Best Memoir Books in Audio Now that you’ve seen our list of the best memoir books and movies, I’m sure you’ll be interested in trying out more of the best memoir books in audio! 1)The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man’s Quest to Be a Better Husband by David Finch and Tantor Audio. New year, new memoirs. Don't miss these personal stories that reach for universal truths. From journalists to whisteblowers to daughters, these are the best new memoirs of 2020.
Memoir lovers, start your engines. This year's best true stories of tragedy, resilience, transformation and love will fuel you for months to come.
I Tried to Change So You Don’t Have To by Loni Love. This is a hilarious and heartwarming memoir. Presidential memoirs are meant to inform, to burnish reputations and, to a certain extent, to shape the course of history, and Obama’s is no exception. Here are the 10 Best Books of 2020. Best Books of 2020: Memoirs Feature by the editors of BookPage. November 27, 2020 Memoir lovers, start your engines. This year's best true stories of tragedy.
25. The Lady's Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness by Sarah Ramey
Though Ramey has experienced considerable pain while living with a chronic illness and enduring medical professionals' skepticism, contempt and even misogyny over the years, she manages to tell the tale with a pointed sense of humor and boatloads of heart.
24. The Sediments of Time by Meave Leakey
It's hard to say which is the more interesting part of this memoir: Leakey's fabulous, colorful life, traveling the globe doing paleontological research, or the amazing discoveries she makes about humanity's past along the way. Luckily for readers, The Sediments of Time includes generous portions of both.
23. Counterpoint by Philip Kennicott
Kennicott's gentle, contemplative account of being consumed by the music of Bach—listening to it, philosophizing about it, even learning to play it—during the decade following his mother's death is a beautiful and unforgettable triumph.
22. Lot Six by David Adjmi
Playwright Adjmi's coming-of-age memoir recounts his life as an outsider—in his family, his school and his Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn—as he fumbles toward finding himself artistically and personally. Sensitive, insightful and funny, Lot Six is a winning debut.
21. What Is the Grass by Mark Doty
In this elegant blend of literary criticism and personal memoir, one of America’s most perceptive contemporary poets digs deep into the work of Walt Whitman in search of personal—and communal—signposts.
20. Dancing With the Octopus by Debora Harding
With remarkable narrative skill, Harding untangles the lingering effects of family dysfunction and criminal trauma. This is a page-turner with a deep heart and soul, full of forgiveness but demanding of accountability.
19. Sigh, Gone by Phuc Tran
Sigh, Gone is the great punk rock immigrant story. Tran is funny and heartfelt as he filters the archetypal high school misfit story through the lens of immigration, assimilation and the ways music and books can bring us together, even when the larger world threatens to tear us apart.
18. When Time Stopped by Ariana Neumann
Neumann's father once told her, “Sometimes you have to leave the past where it is—in the past.” Fortunately for readers, Neumann ignored her father’s admonition and shares the results of her meticulous research in a brilliantly heart-wrenching memoir.
17. The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie
Laveau-Harvie’s debut memoir is a beautifully crafted, unblinkingly honest, often darkly funny lament for a loving family that never was, dotted with precious moments of rueful levity and fleeting beauty.
16. Places I've Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown
Brown's careful and poetic attention—to the world and the way her body moves through it—shines in this essay collection about travel, sex, work and cerebral palsy.
15. The Escape Artist by Helen Fremont
When Fremont's father died and her mother and sister legally excised her from the family, it opened up a lifetime's worth of secrets, betrayal, trauma and lies. As far as family memoirs go, The Escape Artist is as twisted, insightful and beautifully rendered as they come.
14. Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
When Wiener left the world of New York publishing and dove headfirst into San Francisco's startup tech industry, she became an anthropologist of venture capital, coding and big data. Her book is the definitive account of the topsy-turvy world of Silicon Valley, told with the wit and skepticism of a humanities major.
13.A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings by Helen Jukes
Jukes' memoir of learning to keep bees in her Oxford garden is full-to-bursting with warmth, wildness and visions of the gleaming, humming natural world. It's the perfect antidote to corporate stress and modern anxiety.
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12. Stray by Stephanie Danler
This is a read-in-one-sitting kind of memoir. Danler's beautifully crafted tale of childhood trauma, addiction, illness, toxic relationships and, ultimately, new beginnings is set against the backdrop of her native state of California, in all its dangerous beauty.
11. Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
In biting essays that cover topics as broad as intergenerational trauma, art, colonization and stand-up comedy, Hong dismantles reductionist stereotypes and showcases the textured complexities of Asian American identity.
10. Once I Was You by Maria Hinojosa
Thirty years of award-winning journalism culminate in Hinojosa’s beautiful and passionate memoir, which combines her personal story with the history of U.S. immigration policy and its damning effects on the lives of real people.
9. Wow, No Thank You. by Samantha Irby
“Samantha Irby is one of the funniest writers working today, but her frankness about things like chronic illness and depression make her so much more than just the Midwest’s patron saint of poop jokes.” —Christy, Associate Editor
8. Inferno by Catherine Cho
Infernois uniquely, breathtakingly beautiful. As Cho recounts her experience of postpartum psychosis, she moves maternal mental illness out of the shadows and offers a vision of motherhood that is honest, complicated and refreshing.
7. Nobody Will Tell You This but Me by Bess Kalb
“Family memoirs are usually about dysfunction, so it’s refreshing to read one that’s inspired by a soul-deep bond. The special kinship between Kalb and her grandmother, Bobby, is at the heart of this carefully crafted story. I laughed, I cried, I passed my copy on to someone I loved.” —Trisha, Publisher
6. World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Fireflies, wrens and ribbon eels are strung together like glittering jewels in this collection. In essays that explore the love for nature that has sustained her throughout her life, poet Nezhukumatathil finds a sense of connection to the world and a way to soften its sharp edges.
5. Children of the Land by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
“Whatever ideas you hold about families who cross the border without documentation, this memoir will complicate them. Castillo seems to crack open his own chest to reveal the human cost and personal injury of immigrating to the U.S.” —Christy, Associate Editor
4. Conditional Citizens by Laila Lalami
Lalami’s first work of nonfiction considers who has access to the rights and freedoms America is known for and whose citizenship is restricted. It’s a gigantic question that, in the hands of this gifted storyteller, becomes deeply personal.
3. Is Rape a Crime? by Michelle Bowdler
Among the horde of books about assault in America, Is Rape a Crime?stands apart. Bowdler’s candid recounting of her own mishandled legal case swells into a stinging indictment of the criminal justice system’s failure to treat sexual violence as a crime.
2. Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey
“Trethewey’s ability to translate the bone-crushing tragedy of her mother’s murder into art borders on alchemy.” —Christy, Associate Editor
1. Notes on a Silencing by Lacy Crawford
Crawford’s story of sexual assault and institutional cover-up is harrowing, but her elegant writing and propulsive narrative structure keep readers from ever sinking into despair. It’s a rare and brilliant achievement, and readers will be both gripped and challenged by this remarkable book.
This year has highlighted the particularities of that thing called reading. Some found books impossible to pick up; sustained attention to text on a page is hard when the world is in so much pain. Others turned to literature anew, rediscovering the ways it can refresh and inspire. Below are some of the titles we were most drawn to in 2020: a wide-ranging list that includes new spins on epic poems, stories about the interior lives of women, memoirs that eloquently challenged industries, and, yes, essays that made us laugh.
You can read the Culture team’s full selections here.
Every Friday in the Books Briefing, we thread together Atlantic stories on books that share similar ideas. Know other book lovers who might like this guide? Forward them this email.
This is our final Books Briefing of the year. See you in 2021.
What We’re Reading
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)
The workaday lives and thoughts of women may not seem revolutionary, but Mieko Kawakami manages to make them so in Breasts and Eggs. Each of the central characters struggles, in her own way, with the effects of misogyny and poverty. Makiko, a hostess worn down by decades of grueling service work, is considering breast-enhancement surgery. Her 12-year-old daughter Midoriko, deeply affected by her mother’s difficulties, hates the idea of becoming an adult woman; her apprehension manifests as a refusal to speak out loud to her family. Makiko’s sister Natsuko, a writer who lives alone, mulls using a sperm bank to have a child. Kawakami makes blunt but dignified space for this trio. At one point, Midoriko, full of rage and grief and anxiety, finally breaks her silence in a breathtaking kitchen confrontation with her mother that involves dozens of smashed eggs. The electric moment channels the ethos of the book: raw, funny, mundane, heartbreaking. — Jane Yong Kim
Recommended Reading
The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout
Kate Cray
Recommended Reading
The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout
Kate Cray
Uncanny Valley, by Anna Wiener
Before she abandoned her ill-paid life in the publishing business for the San Francisco startup scene in 2013, Anna Wiener was a Brooklyn literary type, socially anxious and “affectedly analog” (owner of a record player she rarely used, dater of men of artisanal bent), not to mention oblivious to “the people behind the internet.” She was, in other words, just the unlikely observer of Silicon Valley I’d been waiting for: an outsider-insider, articulately insecure and hyper-self-aware. Her eye and ear for the tribal details of tech-bro culture are acute. Wiener is also unsparing about her own fascination with an ethos of social and generational arrogance: Variously employed on the customer-support side of the tech world, she feels driven to impress Millennial bosses who are her peers, yet all-powerful. Her indictment of the industry’s myopia and insularity, preaching connectivity while abetting the fracturing of America, is close-up and personal. She never aspired to the elite ranks of coders. But in Wiener, the Bay Area now has a brilliant decoder. — Ann Hulbert
Beowulf: A New Translation, by Maria Dahvana Headley
I’ll admit to a moment—more than one, actually—of fogey-ish recoil as I stepped into the jabbingly familiar/unfamiliar world of Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf. “Blinged-out”? “Hashtag: blessed”? “Beowulf gave zero shits”? Too groovy, I feared, for this Beowulf nerd. But not at all. Headley’s text springs these surprises strategically, almost trickily, little fireworks of idiom to hold our attention as she winds with great fidelity of purpose into the depths of the Beowulf poet’s language—the alliteration, the compound words, the sinewy formality, the doleful magic, and the hard existential light. Thrillingly, it becomes a double act: Headley and her ancient forebear, diving together into the word-hoard. Her Grendel—“brotherless, sludge-stranded”—is more pitiable than ever, her Beowulf more of a thumping super-jock. As for the dragon: “the firedrake raked coast-to-coast / with claws, charred gilded Geatland without pause.” Right on. — James Parker
Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi
Best New Books 2020
I remember reading Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 debut, Homegoing, and being blown away by the book’s ambition. Anintergenerational story that crossed oceans and epochs, it stayed with me for years. Gyasi’s latest book, Transcendent Kingdom, uses a narrower lensbut is no less gripping. It follows Gifty, a sixth-year doctoral student in neuroscience who is reckoning with her family’s relationship to mental illness, addiction, and abandonment. The work she does in her lab, studying the reward-seeking behavior of mice, channels the grief she still carries about her brother’s death from opioids. Gyasi skillfully moves back and forth between the present day and Gifty’s childhood, richly detailing her characters’ lives and treating these heavy topics with complexity and honesty; in particular, the scenes portraying Gifty’s brother’s addiction are devastating without being emotionally overwrought. Writing a successful follow-up to an impressive debut is difficult, but Gyasi certainly did. — Clint Smith
Wow, No Thank You, by Samantha Irby
Memoirs To Read 2020
“Imagine if real life had an off switch!” Samantha Irby exclaims toward the end of her essay-length meditation on the joys of having a smartphone. It’s the kind of line Irby deploys to delicious effect throughout her books—at once wistful, snarky, and just a bit morbid. Wow, No Thank You, her most recent collection, reads like a series of confessions; her tone leans acerbic, but these essays on the difficulty of making friends in adulthood or the unmitigated terror of occupying a human body are deeply intimate. The collection weaves together insights about misogyny, racism, and the alluring ills of capitalist pursuits with Irby’s unfailing humor. “Uncreased, unlined foreheads and cheeks are a prerequisite for tricking people into believe you have a good life,” she writes, only to immediately reveal her real objection to Botox: “But life is fucking stressful and too goddamn long, and I am afraid to get needles in my face.” Brisk and inventive in form, Wow, No Thank You is a quarantine book that conjures that most elusive of experiences: idle time spent with a friend, talking about everything and nothing at all. — Hannah Giorgis
About us: This week’s newsletter is written by the Atlantic’s Culture desk.
Best Memoir Books 2020 New York Times
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