Literary Life: A Second Memoir

My Own Two Feet

Beverly Cleary · 261 pages

The New Yorker called Beverly Cleary's first volume of memoirs, A Girl From Yamhill, a warm, honest book, as interesting as any novel. Now the creator of the classic children's stories millions grew up with continues her own fascination story. Here is Beverly Cleary, from college years to the publication of her first book. It is a fascinating look at her life and a writing career that spans three

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

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

Lynn Barber · 200 pages

Bad Boy: A Memoir

Walter Dean Myers · 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

Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure

Paul Auster · 448 pages

This is the story of a young man's struggle to stay afloat. By turns poignant and comic, Paul Auster's memoir is essentially an autobiographical essay about money - and what it means not to have it. From one odd job to the next, from one failed scheme to another, Auster investigates his own stubborn compulsion to make art, and describes his ingenious, often farfetched attempts to survive on next

Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography

Amrita Pritam · 130 pages

Lust & Wonder

Augusten Burroughs · 304 pages

"In chronicling the development and demise of the different relationships he's had while living in New York, Augusten Burroughs examines what it means to be in love, what it means to be in lust, and what it means to be figuring it all out. With Augusten's unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust and Wonder is an intimate and h

Townie

Andre Dubus III · 387 pages

After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, o

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."

Jacky Daydream

Jacqueline Wilson · 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

Dust Tracks on a Road

Zora Neale Hurston · 336 pages

An exuberant account of Zora Neale Hurston's rise from poverty in the rural south to a prominent place among the leading artists and intelectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

Giving Up the Ghost

Hilary Mantel · 254 pages

At no. 58 the top of my head comes to the outermost curve of my great-aunt, Annie Connor. Her shape is like the full moon, her smile is beaming; the outer rim of her is covered by her pinny, woven with tiny flowers. It is soft from washing; her hands are hard and chapped; it is barely ten o'clock and she is getting the cabbage on. 'Hello, Our Ilary,' she says; my family has named me aspirationally

City Boy: My Life in New York in the 1960s and 70s

Edmund White · 300 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.

Just Kids

Patti Smith · 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.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Haruki Murakami · 179 pages

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

Elsewhere

Richard Russo · 251 pages

This work is the author's memoir of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape. Anyone familiar with the author's fiction will recognize Gloversville, New York, once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a good-time, second-fiddle father

Priestdaddy: A Memoir

Patricia Lockwood · 352 pages

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, t

Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir

Penelope Lively · 234 pages

"The beloved and bestselling author takes an intimate look back at a life of reading and writing. "The memory that we live with is the moth-eaten version of our own past that each of us carries around, depends on. It is our ID; this is how we know who we are and where we have been." Memory and history have been Penelope Lively's terrain in fiction over a career that has spanned five decades. But s

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · 285 pages

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century. Since its publication in 1947, it has been read by tens of millions of people all over the world. It remains a beloved and deeply admired testament to the indestructible nature of the human spirit. Restored in this Definitive Edition are diary entries that were omitted from the original edition. T

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

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · 426 pages

From Wikipedia: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (ISBN 0-330-48455-9) is a memoir by Dave Eggers released in 2000. It chronicles his stewardship of younger brother Christopher "Toph" Eggers following the cancer-related deaths of his parents. The book was an enormous commercial and critical success, reaching number one on The New York Times bestseller list and being nominated as a final

The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap: A Memoir of Friendship, Community, and the Uncommon Pleasure of a Good Book

Wendy Welch · 304 pages