Mary Karr recounts her 1960s childhood in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas, centered on a troubled family life and the group of men her father called the Liars' Club.

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 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.

A father and his young son travel over months through a devastated landscape after an unspecified cataclysm. Their trek focuses on survival: finding food and shelter, avoiding hostile encounters, and preserving the child's safety and moral education amid widespread collapse.

A first-person memoir by Qian Julie Wang about arriving in the United States as a child with her parents and living undocumented. The narrative follows her family's struggle with poverty, precarious work, and the constant fear and limitations that come with noncitizen status.

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 first-person account of the year after Joan Didion's husband died, recording the small, persistent thoughts and rituals that accompany sudden bereavement. The narrative tracks how memory, habit, and formal thinking shape a surviving spouse’s attempt to understand loss and the quotidian aftermath of grief.

A federal police agent comes back to his drought-hit hometown for a friend's funeral and must investigate a family death that the community assumes was a murder-suicide.

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.

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.

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.

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.