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🧲 Books like this

My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff Β· back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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Bad Boy: A Memoir

Walter Dean Myers Β· 224 pages

In his own words...As a boy, Walter Dean Myers was quick-tempered and physically strong, always ready for a fight. He also read voraciously-he would check out books from the library and carry them home, hidden in brown paper bags in order to avoid other boys' teasing. He aspired to be a writer. But growing up in a poor family in Harlem, his hope for a successful future diminished as he came to rea

AutobiographyBookishMemoir & BiographyNew York City
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt Β· 512 pages

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNew York CityNostalgic
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Jacky Daydream

Jacqueline Wilson Β· 352 pages

A wonderful depiction of her own childhood which every child will want to read, from the Children's LaureateEverybody knows Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson's best-loved character. But what do they know about Jacqueline herself? In this fascinating book, discover. . . . . . how Jacky played with paper dolls like April in Dustbin Baby.. . . how she dealt with an unpredictable father like Prue in Lov

BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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Just Kids

Patti Smith Β· 336 pages

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNew York CityNostalgic
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A Girl from Yamhill

Beverly Cleary Β· 279 pages

Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicBookish
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AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicNew York City
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You're Never Weird on the Internet

Felicia Day Β· 272 pages

The Internet isn't all cat videos. There's also Felicia Day -- violinist, filmmaker, Internet entrepreneur, compulsive gamer, hoagie specialist, and former lonely homeschooled girl who overcame her isolated childhood to become the ruler of a new world... or at least semi-influential in the world of Internet Geeks and Goodreads book clubs. After growing up in the south where she was "homeschooled f

BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographySelf-Discovery
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A Strong West Wind

Gail Caldwell Β· 228 pages

In this memoir set on the high plains of Texas, Pulitzer Prize winner Caldwell transforms into art what it is like to come of age in a particular time and place. Beginning in the 1950s in the wilds of the Texas Panhandle, she grew up surrounded by dust storms and cattle ranches and summer lightning, and took refuge from the vastness of the land and the ever-present wind by retreating into books. W

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyBookishNostalgic
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Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach Β· 230 pages

Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and visiting writers of the Lost Generation, a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderso

BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned"

Lena Dunham Β· 287 pages

"If I could take what I've learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile. I'm already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expens

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNew York CitySelf-Discovery
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The Child that Books Built

Francis Spufford Β· 219 pages

"To understand the thrall of fiction, Spufford goes back to his earliest encounters with books, exploring such beloved classics as The Wind in the Willows, The Little House on the Prairie, and the Narnia chronicles. He re-creates the excitement of discovery, writing joyfully of the moment when fuzzy marks on a page become words, which then reveal - a dragon. Weaving together child development, pe

BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Steve Martin Β· 216 pages

The author shares the stories of his years in stand-up comedy in a humorous memoir that recalls a first job selling guidebooks at Disneyland, his early magic and comedy act, his years of honing his craft, and the sacrifice, discipline, and originality it took to take him to the top.

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicSelf-Discovery
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Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

Nicolaia Rips Β· 272 pages

"'Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise--a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents' (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old's darkly funny, big-hearted memoir about growing up in New York City's legendary Chelsea Hotel. New York's Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens

AutobiographyNew York CityMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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The Tender Bar

J.R. Moehringer Β· 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

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicNew York City
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BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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Avid Reader: A Life

Robert Gottlieb Β· 337 pages

"The editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster writes with wit and candor about becoming the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine,"--NoveList.

BookishAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNew York City
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Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel Β· 236 pages

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's

AutobiographyBookishMemoir & BiographySelf-Discovery
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson Β· 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.

BookishMemoir & BiographyAutobiographySelf-Discovery
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The Facts

Philip Roth Β· 208 pages

"The author concentrates on five episodes from his life : his protected childhood during the thirties and forties in Jewish Newark ; his education in the early fifties at gentile Bucknell ; his passionate entanglement as a young university instructor with the angriest person he'd ever met - the "girl of my dreams," Roth calls her ; his clash with a Jewish establishment outraged by the "self-hatred

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicSelf-Discovery
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What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami Β· 179 pages

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicSelf-Discovery
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Manhattan, When I Was Young

Mary Cantwell Β· 214 pages

With Manhattan, When I Was Young, Mary Gantwell, a former writer and editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue and now a writer at the New York Times, gives us an elegant and lyrical autobiographical account of a time and place that for some exists only in imagination. But this is a life as it was actually lived, with romance, passion, and no little share of pain. Set in five different apartments in Manha

AutobiographyNew York CityNostalgicMemoir & Biography
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A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

Kevin Brockmeier Β· 199 pages

"At age twelve, [the American novelist] Kevin Brockmeier is ready to become a different person: not the boy he has always been--the one who cries too easily and laughs too easily, who lives in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes--but someone else altogether. Over the course of one school year--seventh grade--he sets out in search of himself"--Page 4 of cover.

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyNostalgicSelf-Discovery
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Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

Deborah Feldman Β· 272 pages

Traces the author's upbringing in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, describing the strict rules that governed her life, arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.

AutobiographyNew York CityMemoir & BiographySelf-Discovery
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The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

Samuel R. Delany Β· 572 pages

The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village is an autobiography by science fiction author Samuel R. Delany in which he recounts his experiences as growing up a gay African American, as well as some of his time in an interracial and open marriage with Marilyn Hacker. (Wikipedia

AutobiographyNew York CityMemoir & BiographyNostalgic
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