What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHolding the Man
Timothy Conigrave · 304 pages
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 256 pages
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve me
Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival
Sean Strub · 432 pages
Sean Strub, founder of the groundbreaking POZ magazine, producer of the hit play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, and the first openly HIV-positive candidate for U.S. Congress, charts his remarkable life. As a politics-obsessed Georgetown freshman, Strub arrived in Washington from Iowa in 1976, with a plum part-time job running a Senate elevator. He also harbored a terrifying secret: his attracti
Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast · 228 pages
In her first memoir, Roz Chast brings her signature wit to the topic of aging parents. Spanning the last several years of their lives and told through four-color cartoons, family photos, and documents, and a narrative as rife with laughs as it is with tears, Chast's memoir is both comfort and comic relief for anyone experiencing the life-altering loss of elderly parents. When it came to her elderl
Letter to D: A Love Story
Andre Gorz · 144 pages
What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love
Carole Radziwill · 268 pages
A memoir about a girl from a working class town who becomes an award-winning television producer and marries a prince, Anthony Radziwill, nephew of John F. Kennedy. Carole DiFalco Radziwill grew up in a suburb with a large, eccentric cast of characters. At the age of nineteen, she struck out for New York. Her career at ABC News led her to the refugee camps of Cambodia, a bunker in Tel Aviv, and th
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father
Alysia Abbott · 352 pages
In this vibrant memoir, Alysia Abbott recounts growing up in 1970s San Francisco with Steve Abbott, a gay, single father during an era when that was rare. Reconstructing their time together from a remarkable cache of Steve’s writings, Alysia gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic period in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daugh
Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy · 230 pages
Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a you
Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage
Madeleine L'Engle · 231 pages
This moving memoir documents a marriage of more than forty years between two gifted people, a long term marriage that was: "full of wonderful things, terrible things, joyous things, grievous things, but ours."
The Cancer Journals
Audre Lorde · 77 pages
First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde’s experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women’s pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women’s body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a “black, lesb
Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “
A Very Easy Death
Simone de Beauvoir · 106 pages
Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life
Kathleen Norris · 343 pages
Kathleen Norris's masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture.
The Last Act Of Love
Cathy Rentzenbrink · 256 pages
The Last Lecture
Randy Pausch · 224 pages
The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Keeper: One House, Three Generations, and a Journey into Alzheimer's
Andrea Gillies · 323 pages
'Keeper' is a very humane and honest exploration of living with Alzheimer's, giving an illuminating account of the disease itself. Gillies tells about the time she and her family spent living with someone with dementia, in a big Victorian house in the far, far north of Scotland.
C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too
John Diamond · 240 pages
The witty but compelling story of one man's view of his cancer and its treatment which became an instant bestseller on its publication.Shortly before his 44th birthday, John Diamond received a call from the doctor who had removed a lump from his neck. Having been assured for the previous 2 years that this was a benign cyst, Diamond was told that it was, in fact, cancerous. Suddenly, this man who'd
Chasing Daylight: How My Forthcoming Death Transformed My Life
Eugene O'Kelly · 160 pages
By Myself
Lauren Bacall · 506 pages
L'actrice, dont le rêve d'enfant était de devenir comédienne de théâtre, retrace son parcours dans le monde du cinéma tout en évoquant ses fragilités et ses fiertés.
The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend
Sarah Manguso · 111 pages
The Argonauts
Maggie Nelson · 160 pages
Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, as well as her journe