A linked set of personal vignettes about Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters, arranged in distinct sections that echo a mahjong game's structure.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

An aging and famous former movie star commissions a single, final interview with a relatively unknown journalist, using that conversation to recount her life and relationships.

A memoir of a childhood spent in unstable, often impoverished circumstances, told from the author's adult vantage. The account focuses on a family marked by vivid highs and dangerous lows: parental idealism and promises alongside episodes of neglect and homelessness.

A middle-aged man discovers a diary that takes him back to his thirteenth year at the turn of the twentieth century; through that recovered record he reconstructs a formative episode in which a naïve boy becomes entangled in adult secrets and social expectations.

A firsthand memoir of growing up Black and poor in mid-20th-century rural Mississippi, following the author's life from childhood into her twenties.

Set in the violent 1850s, the novel follows Henry Shackleford, a young enslaved boy who becomes involved with abolitionist John Brown.

A Cup of Water Under My Bed is a memoir in linked essays about growing up Colombian–Cuban in a working-class immigrant family.

A first-person memoir of growing up and working in colonial East Africa, told through episodic accounts of life on farms, training racehorses, and learning to fly.

A book-length series of linked essays that record extended, close observations of the natural world around a creek and turn those observations into philosophical and lyrical reflections on life, perception, and the human place in nature.

A biographical memoir by Paula Fox that collects memories and impressions from her early life and career as an American novelist. The book orients around formative childhood experiences and episodes from a writer’s life, using anecdote and recollection to sketch how personal history shaped a literary trajectory.

A first-person memoir that follows a woman raised in a survivalist, home‑schooled household who leaves that insular world to attend college and later pursue advanced academic study.