“A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a beautiful book which tells that story from the point of view of a local resident, an architect, who later ended up working for foreign media, first as a fixer and then as a photographer and writer. The book opens with a chapter on “My First War”—about the Iran-Iraq war, talks about the years of sanctions, and then goes through everything that happened from 2003 up to the present. I couldn’t put it down. It’s like having a friend telling you what they lived through and finally being able to understand what happened and why things went so wrong.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early 2023

Sophie Roell, Journalist

“This is about a family that is divided. One sister spends most of her life in Taiwan and the other spends most of her life on the mainland. It’s a very personal story. It’s a memoir and family history, driven by the author’s interest in figuring out the things that the family didn’t talk about. There’s a bit of the historian-as-detective in this book, as she tries to work out what was going on when her aunts were young…The women in the story are special and they’re not just passive agents. But there is a high degree of luck, which is something that also figures in this. The author herself, in some ways, was lucky. She benefited from having a relative who could help her get connected to the outside world, even though at an earlier point, you would have said, ‘How unfortunate to have a family whose members were disconnected that way.’ That captures something important about China and the China story.” Read more...

The Best China Books of 2022

Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian

“It is a devastating story. It’s a memoir of her marriage and the death of her husband by assisted suicide. Listening to the audio version embodies why author memoirs are so popular and so powerful as audiobooks. You hear her telling this story. It’s an intensely personal story. She’s a professional in the way that she holds herself together as she tells this story, but as the listener, you hear—she can’t help but have in her voice—the emotion and the many feelings that she had as she went through this incredible experience with her husband.” Read more...

The Best Audiobooks of 2022

Robin Whitten, Journalist

“***WINNER of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best autobiography***

It has a real freshness to it. She talks about being Asian American in a way we haven’t quite heard before. She digs into the personal to get to her political points, and that keeps it really lively. She is so honest and clear, and not afraid to be self-deprecating. There’s plenty of autobiography in the mix here, so I was really glad it made it to our final five” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist

“Act Like You Got Some Sense is a guide to parenting, told through stories that impart lessons Foxx learned about parenting, often by failing as a parent. I would especially recommend this book to mothers, who in my experience hold themselves to (or are held to) much higher standards than fathers. They know it’s impossible to be perfect, yet they still always feel like they’re failing. The main message of this book is that you’re inevitably going to fail, but it’s okay: the most important thing you can do as a parent is show up and be present. If you do that, your children will ultimately forgive your screw-ups. Foxx takes a jokey approach.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Many of the short chapters are addressed to Strong’s young cousin, Owen, who dies of brain cancer just as COVID starts spreading in New York City…This Will All Be Over Soon is a short book by a highly emotional person who often provides a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Strong describes having a lot of anxiety and depression which make it difficult for her to get perspective on her emotions.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Reading This Much Is True is like hanging out with an aunt who’s had a little too much to drink and is letting it all hang out. I thought it was fantastic. At one point, she says, apropos of nothing, ‘I’ve always felt that smoked salmon was an essential ingredient of any social occasion. But it must, like a woman, be moist.'” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Burke is the activist and community organizer who coined the phrase ‘Me Too’ while working with Black women and girls to heal from sexual assault. Her book tells the story of how she came to the key insight of that work: you can’t empathize with others unless you empathize with yourself. “ Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“What I liked most about Will was Smith’s self-awareness and self-analysis. He’s very upfront about how his emotional limitations motivated him to become a celebrity. He foregrounds his growth and change as a person, even recounting some of his therapy sessions. He shares insights about what made him a celebrity and kept him a celebrity.” Read more...

The Best New Celebrity Memoirs

Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar

“Volz’s mother was the main vendor of pot brownies in San Francisco in the 1970s, and into the ‘80s. She literally pushed Alia around in a stroller, delivering pot brownies to all the artists and restaurants around the city and at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a major business. There’s another level of the book that’s a social and political history of San Francisco, including the assassination of Harvey Milk, the beginning of Aids, etc. It turns out that these pot brownie vendors were some of the first people to explore the medical uses of marijuana. They were forces in the decriminalisation process as well.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist

“This is Moore’s debut memoir—her previous book was a novel with elements of magical realism. She doesn’t let categories of literature bother her. That’s a good thing. The whole first part of the book is in written in what I would call a voice of innocence: it’s her five-year-old self explaining the civil war in the terms she saw it at the time. She thought that the bad men were dragons, the giant is her father. She perceived the situation in these mythic terms. You’ve got, like, 100 pages of this stuff. Then you turn the page and it’s like, boom, she’s on Tinder in Brooklyn trying to get a date. It’s just so unexpected. I love that. So it’s not just about the heartbreak of war, it’s also about heartbreak of romance.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist

“Lehrer has such a great voice on the page, it’s so engaging and witty. Her memoir is a cousin of Lucy Grealy’s classic Autobiography of a Face. But there are not too many laugh lines in Autobiography of a Face, and this has more of a sense of humour—which is good when you’re in a situation where everything is just so unbelievably painful.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist

“This is a really edgy book. Lawson says things that may get on people’s nerves… and she really doesn’t care. She gets into the whole woke scenario in a really interesting way, both in real life and on social media, which is as you know a big vehicle for wokeness and social justice warrior-ing.” Read more...

The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist

Marion Winik, Journalist