What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
J.D. Vance · 272 pages
From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo
Chanel Bonfire
Wendy Lawless · 295 pages
"Wendy Lawless' stunning memoir of resilience in the face of an unstable alcoholic and suicidal mother"--
The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer · 384 pages
JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss
Frances Stroh · 333 pages
"A memoir of a city, an industry, and a dynasty in decline, and the story of a young artist's struggle to find her way out of the ruins. Frances Stroh's earliest memories are ones of great privilege: shopping trips to London and New York, lunches served by black-tied waiters at the Regency Hotel, and a house filled with precious antiques, which she was forbidden to touch. Established in Detroit in
Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
Laura M. Flynn
When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their moth
Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling...
Rosie Perez · 329 pages
The Oscar-nominated actress shares the previously untold story about her disadvantaged childhood and her successes in and out of the Hollywood limelight, tracing her relationship with the schizophrenic mother who relinquished her to a Catholic orphanage, the abuse she suffered in a series of homes and the fierce sense of independence that inspired her career.
Wishful Drinking
Carrie Fisher · 163 pages
Fisher comes clean (well, sort of) with the crazy truth that is her life, in her first-ever memoir.
With or Without You
Domenica Ruta · 210 pages
The author grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston where in the 17th century women were hanged as witches, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches. And yet she managed, despite the cha
Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter's Memoir
Terry Helwig
"Forced by her mother's instability to care for her five siblings, Helwig crafts a moving story of a mother she loved and struggled to understand"--
Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah · 297 pages
Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab
Coming Clean
Kimberly Rae Miller · 272 pages
Her Last Death
Susanna Sonnenberg · 288 pages
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls · 296 pages
A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.
The Friday Afternoon Club: A Family Memoir
Griffin Dunne · 400 pages
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi · 160 pages
Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and
Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
Azar Nafisi · 336 pages
I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me – A Gripping Memoir of Complicated Family Relationships
Adrienne Brodeur · 272 pages
The Mighty Queens of Freeville: A Mother, a Daughter, and the People Who Raised Them
Amy Dickinson · 240 pages
Millions of Americans know and love Amy Dickinson from reading her syndicated advice column “Ask Amy” and from hearing her wit and wisdom weekly on National Public Radio. Amy’s audience loves her for her honesty, her small-town values, and the fact that her motto is “I make the mistakes so you don’t have to.” In The Mighty Queens of Freeville, Amy Dickinson shares those mistakes and her remarkable
Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love
Debra Gwartney · 224 pages
"Live Through This"--as emotionally wrenching and ultimately redemptive as David Sheff 's "Beautiful Boy"--follows Gwartney's frantic effort to recover her beautiful, intelligent daughters from their lives on the street.

