35 Memoirs to Read This Summer

It’s been said, “If you want to be a great writer, you need to have an insatiable appetite for reading.”  Summer is the perfect time to grab a few books to bring on vacation or to read in your backyard. If you’re a memoir writer, here are Goodreads’ top picks for memoirs published in 2021 with excerpts of their commentary on each book: 

1. Wait for God to Notice by Sari Fordham

In Wait for God to Notice, Sari Fordham writes about her childhood in Uganda, during and after the dictatorship of Idi Amin. Fordham's vivid, unsentimental prose observes how it is possible to love someone you disagree with and how a place that doesn't belong to you can turn you into who you are. Reminiscent of The Poisonwood Bible and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Wait for God to Notice, explores the complex terrain of being a mzungu in Africa, and ultimately being a stranger everywhere on Earth.

2. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

This is a memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

3. Buses Are a Comin': Memoir of a Freedom Rider by Charles Person, Richard Rooker

At 18, Charles Person was the youngest of the original Freedom Riders, key figures in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement who left Washington, D.C. by bus in 1961, headed for New Orleans. Buses Are a Comin' provides a front-row view of the struggle to belong in America, as Charles leads his colleagues off the bus, into the station, into the mob, and into history to help defeat segregation's violent grip on African American lives. 

4. Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad

It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times.

When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live.

How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

5. Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials like animal bones, human hair, and broken glass, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. 

When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against a world that had taken her father away. As an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she’d created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime. Using his sculptures, paintings, and prints as a guide, Dancyger sought out the characters from his world who could help her decode the language of her father’s work to find the truth of who he really was.

Memoir Writers’ Top Picks for Memoirs to Read

I asked members from some of my memoir writing groups on Facebook what their top picks are for memoirs, past and current-day. Along with the Goodreads 2021 favorites, here are some of their recommendations for memoirs to read (not in any particular order):

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
2. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
3. Sunlight on My Shadow by Judy Liautaud
4. It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
5. Inheritance by Dani Shapiro
6. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed
7. Educated by Tara Westover
8. Maid by Stephanie Land 
9. Wildflower by Dr Teresa Van Woy
10. Liars' Club by Mary Carr
11. Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur
12. What We Carry by Maya Lang
13. Dreamseller by Brandon Novak
14. Aftershocks by Nadia Owusu
15. The Soul of a Woman by Isabel Allende
16. This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
17. Breaking Night by Liz Murray
18. Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan 
19. Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp
20. My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
21. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
22. The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner
23. Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen
24. North of Normal and Nearly Normal by Cea Sunrise Person
25. A Movable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
26. Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination by Amy Tan
27. Girl Unbroken by Regina Calcaterra

My Memoir Picks This Year

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi - I’ve re-read this book a few times now, and I recommend it frequently. The author’s writing style is compelling. He’s a neurosurgeon, and he understands his own terminal diagnosis with a gravity that’s heart wrenching. He also delves into the world of medicine and the reality of mortality in a way that’s as authentic as it comes without being sentimental.
2. Keep Moving by Maggie Smith - Smith is a poet, and she weaves her verse seamlessly into this book of personal essays and reflections that are deeply personal and profoundly poetic.
3. The memoir by my bedside right now is Glennon Doyle’s Untamed. I’m late to the party with this one. I’ve had it on my bookshelf for a while, but once I listened to her podcast, “We Can Do Hard Things,” I moved it to the top of my stack.

What’s on your reading list this summer? What are your favorite memoirs? Hop on over to Write Your Own Life on Facebook or Instagram and leave your recommendations.