Down and Out in Paris and London is the English novelist George Orwell's first full-length work, published in 1933. It is a two-part memoir on the issue of poverty in the two cities. Its intended audience was middle- and upper-class members of society—those more likely to be highly educated—and it exposes poverty in two rich cities: Paris and London. The first section is an account of living in near-extreme poverty destitution in Paris, as well as the experience of working as a temporary worker in restaurant kitchens. The second section is a travelogue of life on the road in and around London from the tramp's point of view, with descriptions of the many types of hostel housing available and some of the people that may be found living on the outskirts.

In a two-part memoir, Orwell, a destitute writer in his twenties, reveals the underbelly of these dazzling towns. First, he struggles for starvation pay at the bottom of the culinary food chain in a luxury restaurant in Paris. Then there's London, where he tramps the streets among the most destitute, stopping at workhouses and prison-like spikes for a few hours' sleep on a bug-infested bunk. Orwell provides his audience an unprecedented insight into the endless monotony of life in poverty, devoid of self-pity but filled with compassion. Regardless of its publishing date, this fascinating and, at times, funny memoir serves as a constant reminder of the trappings of class hierarchies.

Detailed information:

Author: George Orwell
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/393199

Maxine Hong Kingston's 1976 book The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts was released by Alfred A. Knopf. The book combines autobiography with traditional Chinese folktales. The Woman Warrior was selected as one of TIME magazine's greatest nonfiction novels of the 1970s and earned the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The Woman Warrior's genre has been debated because of Kingston's combination of views, notably traditional Chinese folktale and memoir. Kingston attempts to present her audience with the cultural, family, and personal background required to comprehend her unique situation as a first-generation Chinese-American woman through this blend. Susan Stanford Friedman's assessment of autobiography in the context of women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities frequently do not have the privilege of viewing themselves as individuals apart from their gender or racial group. Kingston depicts this predicament using a Chinese talk story, her mother's traditional Chinese perspective, and her own first-person perspective as a Chinese American.

Detailed information:

Author: Maxine Hong Kingston
Language: English
Genre: Memoir, Autobiography, Chinese folk tale

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30852

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is a graphic memoir published in 2006 by Alison Bechdel, creator of the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. It follows the author's upbringing and adolescence in rural Pennsylvania, concentrating on her complicated relationship with her father. Sexual orientation, gender roles, suicide, emotional abuse, dysfunctional family life, and the significance of literature in understanding oneself and one's family are all addressed in the book.

Alison Bechdel's acclaimed comic novel, inspired by her father's suicide, is an intricately nuanced narrative of life and artifice, family quiet and disclosure. He was a remote guy who committed himself to the restoration of his huge Victorian mansion — and to a secret romantic life with young men. The title is an acronym for the family company, a funeral parlor, but it also alludes to the dual funhouse image of father and daughter, as well as the author's own queerness.

It's a sexual and intellectual coming-of-age drama that floats along literary lines, paying homage to the books that nurtured and appeared to speak for Bechdel and her parents: Kate Millet, Proust, Oscar Wilde, philosophy, poetry, and literature. Fun Home is a unique, melancholy, complicated piece of art that joins that lineage.

Detailed information:

Author: Alison Bechdel
Language: English
Genre: Graphic novel, Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26135825

The Liars' Club is a memoir written by Mary Karr. The novel, published by Viking Adult in 1995, chronicles the narrative of Karr's boyhood in a tiny industrial town in Southeast Texas in the 1960s. When they weren't working at the nearby oil refinery or chemical factory, her father and his buddies would get together to drink and tell stories.

This explosive memoir, describing the author's boyhood in the 1960s in a tiny industrial town in Southeast Texas, was released in 1995 and was a catalyst for the current memoir boom. The book is deserving of its fame. You might almost say of Mary Karr's nimble language what she says of herself at the age of seven: "I was small-boned and scrawny, but more than capable of making up for it with sheer meanness".

Karr was a serious score settler when she was a child, eager to bite everyone who had offended her or climb a tree with a BB pistol to take aim at a whole family. Her mother, who "imagined herself as a bohemian Scarlett O'Hara", had a wild side. She had seven marriages and suffered from psychotic episodes. Her father was an oil refinery worker, a brawling yet quiet guy who came to life while telling tall stories, usually in the backroom of a bait store with a group of men known as "The Liars' Club". This is one of the best books ever written about growing up in America. Karr evokes the contours of her preadolescent mind — the fears, fights and petty jealousies — with extraordinary and often comic vividness. This memoir, packed with eccentrics, is beautifully eccentric in its own right.

Detailed information:

Author: Mary Karr
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14241

The book was released in May 2010 by Atlantic Books in the United Kingdom and June 2011 by Twelve, an imprint of Hachette Book Group USA, and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. The author's planned international book tour was cut short later that month during the American portion so that she could undergo treatment for newly discovered esophageal cancer.

This lively biography follows the lives and times of this much-missed public intellectual from his youth in Portsmouth, England, where his father was a navy man, through boarding school, Oxford, and his later career as a writer in both England and the United States. Christopher Hitchens was a political leftist who was unexpected (and at times incomprehensible). "Hitch-22" reveals how seriously he treated the things that truly mattered to him: social justice, learning, direct language, mental freedom, loyalty, and holding public personalities to high standards.

This is a vibrant book about friendships, and it will make you want to take your own more seriously. Hitchens recounts moments with friends that include Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and the poet James Fenton. There is a lot of wits here, and bawdy wordplay and accounts of long nights spent drinking and smoking. Hitchens decided to become a student of history and politics, he writes, after the Cuban missile crisis.

Detailed information:

Author: Christopher Hitchens
Language: English

Genre: Memoir
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7332753

Jesmyn Ward, an African-American writer, wrote the book Men We Reaped. Bloomsbury released the book in 2013. Ward's book focuses on her own past as well as the deaths of five Black males in her life during a four-year period. Men We Reaped was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Nonfiction, as well as the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction.

Ward relates their experiences with love and reverence; they come to life once again in these pages. Their stories intertwine with hers: her displacement and misery, and subsequently, the difficult narrative of her own survival and isolation as she is recruited to top all-white colleges. She is a writer who has digested the Greeks and Faulkner — their themes run through her writing — and the story of these men's deaths are intertwined with wider national narratives about rural poverty and prejudice. Ward, on the other hand, never permits her people to become symbols. This effort of immense sadness and beauty distinguishes them and makes them unique and irreplaceable.

Detailed information:

Author: Jesmyn Ward
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286683

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995) is a memoir by Barack Obama that explores the events of his early years in Honolulu and Chicago until his entry into Harvard Law School in 1988. Obama originally published his memoir in 1995, when he was starting his political campaign for the Illinois Senate. He had been elected as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. According to The New York Times, Obama modeled Dreams from My Father on Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man.

Barack Obama's first book was released a year before he was elected to the Illinois Senate, and long before his eight years in the White House under the constant scrutiny of the public. "Dreams From My Father" is a touching and honest work of self-examination, refreshingly devoid of the virtue-signaling and joyful moralizing that makes so many politicians' memoirs sound like notes to a stump speech.

Obama recalls a background that set him distinct, with a tangle of roots that didn't provide him with a clear picture of who he was. His father was Kenyan, while his mother was from Kansas. Obama was born in Hawaii, spent time in Indonesia, and was mostly raised by his mother and maternal grandparents when his father departed for Harvard when he was two years old. This is a book about the uses of disenchantment; the revelations are all the more astonishing for being modest and hard-won.

Detailed information:

Author: Barack Obama
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/88061

All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw is a 1974 work of oral history by American historian Theodore Rosengarten. Based on four years of interviews, the book narrates the life of illiterate African-American sharecropper “Nate Shaw” (real name Ned Cobb) in Nate’s own words.

Theodore Rosengarten, the author of this book, was a Harvard graduate student who traveled to Alabama in 1968 to examine a defunct labor group. Someone advised him to contact Shaw, whose true name was Ned Cobb. What came out of Cobb's mouth was a deep and complicated social history, a story that effectively takes us from enslavement to Selma through the eyes of an impoverished but articulate and unbroken black man.

Reading it will teach you more about wheat, guano, agricultural equipment, bugs, cow slaughter, and mule management than you ever imagined imaginable. This is also a detailed account of how whites deceived and abused blacks throughout the first part of the twentieth century. "I heard Abraham Lincoln emancipated the African people years ago", Cobb recalls, "but it didn't amount to a hill of beans". "Any manner they could deny a Negro was a celebration to "em", he says of his white neighbors. This book isn't often easy to read, but it's the genuine deal, a must-read for everyone.

Detailed information:

Author: Theodore Rosengarten
Language: English

Genre: Memoir
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226701

A Tale of Love and Darkness is a memoir written by Israeli novelist Amos Oz, which was first published in Hebrew in 2002. The book has been translated into 28 languages and has sold over a million copies worldwide. A bootleg Kurdish version was discovered at a shop in northern Iraq in 2011. Oz was said to be overjoyed.

This book was published 50 years after Amos Oz's mother committed suicide with sleeping drugs when he was 12, three months before his bar mitzvah. The final work is both cruel and kind, full of meandering observations on a life in politics and writing.

Oz, the lone child of European Jews who arrived in the Promised Land, grew up alongside the fledgling state of Israel, first enamored of a fervent nationalism until becoming violently (and quite humorously) disillusioned in one unforgettable episode. Oz, as a lonely youngster, felt unnoticed by his clumsy father and perplexed by his intelligent but terribly sad mother. People, she told him, were a perpetual source of deception and disappointment. Books, on the other hand, would never let him down. Hearing what happened to the Jews who remained in Europe, the young Oz desired to become a book, since no matter how many books were burnt, one copy had a good chance of surviving.

Oz claims he killed his father by relocating to a kibbutz at the age of 15 and changing his name. But his father, like Oz's mother, lives on in this memoir, not only in his memory of her but in the very presence of this book. She enthralled him with stories that "amazed you, sent thrills up your spine, then vanished back into the darkness before you had time to see what was in front of your eyes".

Detailed information:
Author: Amos Oz

Language: English
Genre: Memoir
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27574

Wave: Life and Memories After the Tsunami is a book about the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami written by Sri Lankan educator Sonali Deraniyagala. Alfred A. Knopf released it for the first time in 2013. [3] The book tells the tale of Deraniyagala's life before the tsunami and how it altered radically after the tragedy, concentrating on living without her five most essential family members, including her parents, husband, and two boys. It's written in first-person narrative form and premieres on December 26, 2004. The book won various honors and earned favorable reviews from critics.

Sonali Deraniyagala was looking for ways to commit suicide on the internet when one click led to another and she found herself staring at a news item with images of her two young boys. The youngsters had perished not long earlier, victims of Sri Lanka's 2004 tsunami, which also killed Deraniyagala's husband and parents. She managed to stay alive by hanging to a branch.

"Wave" is a thorough depiction of insanity — of being so overwhelmed by grief that existence becomes not just difficult, but scary. She remembers stabbing herself in the back with a butter knife. She couldn't look at a flower or a blade of grass without being ill with fear. Reading this book is like peering into the abyss, only instead of returning your gaze, it may engulf you whole.

Detailed information:

Author: Sonali Deraniyagala
Language: English

Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15771862

Sally Mann's memoir is strange, powerful, and unusually lovely. She possesses genuine writing abilities and has had an event-filled Southern-bohemian existence. Perhaps it only appears to be rich in the event because of an ancient adage that still holds true: Stories happen only to people who can tell them. This National Book Award nominee has accomplished photographer Sally Mann's candid and beautifully written biography and family history. Mann's obsession with family, race, mortality and the historic terrain of the American South are shown as almost genetically predestined in this revolutionary work, a unique interplay of narrative and image, inscribed into her DNA by the family history that before her.

This memoir describes some of her parents' Southern gothic experiences. This book is richly drawn and chronicles her development as an artist. It tells the story of friendships with Southern artists and authors including Cy Twombly and Reynolds Price. Her tales are razor-sharp. In a memorable comment about his advanced age, Twombly tells the author that he is "shutting down the bodega for real". But this is totally her narrative.

Detailed information:

Author: Sally Mann

Language: English
Genre: Memoir
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6373717

Country Girl is the memoir of Edna O'Brien. Faber and Faber published it in 2012. The title refers to her debut novel The Country Girls, which was banned, burned and denounced upon publication. Country Girl's cover is a reprint of the photograph used for O'Brien's 1965 novel August Is a Wicked Month.

Edna O'Brien, an exceptionally accomplished Irish writer, was in London during the Swinging '60s. She experimented with acid with her psychiatrist, R.D. Laing. Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Princess Margaret, and Jane Fonda were among those who attended her events. Richard Burton and Marlon Brando both attempted to get her into bed. After courting her with this pickup line: "I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor, and I bet you've never tasted white peaches", Robert Mitchum was successful.

O'Brien was born in 1930 in a hamlet in County Clare, Ireland's west. This earthy and vivid book also chronicles her childhood and growth as a writer. Her religious household was tiny. Her father was a farmer who drank and gambled, and her mother had previously worked as a maid. Tuamgraney, her home hamlet, has been described as "tight, fervid, and intolerant." O'Brien did not go to college. She relocated to Dublin, where she worked in a pharmacy during the day and attended the Pharmaceutical College at night.

Detailed information:

Author: Edna O'Brien
Genre: Memoir

Language: English

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15790829

Margo Jefferson's childhood house had a simple motto: "Achievement. Invulnerability. Comportment." Her family belonged to Chicago's black aristocracy. Her father was the chief doctor at Provident Hospital, America's oldest black hospital, and her mother was a socialite. They considered themselves as a "Third Race" standing between the masses of Negroes and all sorts of Caucasians. Life was governed by rigid rules of behavior and femininity. Jefferson describes the severe emotional load of growing up believing she was a spokesman for her race, as well as persistent, scary suicide thoughts.

In 1995, Jefferson was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book reviews in The New York Times. "Negroland" is a long-form of critique that moves from a history of socioeconomic class to a detailed analysis of her mother's emotions; the information is measured in brow arches of "three to four millimeters".

The prose is blunt and evasive, sensuous and ascetic, doubting and resolute — and above all beautifully skeptical of the genre, of the memoir’s conventions, clichés and limits. “How do you adapt your singular, willful self to so much history and myth? So much glory, banality, honor and betrayal?” she asks. This shape-shifting, form-shattering book carves one path forward.

Detailed information:

Author: Margo Jefferson

Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: www.goodreads.com/book/show/24040176-negroland

Tuesdays with Morrie is a memoir written by American author Mitch Albom about a series of visits Albom made to his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz as he succumbed to ALS. The book topped the New York Times Non-Fiction Best-Sellers List for 23 weeks in a row in 2000, and it remained on the list for more than four years after that. Tuesdays with Morrie was the best-selling memoir of all time in 2006.

Albom is a successful sports journalist for the Detroit Free Press in 1995. Albom calls his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz after watching him on Nightline and is encouraged to meet him in Massachusetts. Albom can visit Schwartz every week, on Tuesdays, thanks to a coincidence newspaper strike. The book describes each of Albom's fourteen trips to Schwartz, augmented with Schwartz's lectures and life experiences, and interwoven with flashbacks and references to current events.

Morrie's final days are spent teaching his former student Mitch his final life lesson after being diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The story is broken over 14 "days" that Mitch Albom spent with his professor Morrie. Throughout these days, Mitch and Morrie talk about a variety of issues relevant to life and living. Mitch's memories of Morrie as a lecturer are also recounted in the novel.

Detailed information:

Author: Mitch Albom
Language: English
Genre: Biographical, Philosophical novel, Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6900

On Writing: A Book of the Craft is a memoir written by American novelist Stephen King about his experiences as a writer and advice for budding authors. On Writing, initially published in 2000 by Charles Scribner's Sons, is King's first book after being injured in a vehicle accident a year before. Scribner reprinted the memoir twice more, in 2010 and 2020. The 10th-anniversary version had an updated reading list from King, while the 20th-anniversary edition included contributions from both of King's sons, Joe Hill and Owen.

On Writing is organized into five sections: "C.V.", in which King highlights events in his life that influenced his writing career; "What Writing Is", in which King urges the reader to take writing seriously; "Toolbox", which discusses English mechanics; "On Writing", in which King details his advice to aspiring writers; and "On Living: A Postscript", in which King describes his van accident and how it affected his life. In 2008, Entertainment Weekly included On Writing on their "The New Classics: Books – The 100 best reads from 1983 to 2008" list. Both Sharon Johnson in The Patriot-News and Julie Woo for the Associated Press, in separate reviews, praised King's advice as "solid".

Detailed information:

Author: Stephen King

Language: English

Genre: Memoir
Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10569

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books is a book by Iranian author and professor Azar Nafisi. Published in 2003, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for over one hundred weeks and has been translated into 32 languages.

The book is a narrative of the author's experiences returning to Iran during the revolution (1978–1981) and living under the administration of the Islamic Republic of Iran until her departure in 1997. It recounts her teaching at the University of Tehran after 1979, her refusal to submit to the veil rule and subsequent expulsion from the university, life during the Iran–Iraq War, her return to teaching at Allameh Tabatabai University (1981), her resignation (1987), the formation of her book club (1995–97), and her decision to emigrate. The events are intertwined with the lives of seven of her female pupils who gathered regularly in Nafisi's house to discuss works of Western literature, including the controversial Lolita, and how the texts are understood via the books they read.

Detailed information:

Author: Azar Nafisi

Language: English

Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7603

Jeannette Walls' book The Glass Castle was published in 2005. Walls recalls her troubled and migratory yet vivid childhood, stressing her resilience and her father's attempts at forgiveness. Despite her family's imperfections, their love for one another and her unique outlook on life enabled her to carve out a prosperous existence for herself, ending in a career in journalism in New York City. The title of the book alludes to her father's eventual unfulfilled vow to create his ideal house for the family, a glass castle.

Walls' balanced view on the virtues and negatives of her childhood has garnered extensive reading and favorable critical acclaim in The Glass Castle. It has been utilized in North American grade school curricula, which has caused considerable controversy; The Glass Castle was ranked #9 on the Office for Intellectual Freedom's list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books in 2012. Among the reasons for the challenge are the book's "offensive language" and "sexually explicit content".

Detailed information:

Author: Jeannette Walls
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35996816

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Homage to His White Mother is James McBride's autobiography and memoir, originally published in 1995; it is also a tribute to his mother, whom he refers to as Mommy or Ma. The chapters alternate between James McBride's depictions of his childhood and first-person narratives of his mother Ruth's life, which takes place primarily before her son was born. McBride portrays the mixed feelings he had as he fought to understand who he actually was, while his mother recalls the difficulties she faced as a white, Jewish lady who decided to marry a black man in 1942.

This fascinating, superbly written memoir was a New York Times bestseller for two years. To date, it has sold more than 2.1 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 16 languages. It tells the story of James McBride and his white, Jewish mother Ruth. Ruth was born in Poland and raised in Suffolk, Va, the daughter of an itinerant rabbi and a loving, disabled mother who spoke no English. At 17, Ruth fled the South, landed in Harlem, married a black man in 1941, founded a church, was twice widowed and raised 12 children in New York City. Despite hardship, poverty, and suffering, Ruth sent all 12 of her children to college.

Lavishly praised by critics, embraced by millions of readers, this tribute to a remarkable woman helped set the standard for modern-day memoir writing. It is considered an American classic and is required reading in high schools and colleges across America. It is a perennial favorite of book clubs and community-wide reading events, including New York City and Philadelphia. But most importantly, it is an eloquent, touching exploration of what family really means.

Detailed information:

Author: James McBride
Language: English
Genre: Memoir

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29209

Night is Elie Wiesel's 1960 memoir based on his Holocaust experiences with his father in the Nazi German concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945, near the conclusion of World War II in Europe. Wiesel writes about the death of God and his own growing disgust with humanity in just over 100 pages of sparse and fragmented narrative, which is reflected in the inversion of the parent-child relationship as his father deteriorates to a helpless state and Wiesel becomes his resentful, teenage caregiver.

Wiesel was 16 when the United States Army liberated Buchenwald in April 1945, too late for his father, who died after a beating as Wiesel lay silently on the bunk above for fear of being beaten as well. After the war, he relocated to Paris and created an 862-page book in Yiddish describing his experiences, which was later published in Argentina as the 245-page Un di velt hot geshvign ("And the World Remained Silent"). François Mauriac, a novelist, assisted him in finding a French publisher. In 1958, Les Éditions de Minuit released La Nuit, a 178-page translation, and Hill & Wang in New York published Night, a 116-page translation, in 1960.

Detailed information:

Author: Elie Wiesel
Language: English
English translators: Stella Rodway for Hill & Wang, 1960

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1617