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

An autobiographical account by Zora Neale Hurston that traces episodes from her life, mixing personal memory with material drawn from folklore and the social customs of Black communities.

A linked-memoir of personal essays in which the author recounts growing up Vietnamese American, arriving as a refugee, and navigating family, race, and literary ambitions.

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.

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 graphic memoir recounting George Takei's childhood experiences during the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. The book focuses on family life inside the camps and traces how those early events shaped the author's later path in theater and public life.

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.

A series of personal essays by George M. Johnson that trace growing up as a Black queer youth in the U.S., linking autobiographical scenes to direct address to younger Black queer readers.

A first-person memoir recounting the author's migration from El Salvador to the United States as a child. The narrative follows the physical and emotional journey, the dangers and practical hurdles of traveling undocumented, and the ongoing effects of displacement on family and identity.

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 first-person account by Suleika Jaouad of surviving serious illness and the aftermath, tracking the author's time as a patient and the challenges of rebuilding life afterward. The book situates medical experience within social and psychological questions about identity, belonging, and self-recovery.

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.

Suzanne Simard recounts her career as a forest ecologist and presents her research showing that trees connect and exchange resources through fungal mycelial networks.

A first-person memoir about growing up Black and queer in rural Ohio, charting the author's struggles with family conflict, physical violence, and the search for an affirmed sense of manhood.

A first-person memoir of Saeed Jones' adolescence and young adulthood, focused on his efforts to find safety, desire, and selfhood as a young Black gay man in 1990s Texas.

A first-person memoir that follows the author's experience growing up as the child of an incarcerated parent and the personal consequences that unfolded in family life, identity, and adulthood. The book situates intimate recollection alongside social context to reckon with shame, longing, and the search for belonging.

A first-person memoir that links the author's history of sexual trauma to long-term weight gain and the ways her body has been treated by herself and others. The book focuses on physical hunger and its emotional roots while situating those experiences within social reactions, stigma, and personal coping.

A linked collection of personal essays in which the author describes living with schizophrenia and related diagnoses, linking firsthand memoir to discussion of clinical diagnosis, treatment, and the social realities of mental illness.

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 neurosurgeon and writer confronts a diagnosis of advanced lung cancer and records the transition from clinician to patient. The book links scenes from medical training and surgical practice to reflections on meaning, identity, and what makes life worth living when time is suddenly limited.

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 poet-turned-memoirist looks closely at the death of her mother and the aftermath for the daughter left to piece together memory, legal facts, and family history.

A first-person memoir that looks closely at a relationship Machado calls the Dream House and how that relationship involved psychological abuse.