Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel

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

'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 294 pages

For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq

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

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.

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

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

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Marjane Satrapi · 187 pages

187 pages : illustrations ; 24 cmGN500L Lexile

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Down These Mean Streets

Piri Thomas · 317 pages

The story of a Puerto Rican boy, oldest of seven children, who was born and brought up in Spanish Harlem.

Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx

Sonia Manzano · 267 pages

Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges us into the daily lives of a Latino family that is loving--and troubled. This is Sonia's own story rendered with an unforgettable narrative power. When readers meet young Sonia, she is a child living amidst the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy r

Brown Girl Dreaming

Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.

How to Murder Your Life

Cat Marnell · 379 pages

"From Cat Marnell, 'New York's enfant terrible' (The Telegraph), a candid and darkly humorous memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. At twenty-six, Cat Marnell was an associate beauty editor at Lucky, one of the top fashion magazines in America--and that's all most people knew about her. But she hid a secret

A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade

Kevin Brockmeier · 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.

Everything I Know About Love

Dolly Alderton · 368 pages

The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding

The Fields of Home

Ralph Moody · 335 pages

Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde: A True Story

Rebecca Dana · 274 pages

A weekly columnist for "The Daily Beast" recounts the story of the launch of her career, a period marked by her graduation from Yale, unanticipated setbacks that culminated in brief homelessness in New York, and a Russian rabbi roommate.

Underfoot in Show Business

Helene Hanff · 177 pages

Helene Hanff's witty memoir of her adventures and misadventures as an aspiring playwright in New York City, 1940s-1960s.

Honor Girl: A Graphic Memoir

Maggie Thrash · 272 pages

Maggie Thrash has spent basically every summer of her fifteen-year-old life at the one-hundred-year-old Camp Bellflower for Girls, set deep in the heart of Appalachia. She's from Atlanta, she's never kissed a guy, she's into Backstreet Boys in a really deep way, and her long summer days are full of a pleasant, peaceful nothing . . . until one confounding moment. A split-second of innocent phys

The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: a Memoir

Debra Marquart · 270 pages

Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir

Janice Erlbaum · 272 pages

The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll · 210 pages

The Basketball Diaries is a 1978 memoir written by author and musician Jim Carroll. It is an edited collection of the diaries he kept between the ages of twelve and sixteen. The original classic story about growing up with drugs and sex and about learning to survive on the streets of New York--once again in print. An urban classic of coming of age.

Smile

Raina Telgemeier · 213 pages

Manhattan, When I Was Young

Mary Cantwell · 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