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 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 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.

An investigative nonfiction account tracing the life of Henrietta Lacks and the origin of the HeLa cell line, focusing on how her cells were taken, used in scientific research, and the ethical, racial, and personal consequences for her family.

An author convalescing with a chronic illness observes and cares for a wild snail that becomes a daily companion. The book records close, patient attention to the snail’s behavior and anatomy while using that relationship to reflect on bodily experience, time, and recovery.

A first-person memoir tracing the author's journey from an abusive childhood through competitive swimming, substance use, and sexual exploration toward eventual stability in adult life.

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

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.

Janet Mock recounts her path to womanhood from childhood through young adulthood, focusing on the realities of growing up transgender and multiracial in Hawaii and negotiating family, community, and medical systems.