Favorite Five: Best Memoirs
I’m back again with our second month of the Favorite Five, where I share some of my all-time favorite books in a given genre. This month, I’m sharing five of my favorite memoirs (with a couple of honorable mentions).
This collection of memoirs is diverse and spans decades of publication. I’ve read, cherished, and even taught some of these books as a professor over the last two decades. Here they are, in the order in which I read them!
Have you read any of these? What’s your favorite memoir?
Travels by Michael Crichton
I have always loved Crichton’s writing style because he’s so good you don’t even notice the writing; and it’s so easy to devour. While I love his fiction books as well (for which he is most famous), this is arguably the first memoir I ever read and I still love it to this day. It also fed my burgeoning obsession with travel in my early 20s. Think of this as the original Eat, Pray, Love with a style all its own.
After success as a Harvard-trained medical doctor, best-selling novelist, and successful movie director, Crichton grew restless and set out on a mission to broaden his horizons through epic adventures on par with those he created in his fictional works. He climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, tracked wild beasts in Rwandan jungles, scaled Mayan pyramids, trekked landslides in Pakistan, swam with sharks in Tahiti. He explores the way that travel can be a potent path of self-inquiry and self-discovery:
“Often I feel I go to some distant region of the world to be reminded of who I really am. There is no mystery about why this should be so. Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes—with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it’s always invigorating … So travel has helped me to have direct experiences. And to know more about myself.”
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
This book has had a profound impact on my life. I first read it in a sophomore literature class at San Diego State. It left such an impression that when I began my career as a professor, I taught parts or all of this book to my students for several semesters.
My favorite chapter is “How to Tell a True War Story.” In it, O’Brien explores the nature of what makes a story true and separates that truth from what actually happened. Capital-T “Truth” is about getting to the essence of a story, conveying what it really means and what really matters. I used to teach this chapter, and it’s a great model to play with your own “How to tell a True ______ Story” about whatever matters to you. For my memoirists out there, this is a great book to read for both technique and content.
While this book is technically considered fictional literature because Tim O’Brien is playing with the truth in this book (and so doesn’t call it non-fiction), it very much reads like a memoir and shares much of the genres’ features. And it’s simply a damn good read. The Things they Carried is a classic and pioneering exploration of war, memory, imagination, and the life-saving power of storytelling.
“Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.”
A Place to Stand by Jimmy Santiago Baca
I met Jimmy Santiago Baca (not in person, but hopefully someday, I would love to shake that man’s hand), in an undergrad Lit class taught by a man who wore sunglasses to our windowless classroom each week and glorified Charles Manson.
Jimmy Santiago Baca was definitely the best thing that came out of that class.
I devoured his book of poetry Set this Book on Fire back then, and went on to teach his memoir to my own literature students. Sans sunglasses.
In his memoir A Place to Stand, Baca recounts his journey as a youth born into poverty, abuse, systemic racism and classism, illiteracy, substance abuse and crime. Illiterate in his young 20s, and the product of a system with few real choices or opportunities, Baca received a 5- to 10-year prison sentence on a drug conviction. In a prison environment that sought to steal any humanity left in him, he found a way to reclaim his own soul.
He taught himself to read in prison, and then to write. This book is a gripping testament to the power of the human spirit, of his human spirit, to overcome the most brutal adversity. Today Baca is an exceptional poet, has written several books of poetry and numerous screenplays, and won dozens of awards for his work.
This is one of the most potent stories of writing to save one’s life that I’ve ever read. Read this book.
“I culled poetry from odors, sounds, faces, and ordinary events occurring around me. Breezes bulged me as if I were cloth; sounds nicked their marks on my nerves; objects made impressions on my sight as if in clay. There, in the soft language, life centered and ground itself in me and I was flowing with the grain of the universe. Language placed my life experiences in a new context, freeing me for the moment to become with air as air, with clouds as clouds, from which new associations arose to engage me in present life in a more purposeful way.”
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
I know, Wild is, well wildly popular. And for good reason. I actually remember the first time I saw its boot-boasting cover in an indie bookstore when it first came out, before it reached Reece Witherspoon status. I knew nothing about it, but somehow, I could feel its potency. Cheryl Strayed is an exceptional writer (pause to plug her book Tiny Beautiful Things as well) and the book lived up to its vibe. In Wild, Strayed struggles with the essential question: how do we go on when someone we love as-dearly-as-life-itself dies or (we divorce them)? Or we otherwise lose everything we once held dear?
Strayed sought her answers on the Pacific Crest Trail, hiking alone from Southern California up to Washington State for months. It’s about the trek but it’s not at all about the trek. It’s about putting oneself and one’s life back together in the rubble of massive grief and loss. Wild captures the full range of a young woman’s humanity as she hikes on ahead against all odds to heal and transform herself.
“I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me.”
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd
In The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, Kidd traces her own personal journey from the patriarchal Christian faith she was handed toward her own direct relationship with the Sacred Feminine, long buried but now unearthed. She brings the reader through her emotional and transformative journey of reclaiming her spirituality as something of her own, not something that once sought to own her.
“The truth is, in order to heal we need to tell our stories and have them witnessed...The story itself becomes a vessel that holds us up, that sustains, that allows us to order our jumbled experiences into meaning.
As I told my stories of fear, awakening, struggle, and transformation and had them received, heard, and validated by other women, I found healing.
I also needed to hear other women’s stories in order to see and embrace my own. Sometimes another woman’s story becomes a mirror that shows me a self I haven’t seen before. When I listen to her tell it, her experience quickens and clarifies my own. Her questions rouse mine. Her conflicts illumine my conflicts. Her resolutions call forth my hope. Her strengths summon my strengths. All of this can happen even when our stories and our lives are very different.”
Honorable Mentions
I also love these memoirs:
The Treehouse by Naomi Wolf
Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton
Autobiography of an Orgasm by Betsy Blankenbaker Murphy (which I’ll share more about in an upcoming Fave Five)
The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch
Widows Guide to Dead Bastards by Jessica Waite
