I have been fascinated about other people’s family history mainly because I did not know one-half of mine. I have been intrigued by memoir writers’ descriptions of their childhoods, feeling like a detective looking for clues as to why they wrote and if their experiences could give me clues to my personality and longing for belonging. The more memoirs I read, the more confident I became in believing that I had a story to tell, and my voice could help others in their quest for family and identity. I hope you enjoy my list of books as well as my own memoir. Let me know what you think.
I wrote...
Finding My Way: A Memoir of Family, Identity, and Political, Ambition
A deeply personal memoir about finding family and belonging: Growing up torn between her single stewardess mom and brothel-owning grandmother in 1960s New York City, Robin never imagined that she’d one day have an office in the White House. Her childhood on the Upper East Side was peppered with half-truths and family secrets. In a world of self-absorbed adults, Robin largely raised herself. In the professional world, Robin quickly ascended in the political sphere. Through it all, Robin searched for her biological father. She felt that if she could find him, she could free herself from secrets, lies, and shame. Finding My Way follows a woman who created a political career while simultaneously fulfilling her quest to heal from family trauma and discover her identity.
The story follows a young woman who gets leukemia and the lessons she learns. One character in the book talks about healing in a way that I never heard before – healing does not mean you are back to where you were before, but that you can live with the trauma and move forward. This comment resonated with me and my own trauma of raising myself, not knowing my dad, and getting sexually abused.
I am not like before, but I am able to move forward.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New…
I was drawn to Inheritanceby my own questions about paternity.
Dani’s discovery through a consumer DNA test, resembles my own story, thinking my dad was someone else and discovering through DNA he was not. Dani’s love for her father who raised her, not her DNA father, falls into my belief that you can create family without DNA.
As a mother of two adopted children from Kazakhstan, I believe love can create families. Dani explores family secrets, culture, and the age-old question of nature vs. nurture which resonated with my own search for my biological father.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Inheritance and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets: a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test, an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.
“Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” —People
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father…
When I first read The Glass Castle, I was relieved to know that I was not the only one to have a dysfunctional childhood.
The main character and her siblings learn to take care of themselves. It reminded me of how I raised myself and was not really allowed to be a child. Every morning, I brought my mother coffee in bed before I walked the dog. After school I did the shopping and cooked dinner.
The Walls children learn resilience at an early age, despite their destructive and alcoholic father. They also end up in New York, like me, surprisingly adjusted despite the neglect of their childhood.
Now a major motion picture starring Brie Larson, Naomi Watts and Woody Harrelson.
This is a startling memoir of a successful journalist's journey from the deserted and dusty mining towns of the American Southwest, to an antique filled apartment on Park Avenue. Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents.
At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings follow later. After pursuing the education and civilisation her parents sought to escape, Jeanette eventually succeeds in her quest for the 'mundane,…
I read this memoir of a Korean girl adopted by white parents in Oregon because the issues of race, identity, and belonging were constant in the book.
I looked for clues in the book of how the character was feeling, since my husband and I have adopted two Asian children from Kazakhstan. Nicole’s unearthing of painful family secrets mirrored my own search for answers of finding my biological father and the impact it had on my mother.
This book explores so many issues of identity in a straightforward style that could help anyone, adopted or not, to understand their family and belonging in the world.
This beloved memoir "is an extraordinary, honest, nuanced and compassionate look at adoption, race in America and families in general" (Jasmine Guillory, Code Switch, NPR)
What does it means to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of…
I was attracted to Bess Kalb’s memoir because it deals mostly with the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter.
My grandmother was a huge force in my life and her strength and independence were a big influence on me. She loved me unconditionally and like the grandmother in Kalb’s book, my grandmother came to the United States to escape.
Kalb describes her grandmother, Bobby, as full of strong opinions, glamorous, and the person that gave her unconditional love and pragmatic advice. Her support and unwavering love remind me that we all need a Bobby in our lives to remind us that we are loved.
**I HAVE NOT BEEN AS PROFOUNDLY MOVED BY A BOOK IN YEARS' JODI PICOULT** **I LOVED THIS BOOK MORE THAN I CAN SAY**NIGELLA LAWSON
A brilliantly original memoir of a grandmother speaking to her granddaughter from beyond the grave, telling the story of her life with hilarious candor and love.
Bess Kalb has saved every voicemail message her grandmother - her best friend, her confidante - ever left her until the day she died.
In this wildly imaginative memoir, Bobby Bell's voice is still in Bess's head. Stubborn, glamorous, larger than life, she gives Bess critical advice on everything and…
This climate fiction novel follows four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. Told mostly through a diary and drawing on scientific observation and personal reflection, Lynna’s story unfolds incrementally, like climate change itself. Her gritty memoir describes a near-future Toronto in the grips of severe water scarcity.
Single mother and limnologist Lynna witnesses disturbing events as she works for the powerful international utility CanadaCorp. Fearing for the welfare of her rebellious teenage daughter, Lynna sets in motion a series of events that tumble out of her control with calamitous consequence. The novel explores identity, relationship, and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
Centuries from now, in a post-climate change dying boreal forest of what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, discovers a diary that may provide her with the answers to her yearning for Earth’s past—to the Age of Water, when the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity in hatred—events that have plagued her nightly in dreams. Looking for answers to this holocaust—and disturbed by her macabre longing for connection to the Water Twins—Kyo is led to the diary of a limnologist from the time just prior to the destruction. This gritty memoir describes a…
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