A compact memoir in essay form that traces the author's coming-of-age moments, friendships, and cultural touchstones while reflecting on identity and belonging.

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 personal memoir about the author's relationship with her mother and how food—especially shopping and cooking at a Korean grocery—carries memory and cultural connection.

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 essay collection blending memoir and criticism in which the author uses personal anecdotes, cultural analysis, and literary reflection to name and look closely at 'minor feelings'—ambivalent, often-dismissed emotions that arise from living as an Asian American in the United States.

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 meditation on eels that interweaves the species’ baffling lifecycle and scientific search with the author’s personal reflections. The book traces biological questions about migration and reproduction while using those puzzles as a lens for broader natural-history investigation and memoir-inflected curiosity.

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 sequence of exploratory trips beneath landscapes — caves, catacombs, glacial moulins and other underground sites — that probe how subterranean spaces hold memory, burial, and signs of human activity across deep time.

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.

Through a sequence of illustrated chapters and reflective sections, the author traces her parents’ lives in Vietnam, their escape after the fall of South Vietnam, and the family’s resettlement in the United States.