Sleeping with Cats

Are You Somebody?: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman

Nuala O'Faolain · 238 pages

Irish times columnist Nuala O'Faolain opens her past and looks at it in this searingly honest midlife exploration of the love, pain, loneliness, loss, and self-discovery she has experienced. The result is a classic memoir. Born one of nine children in a penniless North Dublin family headed by an overwhelmed mother and a charming but absent father, Nuala not only survived but pushed at the boundari

Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel · 336 pages

Full of promise is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in every way. By twelve she was cutting her legs in the girls' bathroom and listening to scratchy recordings of the Velvet Underground. College was marked by a series of breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations before she was finally given P

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

Lena Dunham · 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

Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography

Amrita Pritam · 130 pages

You're Never Weird on the Internet

Felicia Day · 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

An Education: My Life Might Have Turned Out Differently if I Had Just Said No

Lynn Barber · 200 pages

Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel · 224 pages

From the best-selling author of Fun Home, Time magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, a brilliantly told graphic memoir of Alison Bechdel becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman,

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

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.

My Salinger Year

Joanna Rakoff · 286 pages

1996. Joanna Rakoff takes a job at one of New York's oldest literary agencies. On her first day, her boss gives her a stern talk about someone named 'Jerry'. She is never to give out Jerry's address or phone number, or talk to reporters about Jerry, or to call him with questions. It is only then she notices an entire wall of books containing myriad editions of the works of J.D. Salinger. Filled wi

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Hungry Heart: Adventures in Life, Love, and Writing

Jennifer Weiner · 402 pages

"You fall down. You get hurt. You get up again. You know Jennifer Weiner as many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and "an unlikely feminist enforcer" (The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister; a former rower and current runner; a best friend and a reality TV junkie. Here, in her first foray into nonfiction, she takes the raw stuff of her personal life and spin

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

Donald Miller · 255 pages

The Facts

Philip Roth · 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

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami · 179 pages

Diaries of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka · 528 pages

These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensit

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby · 141 pages

The author, former editor of French Elle magazine, describes the rare stroke to the brain stem that left his mind intact in a nearly totally paralyzed body.

Lit

Mary Karr

An Angel at my Table

Janet Frame · 514 pages

AUTOBIOGRAPHY: LITERARY. New Zealand's preeminent writer Janet Frame brings the skill of an extraordinary novelist and poet to these vivid and haunting recollections, gathered here for the first time in a single volume. From a childhood and adolescence spent in a poor but intellectually intense railway family, through life as a student, and years of incarceration in mental hospitals, eventually fo

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

Stephen King · 291 pages

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft -- and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever. Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so reveal

Time To Be In Earnest: A Fragment Of Autobiography

P.D. James · 291 pages

In 1997, P. D. James, the internationally acclaimed author of mysteries, turned seventy-seven. Taking to heart Dr. Johnson's advice that at seventy-seven it is "time to be in earnest," she decided to undertake a book unlike any she had written before: a personal memoir in the form of a diary. This enchanting and highly original volume is the result. Structured as the diary of a single year, it roa

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness

William Styron · 224 pages

Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked

James Lasdun · 218 pages

A true story of obsessive love turning to obsessive hate, "Give Me Everything You Have" chronicles the author's strange and harrowing ordeal at the hands of a former student, a self-styled "verbal terrorist", who began trying, in her words, to "ruin him."

The Story of My Life

Helen Keller · 240 pages