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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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.

A multi-generational memoir tracing Sarah M. Broom's family and the life of their home in New Orleans East, culminating in the loss of that house after Hurricane Katrina.

Lulu Miller interweaves a personal memoir about grief and depression with the life and work of 19th-century fish taxonomist David Starr Jordan to probe how humans try to impose order on a chaotic world.

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 looks closely at a relationship Machado calls the Dream House and how that relationship involved psychological abuse.

A first-person memoir by Chanel Miller recounting her sexual assault at Stanford in 2015 and the consequences that followed, including the legal case People v. Turner. The book traces the personal aftermath, public attention, and interactions with the justice system as the author reclaims voice and identity.

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.

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 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 first-person memoir about a First Nation woman's passage through a troubled childhood, early and fraught motherhood, and ongoing struggles with mental health and identity. The narrative pieces together memory, family history, and personal reflection to show how past trauma informs present life and relationships.

A first-person memoir in which the author confronts his upbringing, family relationships, and struggles with body weight and compulsive behaviors while placing those personal troubles against broader questions of race, responsibility, and belonging.

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 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 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 nonfiction letter from Ta‑Nehisi Coates to his teenage son that explains what it feels like to be Black in the United States.

A first-person, essayistic account that traces an author's experiences around pregnancy, partnership, and family while weaving in philosophical and theoretical reflections. The work observes intimate domestic moments alongside questions about gender, identity, and what it means to make a family in contemporary life.

A detailed biography of Alexander von Humboldt that follows his formative years, major expeditions—especially in Latin America—and his intellectual effort to present nature as an interconnected system.

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.

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.

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 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.

A first-volume autobiographical account of Maya Angelou’s early life, following her from early childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, through adolescence and into young motherhood. The narrative traces how encounters with racism, personal trauma, and steady literary influences shape her sense of self and dignity.

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.

Richard Wright's Black Boy is a memoir of his childhood and early adulthood, following life in the segregated American South and his later move to Chicago where he begins a writing career and political engagement.

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 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.