended coming-of-age memoirs)
• Balsamroot by Mary Clearman Blew (while caring for a beloved aunt during her slide into dementia, wondering where Aunt Imogene goes when she falls "through the hole in her mind," Blew discovers a destructive but unstated family code of silence. About family ties and self-discovery.
• A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland, Indiana (Haven Kimmel's funny, tender ode to childhood in a tiny town, as she grows up in a state of benign neglect), followed by She Got Up Off the Couch: And Other Heroic Acts from Mooreland, Indiana, which features the transformation of Delonda, her downtrodden and greatly overweight mother, as she claims a life for herself.
• Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl by Carol Bodensteiner. A charming, genuine account of rural life in middle America in the mid-1950s, when a family could make a living on 180 acres--a disappearing world.
• Between Panic and Desire by Dinty W. Moore. Not so much a memoir as an unconventional essay-montage about a man and his culture--about "the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world." "A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, 'Between Panic and Desire' unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroner’s report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan -- aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America." Read review in Coal Hill Review.
• The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers by Harry Bernstein. From Ed Pilkington's review in the Guardian: "Harry Bernstein grew up in a Lancashire street with Jews on one side and Christians on the other. Now, at the age of 96, he has written a memoir recalling the tensions that the split created." (If old age is keeping you from writing your memoirs, read this one.)
• Miss American Pie: A Diary of Love, Secrets and Growing Up in the 1970s by Margaret Sartor. (Her diary, written from ages 13 to 18, captures changes going on in a teenager's life in rural Louisiana.
• Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
• My Ruby Slippers: The Road Back to Kansas. "In this smart meditation on place, Seeley gives to Kansas the time she never afforded it in her youth."—Kirkus Reviews, and Terese Svoboda writes "An honest inquiry into who we are wherever we are, and a brave meditation on mortality." Check out her blog on her RV tour.
• The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less, by Terry Ryan, with a foreword by Suze Orman. Married to a drinking man with violent tendencies, Mom kept food on the table by submitting rhymed jingles and advertising slogans of '25 words or less' to contests.
• Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place by Terry Tempest Williams (a naturalist from northern Utah, who writes of the deaths of her mother, grandmother, and other women from cancer, the result of the U.S. government's ongoing nuclear weapons tests in the nearby Nevada desert)
• This Path We Share: Reflecting on 60 Years of Marriage by Lois Tschetter Hjelmstad
• Walking Beans Wasn't Something You Did With Your Dog: Stories Of Growing Up In And Around Small Towns In The Midwest by edited by Jean Tennant (stories by authors from Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Illinois and more)

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MEMOIRS ABOUT FRIENDSHIP, FAMILY, AND OTHER RELATIONSHIPS
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• All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg, as well as Ava's Man and The Prince of Frogtown
• Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman by Nuala O'Faolain. (One of 9 children in a "defeated Dublin household," with a reporter father who was seldom home and an alcoholic mother, and aspiring to write in a male-dominated literary culture, Irish journalist O'Faolain narrates her journey of self-discovery in the Dublin world in which "writing and drink mattered far more than women."
• Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You by Sue William Silverman
• Being Flynn by Nick Flynn, movie tie-in edition of the award-winning Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir , now a movie, "Being Flynn," the story of an estranged father and son reunited when the alcoholic, narcissistic father shows up at a homeless shelter where the son, now adult, is working. (Listen to Dave Davies interview on Fresh Air with Nick Flynn.
Blue Nights by Joan Didion (about the loss of her beloved child, and a reflection on the complexity of being adopted, as her daughter, Quintana Roo, was). Here's • Hawley Roddick's review.
• Best Seat in the House: A Father, a Daughter, a Journey Through Sports by Christine Brennan (memoir of the popular sports columnist, whose father encouraged her love of sports and her belief that she could make it in the male-dominated niche of journalism). Read the Politics & Prose bookstore review .
• The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride
• Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp, author of Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs
• The Family Nobody Wanted by Helen Doss (foreword by Mary Battenwell). Doss chronicles how each of her adopted children, representing white, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Mexican, and Native American backgrounds, came to her and husband Carl, a Methodist minister
• Fathers, Sons, & Brothers: The Men in My Family by Bret Lott (autobiographical essays reviewed by Michael Harris ("Men Behaving Badly, Madly and Gladly," Los Angeles Times 7-21-97)
• Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick. "Rarely is the barbed edge of mother love described with such scorching wit and raw emotion as it is in Vivian Gornick's reissued memoir" about the literary critic's volatile relationship with her mother.
• Growing Up Patton: Reflections on Heroes, History, and Family Wisdom by Benjamin Patton and Jennifer Scruby (the grandson of General George S. Patton Jr., particularly on the relationship between the general and his son)
• The Habit by Susan Morse. “Morse’s caustic, changeable, demanding, smarty-pants mother is a late-life Sharon Sedaris, had Sharon Sedaris lived and become an Orthodox Christian nun in her eighties, and Morse herself is a crackerjack guide.” ~Cynthia Kaplan
• Hats & Eyeglasses: A Family Love Affair with Gambling by Martha Frankel
• How I Came Into My Inheritance: And Other True Stories by Dorothy Gallagher, as well as Strangers in the House: Life Stories
• Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship by Gail Caldwell. Dogs brought them together; illness (and grief) deepened the friendship. Highly recommended.
• The Low Road: A Scottish Family Memoir by Valerie Miner
• Replacement Child by Judy Mandel. (Here's A Circuitous Road to Memoir (Mandel on how she organized her material, ASJAWord, 2-6-13)
• Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham (orphaned at 8, Laura was raised in the Bronx by two odd but memorable uncles)
• The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on My Road Trip with Grandma by Iain Reid. (Read this Globe & Mail review by Kathryn Borel, Memoir of time spent with Grandma reveals old truths, young wisdom.)
• Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett, an excellent example of a "warts and all" memoir, about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face
• What Becomes You by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz. "Born ostensibly female, Sarah felt male, changed her name to Aaron, took testosterone injections, and survived life-threatening complications from a hysterectomy before undergoing a surgical sex change at 30. Raz writes of her child with rare and moving candor: "I'd given him a library card, braces, orthopedic shoes, glasses, but not what he needed, a sex change . . . now I felt useless in his life . . . I missed Sarah." Mother and son's poignant account becomes one of steadfast maternal love in the midst of changes only partly physical. Both knowingly return, always, to the terrain of the heart. As Link says, "If you want to survive, you must find a way to love what you are." ~Whitney Scott, Booklist
• What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love by Carole Radziwill

Two books to read in tandem. Read Francine Prose's story The Brothers Wolff (NY Times Magazine 2-5-89) about Tobias Wolff and Geoffrey Wolff, and compare their memoirs:
• This Boy's Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff (a remarkable account of growing up, and especially about his relationship with his abusive stepfather)
• The Duke of Deception: Memoirs of My Father by Geoffrey Wolff
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Short pieces of memoir writing

• American Lives: A Reader, ed. by Alicia Christensen, intro. by Tobias Wolff (with contributions by Laurie Alberts, Marvin V. Arnett, Charles Barber, Mary Felstiner, Eli Hastings, Sonya Huber, Jonathan Johnson, Ted Kooser, Dinah Lenney, Aaron Raz Link, Lee Martin, Dinty W. Moore, Hilda Raz, Mimi Schwartz, Brenda Serotte, Fan Shen, Peggy Shumaker, Natalia Rachel Singer, Floyd Skloot, John Skoyles, and Janet Sternburg_
• The Bishop's Daughter (a father, a faith, a secret) by Honor Moore (The New Yorker, 3-3-08)
• The Daily Miracle: Life with the mavericks and oddballs at the Herald Tribune, by William Zinsser (American Scholar, Winter 2008)
• Growing Up Buckley (Christopher Buckley, "Mum and Pup and Me," New York Times Magazine, 4-22-09)
• Held Hostage by History by Sandy M. Fernandez (Washington Post Magazine, 1-29-06), an adult child reconciles her memories of immigrating to the U.S. from war-torn Nicaragua with what she is discovering about her parents' experience of the same period
• Jewish Like Me by Amy Fine Collins (Vanity Fair 5-30-08).The author reflects on her lifelong role—above and below the Mason-Dixon Line—of being the only Jew in the room, and how an unexpected declaration by her daughter helped her reconstitute her identity.
• The Oxford Project (photo project gives "voice" to backbone of America)
• Paradise of Lies by Staceyann Chin (Lives, The New York Times Magazine, 2-17-08). "My mother ran away to Montreal shortly after my birth and left me behind in Jamaica. And the wealthy Chinese man from Montego Bay — whose name she gave me — denied he ever had any relations with her."
• Soaps of Our Lives . Soap operas as her mother knew (and acted in) them. (Liz Welch, NY Times Op-Ed, 12-12-09)

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MEMOIRS AND PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF
VOCATION, AVOCATION, OCCUPATION, PROFESSION, "CALLING"
In other words: Work
Life stories featuring the authors' work, careers, "day jobs"

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• Abbott, Shirley. The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound
• Armstrong, Karen. The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness. Anderson's memoir of leaving the life of a Roman Catholic nun in 1969 to join the secular world, "a stunningly poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth."
• Ashton-Warner, Sylvia. Teacher (most memorable scenes: teaching children how to read)
• Baryshnikov, Mikhail. Baryshnikov at Work
• Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly
• Branson, Richard. Losing My Virginity: How I Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way
• Brennan, Christine Brennan. Best Seat in the House: A Father, a Daughter, a Journey Through Sports (memoir of the popular columnist, one of the first women to make it in the male-dominated world of sports journalism).
• Carson, D.A. Memoirs of an Ordinary Pastor: The Life and Reflections of Tom Carson
• Cheever, Ben. Selling Ben Cheever: Back to Square One in a Service Economy (aware of his failure as the writing child of a famous novelist father, Cheever takes on a series of jobs in retail America, planning to write about them).
• Cherry, Mike. On High Steel: The Education of an Ironworker (a great book about construction workers on very tall structures)
• Conover, Ted. Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing
• Conroy, Pat. The Water Is Wide (early Conroy nonfiction about teaching Gullah children on a South Carolina island)
• Cowser, Robert. Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team
• Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (a journalist’s account of trying to live on what she makes as a waitress, a cleaning woman, a nursing home aide, and a Wal-Mart employee)
• Evans, Robert. The Kid Stays in the Picture. His 30 years in Hollywood and the film business.
• Gandhi, Mahatma. Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
• Gawande, Atul. Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science
• Gawande, Atul. Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance
• Griffin, Gail. Calling: Essays on Teaching in the Mother Tongue
• Grim, Pamela. Just Here Trying to Save a Few Lives: Tales of Life and Death in the ER
• Groopman, Jerome. Second Opinions: Stories of Intuition and Choice in the Changing World of Medicine
• Hamper, Ben. Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line (a shoprat’s life on the General Motors assembly line)
• Haynes, Jane. Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am? ("an unflinching journal of her life as a psychotherapist, revealing as much about the author as her patients")
• Hertzel, Laurie. News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist (how a talented journalist working for a small-city--Duluth--newspaper on the cusp of transformation stumbled on the story of her career, captured in They Took My Father: Finnish Americans in Stalin's Russia by Mayme Sevander with Laurie Hertzel
• Hoover, Dwight W. A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression
• Iacocca, Lee and William NovakIacocca: An Autobiography
• Juahar, Sandeep. Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
• Kimes, Martha. Ivy Briefs: True Tales of a Neurotic Law Student
• Kirkland, Gelsey. Dancing on My Grave (about her life as a ballerina and her struggles with eating disorders and drug addiction)
• Kirkland, Gelsey. The Shape of Love: The Story of 'Dancing on My Grave' (about her return to dancing--you can find used copies)
• Konner, Melvin. Becoming a Doctor: A Journey of Initiation in Medical School
• Lynch, Thomas. The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade
• Lynn, Loretta, with George Vecsey. Coal Miner’s Daughter (from her childhood in Butcher Holler to a life in country music)
• Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)
• Marion, Robert. The Intern Blues: The Timeless Classic About the Making of a Doctor
• Markham, Beryl. West with the Night. Raised in East Africa, where she apprenticed with her father as a trainer and breeder of racehorses, she became a bush pilot in the 1930s and was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. A classic memoir, beautifully written.
• Martin, Steve. Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
• Metz, Don. Confessions of a Country Architect
• Moody, Ralph. Little Britches, Man of the Family
• Moody, Ralph. Horse of a Different Color: Reminiscences of a Kansas Drover (ranching in the early 20th century)
• Neville, Susan. Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation
• Ofri, Danielle. Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
• Peterson, Eugene H. The Pastor: A Memoir
• Rafkin, Louise. Other People’s Dirt: A Housecleaner’s Curious Adventures
• Reichl, Ruth. Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
• Reichl, Ruth. Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (memoirs of the New York Times food critic)
• Robinson, Holly. The Gerbil Farmer's Daughter. The charming story of a military brat whose father abruptly and inexplicably takes up breeding then little-known gerbils in the 1960s, keeps his obsession a secret from the Navy, discovers that the gerbils are useful for research, and becomes a major supplier of gerbils bred for research (that Holly’s younger sister dies from cystic fibrosis is another thread to the story).
• Ruhlman, Michael. The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America and The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection (about cooking as an art form); and The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity (a journalist-chef's exploration of the world of the chef).
• Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
• Seltzer, Richard. Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery; Confessions of a Knife
• Sloan, William. My Years with General Motors
• Smith, Dennis. Firefighters: Their Lives in Their Own Words
• Sterling, Joy. A Cultivated Life: A Year in a California Vineyard
• Stone, John. In the Country of Hearts: Journeys in the Art of Medicine
• Teresa of Avila. The Way of Perfection
• Transue, Emily. On Call: A Doctor's Days and Nights in Residency
• Turow, Scott. One L: The Turbulent True Story of a First Year at Harvard Law School
• Unger, Zak. Working Fire: The Making of a Fireman (a rookie’s year in the Oakland Fire Department)
• Vertosick, Frank. When the Air Hits Your Brain: Tales from Neurosurgery and Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain
• Walton, Sam. Sam Walton: Made In America
• Payday (a bibliography of North American Working Class Autobiographies, compiled by Cheryl Cline)

And on the same theme, different genres (many of these recommended on the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass):
• Ferris, Joshua. Then We Came to the End. This funny, award-winning debut novel(written in first-person plural) has been called "The Office meets Kafka": a group of writers and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs during the dot.com bust. Another novel filled with firings: Personal Days by Ed Park.
• Heller, Joseph. Something Happened (working in an ad agency, circa the period of the TV series Mad Men
• Levine, Philip. What Work Is (a poet's "hymn of praise for all the workers of America," winner of the National Book Award in 1991. (Reviewed by Jane Ciabattari, NBCC blog)
• Terkel, Studs. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Brilliantly edited oral histories by the master interviewer.
• Rachman, Tom. The Imperfectionists (follows the topsy-turvy private lives of the reporters and editors of an English-language newspaper in Rome), comment by Ben Griffin
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Food Memoirs and Biographies

• Abu-Jaber, Diana. The Language of Baklava (growing up with a food-obsessed Jordanian father, an immigrant who "cooked to remember where he came from and pass that connection on to his children."
• Achatz, Grant. Life, on the Line: A Chef's Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat (a great chef's account of "how his drive to cook immaculate food fueled his miraculous triumph over tongue cancer."
• Apple, Jr., R.W.. Far Flung and Well Fed
• Bienvenu, Marcelle. Who's Your Mama, Are You Catholic, and Can You Make A Roux? A Cajun/​Creole Family Album Cookbook (more cookbook than memoir, and apparently the recipes are great--but there's also a lot about the Cajun/​Creole family traditions)
• Bemelmans, Ludwig. Hotel Bemelmans (behind-the-scenes account of a great hotel by a writer who worked at the Ritz and who wrote the Madeline books)
• Bijan, Donia. • Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen. “Chapter by chapter, Bijan recreates the memory-menu of her life, incorporating recipes for the dishes that most poignantly capture the past for her. By its heart-plucking end, this literary feast accomplishes what only the best meals do, bestowing not only a satisfying culinary experience but also a larger appreciation of life’s precious table.”~National Geographic Traveler
• Birnbaum, Molly. Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way. At 22, a head injury obliterated her sense of smell, destroying her dream of becoming a chef. The moving story of a pilgrimage (with no recipes!).
• Bociurkiw, Marusya. Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl
• Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential Updated Ed: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (P.S.)
• Boyle, T.C.. Talk Talk (a novel about identity theft that some criticize for too much food writing--not a problem for foodies!)
• Buford, Bill. Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
• Chang, T. Susan. A Spoonful of Promises: Stories & Recipes from a Well-Tempered Table. A heartfelt, poignant, often funny collection of stories about food, family, intimacy, and the ties that bind.
• Child, Julia. My Life in France (delicious!)
• Child, Julia about: Noel Riley Fitch, Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child; Nancy Verdi Barr, Backstage with Julia: My Years with Julia Child; and Julie Powell, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen
• Claiborne, Craig. A Feast Made for Laughter
• Colwin, Laurie. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen
• Ehrlich, Elizabeth. Miriam's Kitchen: A Memoir
• Ephron, Nora. Heartburn (Memoir, disguised as novel, with recipes and outrage)
• Epstein, Jason. Eating: A Memoir
• Ferrary, Jeannette. Out of the Kitchen: Adventures of a Food Writer
• Fisher, M.F.K.. The Art of Eating (brings together the wonderful Fisher’s Serve it Forth, Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets)
• Fussell, Betty. My Kitchen Wars
• Greene, Gael. Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess
• Guinta, Edvige. The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture
• Hamilton, Gabrielle. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
• Haney, John. Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food (growing up hungry in London’s East End)
• Hesser, Amanda, ed. Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (essays from the New York Times)
• Jaffrey, Madhur. Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India
• Jones, Judith. The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (Knopf’s legendary cookbook editor)
• Kingsolver, Kingsolver. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (about the year they lived without processed foods)
• Liebling, A.J.. Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris
• Maisto, Michele. The Gastronomy of Marriage
• Mayle, Peter. A Year in Provence; French Lessons: Adventures with Knife, Fork, and Corkscrew
• McNamee, Peter. Alice Waters and Chez Panisse
• Miller, Leslie, ed. Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food
• Mitchell, Joseph. Up in the Old Hotel (especially “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks”)
• Mones, Nicole. The Last Chinese Chef: A Novel (a novel, but a great gift for foodies)
• Murray, Erin Byers. Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm. Murray quit her unfulfilling job, looking for more fulfilling work -- and provides in this memoir a "behind-the-scenes tour of the oyster world."
• Orwell, Joseph. Down and Out in Paris and London (you will never feel the same about a restaurant meal again)
• O’Neill, Molly. Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball
• Pepin, Jacques. The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen
• Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (this is bigger than a memoir) and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
• Reichl, Ruth. Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (the early years); Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, and Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
• Richman, Alan. Fork It Over: The Intrepid Adventures of a Professional Eater
• Roberts, Doris. Are You Hungry, Dear? Life, Laughs, and Lasagna
• Samuelson, Marcus. Yes, Chef (life story of the celebrity chef born in Ethiopia, who survived TB, was adopted by a Swedish family and grew up in Sweden, then came to America and became the youngest chef ever to get the NY Times three-star rating. Listen to interview on Fresh Air radio.
• Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day (he’s funny, and there’s a food story)
• Sheraton, Mimi. Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life
• Slater, Nigel. The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater and Toast
• Steingarten, Jeffrey. The Man Who Ate Everything
• Trillin, Calvin. The Tummy Trilogy (or any of his books)
• Villas, James. Between Bites: Memoirs of a Hungry Hedonist
• West, Michael Lee. Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

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Anthologies:

• Berkeley, Ellen Perry, ed. At Grandmother's Table: Women Write about Food, Life and the Enduring Bond between Grandmothers and Granddaughters (68 women share stories of their grandmothers, and a recipe)
• Bodger, Lorraine. Eater's Digest: 400 Delectable Readings about Food and Drink
• Hesser, Amanda. Eat, Memory: Great Writers at the Table (essays from the New York Times, with recipes)
• Hughes, Holly. Best Food Writing 2008
• In My Mother's Kitchen: 25 Writers on Love, Cooking, and Family (contributions by Maya Angelou, Jennifer Appel, Holly Clegg, M. F. K. Fisher, Rosemary Gong, Tina Miller, Kitty Morse, Michel Nishan, - Christina Orchid, Ruth Reichl, Julie Sahni, Nigel Slate, Walter Staib, James Villas, Joyce White
• Miller, Leslie. Women Who Eat: A New Generation on the Glory of Food
• Ruhlman, The Making of a Chef: Mastering Heat at the Culinary Institute of America. If you like that you may want to read his The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity
• Volk, Patricia. Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family
• White, Marco Pierre. The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef
• Witherspoon, Kimberly and Andrew Freidman. Don't Try This At Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs

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Memoir- and life-story-related sites and articles
• Books to help you get started writing your life story (a recommended reading list)
• Compelling Stories, if Not Literature (Abigail Zuger, MD, NYTimes, 6-28-10, on the nature, benefits, uses, limits, and appeal of personal health-or illness-related memoirs, including tales of survival)
• Confessing for Voyeurs: The Age of the Literary Memoir Is Now, by James Atlas (New York Times, 5-12-96)
• Dawn Thurston's advice on memoir writing
• How to Write Your Memoir (an excellent piece by Joe Kita, Reader's Digest, January 2009)
• James Frey's Morning After, by Evgenia Peretz (Vanity Fair June 2008)
• Links to useful sites and resources about memoir writing (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors)
• Memoirs of illness, crisis,disability, differentness, and survival (a reading list)
• Michael Greenberg's breakdown lowdown (Joyce Carol Oates' review in TLS of a memoir of Greenberg's daughter's mental illness, and an interesting piece on the genre)
• My Father's Voice (Taylor Plimpton on George Plimpton, New Yorker, 6-17-12)
• On Ghostwriting (Scott Westerfield on ghostwriting other people's memoirs)
• The Proust Questionnaire (Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair, 5-6-10)
• "The Red Leather Diary," by Lily Koppel. Lori Rotskoff (Chicago Tribune 5-17-08) on how a 22-year-old reporter came to revive a 90-year-old woman's teen years
• Telling Your Story. Resources for writing your memoir, telling your family story, capturing a personal history (Pat McNees site)
• Types of Autobiographic Writing (Tristine Rainer's site)

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