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 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.

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.

Lucy Grealy recounts her life before and after a childhood diagnosis of Ewing's sarcoma, describing the medical treatments that altered her face and the social and emotional consequences that followed.

Jill Ker Conway recounts her childhood on a vast sheep station in western New South Wales and the disruptions—most notably drought and her father's death—that forced her family to leave for Sydney.

A first-person life account that traces a Black lesbian’s development from childhood into adulthood, attending to family, work, lovers, and the communities that shaped her.

An extended piece of narrative journalism that follows postwar U.S. test pilots and the first astronauts selected for Project Mercury, probing why these men accepted extreme danger and how American aviation and space culture valorized risk.

A first-person account of growing up between Chinese folktales and American life, where family history and mythic stories intertwine with recollections of childhood.

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.