Disclaimer: This is not meant to be any sort of authoritative list of the ten best memoirs ever, but rather an edit of ten memoirs that I feel embody the best of the genre. I wanted to capture the diversity of the memoir space, and thus I’ve included lighthearted celebrity memoirs, deeply moving activist memoirs,… Continue reading The Memoir Edit
Tag: Reviews
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Before she was the literary cool-girl icon that she is now, Sally Rooney burst onto the scene with her 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends. Rooney’s much-awaited second novel, Normal People (check out my review here), only cemented her position as the preeminent trendy millennial novelist. The highly successful… Continue reading Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Purchase a copy here! Britt Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers begins, “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”… Continue reading The Mothers by Brit Bennett
The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In an interview at the University of Central Florida, novelist Emily St. John Mandel said, “You can make an argument that the world’s become more bleak, but I feel like we always think we’re living at the end of the world”. Her most recent novel, The Glass Hotel, published… Continue reading The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Purchase a copy for yourself here! By all appearances, newly married college grads Roy and Celestial are living the dream as an upwardly mobile and passionately in love black couple in Atlanta. But their marriage is at once torn asunder, on a night when the couple is staying in a hotel in Louisiana on a… Continue reading An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Hunger by Roxane Gay
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “When I was twelve years old I was raped and then I ate and ate and ate to build my body into a fortress,” writes Roxane Gay in her 2017 bestseller, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. From the very first pages, it is clear that Hunger is an… Continue reading Hunger by Roxane Gay
Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In the late 1980s—amidst a great deal of political turmoil in Nigeria—university students Yejide and Akin fall in love hard and fast. The modern and highly educated couple resolves not to partake in the traditional Nigerian practice of polygamy, where a husband acquires a series of wives who bear… Continue reading Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Emma Straub’s bright new novel, All Adults Here, begins with sixty-eight-year-old Astrid Strick witnessing her long time frenemy, Barbara Baker, get hit by a bus in the middle of an intersection. Barbara’s sudden death shakes loose something in Astrid, a widow who has spent her whole life in a… Continue reading All Adults Here by Emma Straub
Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Purchase a copy for yourself here! “Labour to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience.” — Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation by George Washington Rules of Civility, the debut novel from investment banker turned novelist Amor Towles, takes its name from this code of… Continue reading Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History, which has been out for almost three decades now, is still the standard-bearer for that niche genre of stylish New England academic novels. The novel’s haunting narrator, Richard Papen, a scholarship student from California who becomes involved with a small group of… Continue reading The Secret History by Donna Tartt