1
The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History
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This book, a personal and extensively researched account of pain, beauty, and survival amidst the climate crisis, has stayed with me ever since I read the galley last fall. Manjula Martin’s clear prose stirs and sings, balancing justified rage and anxiety with a tenderness that never veers into sentimentality. A memoir threaded with natural history and a complicated love letter to the wild and imperiled California landscape Martin calls home, The Last Fire Season shows readers one way to both hold grief and look for new possibilities in the face of an uncertain future.
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Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, by Crystal Wilkinson
Now 38% Off
In Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky uplifts the labor and legacy of her foremothers—five generations of Black Appalachian country cooks whose stories, recipes, and cooking rituals are now a treasured part of her inheritance. I am no cook myself, but I’m here for anything Crystal Wilkinson writes, and this stunning culinary memoir is one to savor and share. Wilkinson brings her many kitchen ghosts to vivid life through painstaking research and perfectly chosen details, reminding us that food is never just about the here and now—it is also a vital link to our families, our communities, and our history.
3
How to Live Free in a Dangerous World, by Shayla Lawson
Now 33% Off
From Mexico City to Montserrat, Kyoto to Cairo, writer and poet Shayla Lawson explores issues of gender identity, sex and relationships, race, disability, friendship, healing, and more, inviting readers along on a far-ranging journey that’s more about love and liberation than points on a map. Lawson is an insightful and unfailingly open-handed writer—honest about their trials and lessons learned, sharp but never jaded, unafraid to be vulnerable. Most travel memoirs aim to transport readers; Lawson’s may transform many.
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4
I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante
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Early in this beautiful book, Lucy Sante writes: “Who am I? is a question I’ve been trying to resolve for the better part of my life.” Sante, an award-winning author, artist, and critic, shares the story of her fascinating life and a candid accounting of how she came to face the truth of her gender identity in her seventh decade (“I had at last met my reckoning”), after feeding photos into FaceApp’s gender-swap function helped her to finally meet herself as she is. A profound narrative of self-realization written with curiosity and bracing clarity, I Heard Her Call My Name is a work that both new and established readers of Sante will treasure.
5
Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa
Now 33% Off
Deborah Jackson Taffa, director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, writes with compassion for her past self and the people and places that formed her, weaving stories of her parents and grandparents through an intimate account of her own childhood after her family relocated from the Quechan (Yuma) reservation in California to Navajo territory in New Mexico. Taffa writes about the challenges, dreams, and traditions of her mixed-tribe, mixed-race family, confronts genocidal US government policies against Native people, and grapples with the specific harms visited on those pushed to uproot and assimilate. The result is a riveting, intricately layered exploration of family, belonging, trauma, and survival—an instant classic by a writer I can’t wait to read more from.
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Here After, by Amy Lin
Now 23% Off
Amy Lin told me that she wrote Here After “in an agony that insisted”—a phrase I’ve continued to think about long after finishing this aching, fragmented memoir about her life with her husband Kurtis and his sudden death. If you’ve ever known loss so cataclysmic that you want not stories of hope or survival, but ones that cry out in their brokenness—if you are looking for a place to meet your own pain or perhaps feel less alone with it—Here After might be the companion you need.
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7
Where Rivers Part, by Kao Kalia Yang
Now 21% Off
Kao Kalia Yang’s The Late Homecomer, detailing her family’s escape from war in Laos, holds a place on my list of all-time favorite memoirs. The Song Poet focused on the story of her father, a song poet and a Hmong refugee. Now, in Where Rivers Part, she shares the story of her mother Tswb, who fled genocidal violence, lived in a refugee camp, and helped her family find and build a new home in the US. Yang keeps readers as close as possible to Tswb’s perspective, treating her history and hardships with care. Where Rivers Part is a sensitive, unforgettable account of one mother’s immeasurable strength and love for her family.
8
Bones Worth Breaking, by David Martinez
Bones Worth Breaking is the hard, immersive story of two brothers, David Martinez and his brother Mike, who start out and are in a sense always together throughout this arresting narrative, although they eventually take very different paths in life. Martinez holds nothing back when writing about his upbringing as a multiracial Mormon in Idaho, family dysfunction, living with addiction, and surviving complicated losses—but the heart of this book is found in his defining relationship with his brother, and what it means to share your life and your wounds with someone you ultimately cannot save.
9
The Dead Don't Need Reminding, by Julian Randall
Julian Randall, who has a poetry collection and two middle-grade novels to his name, further showcases both his range and his generosity as a writer in his latest book, The Dead Don’t Need Reminding. His unflinching excavation of family history, mental health struggles, legacy, and loss flows around and through lyrical reflections on media, ranging from Spider-Man and BoJack Horseman to the Creed movies and Jordan Peele’s filmography. Incisive, enthralling, and full of heart, this book doesn’t just set itself apart in the genre of blended personal/pop culture writing; it deserves to be seen as a reinvention of it.
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10
Love Is a Burning Thing, by Nina St. Pierre
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In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre attempts to untangle the legacy left by her mother, Anita, whose recovery from self-immolation ten years before Nina’s birth led her to a lifelong obsession with Transcendental Meditation. This memoir is a daughter’s reckoning: a quest to understand her mystery of a mother, an exploration of mysticism and untreated mental illness, and an indictment of the systems that failed their family. Reading it was also something of a homecoming for me, as St. Pierre and I grew up in the same remote corner of the west, but you don’t need to know the region in order to appreciate the descriptions that add lush texture to this searching, empathetic narrative.
11
Cactus Country, by Zoë Bossiere
Now 35% Off
Growing up in Tucson, Zoë Bossiere doesn’t quite know where they belong or have the language for their gender fluidity. Surrounded by people who want to categorize them, sometimes treated like a boy, young Zoë often has more questions than answers as they dream of a life beyond Cactus Country RV Park. In seeking out stories like her own, finding vital community, and eventually writing about the home she leaves behind, Bossiere begins to imagine a future that holds more joy, more safety, and more truth. Heartrending and hopeful by turns, written with precision and a deep-rooted sense of place, Cactus Country is a soulful coming-of-age story I’m grateful to have read.
12
Woman of Interest, by Tracy O'Neill
Now 14% Off
In the spring of 2020, as thousands of people worldwide succumb to Covid, Tracy O’Neill finds herself suddenly consumed by the fear that her unknown birth mother might be dying alone in Korea. She seeks out a private investigator, puzzles over unearthed clues, and eventually travels to the other side of the world, determined to learn more about herself as well as the mysterious woman who bore her. O’Neill invites readers to consider the complex and often confounding nature of family mythology in Woman of Interest—a funny, effervescent addition to the memoir-as-detective-story genre.
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13
The Lucky Ones, by Zara Chowdhary
Zara Chowdhary was 16 years old when terrifying anti-Muslim violence erupted in Gujarat in 2002. Instead of taking her school exams, she spent three harrowing months locked with her family in their apartment in Ahmedabad while violent mobs hunted down and massacred hundreds of Muslims. In The Lucky Ones, she describes her relatives’ and neighbors’ terror under siege in unshrinking detail, naming the extremist hatred and violence that destroyed so many lives and remade her own. An astonishing feat of storytelling, an urgent reckoning with a past that feels all too present, and a moving ode to the women in her family, Chowdhary’s memoir is one that should and will haunt you.
14
First in the Family, by Jessica Hoppe
Jessica Hoppe writes with grace and gripping candor about being the first in her family to recover from addiction in this fiery debut memoir. “Although alcohol would become my drug of choice, American exceptionalism was the first drug I ever took,” she writes. In sharing both her family history and her journey to recovery, Hoppe doesn’t shy away from challenging “the propaganda of the American Dream” she was raised to believe in—she explicitly connects her personal experiences with racialized trauma and substance use to a broader and more devastating story about this country.
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