Abuse, Addiction,
Trauma & Recovery
Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick (1987)
A Child Called "It": One Child's Courage to Survive by Dave Pelzer (1995)
The Liar's Club by Mary Karr (1995)
Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp (1996)
I Am The Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility by Trisha Meili (2003)
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls (2005)
The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life--His Own by David Carr (2008)
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson (2011)
The Skin Above My Knee by Marcia Butler (2017)
Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home by Jessica Berger Gross (2017)
The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger (2017)
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (2018)
Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir by Matthew Perry (2022)
Adventure & Survival
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain
(1883)
Seven Years in Tibet: My Life Before, During and After by Heinrich Harrer (1952)
My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy #1) by Gerald Durrell (1956)
Travels With Charlie: In Search of America by John Steinbeck (1962)
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Read (1974)
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer (1997)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (2003)
Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert (2006)
African American/Black Experiences
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845)
Black Boy by Richard Wright (1945)
Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown (1965)
Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (1995)
Coming of Age/Growing Up
Stop-Time by Frank Conroy (1967)
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)
The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway (1989)
This Boy's Life: A Memoir by Tobias Wolff (1989)
The Liar's Club: A Memoir by Mary Karr (1995)
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie by Michael Patrick MacDonald (1999)
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (1996)
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (2006)
Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010)
Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl by Carrie Brownstein (2015)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by
J. D. Vance (2016)
My Life in Boats, Fast and Slow by Andrew Larkin (2018)
Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (2018)
Where The Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancey (2021)
Funny People
My Gorgeous Life: The Life, the Loves, the Legend by Dame Edna Everage (1989)
Dave Barry Turns 40 by Dave Barry (1991)
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And
Other Thoughts On Being a Woman by Nora Ephron (2006)
Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art by Gene Wilder (2010)
Bossypants by Tina Fey (2011)
Hollywood & Theater
Gypsy: A Memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee (1957)
Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller (1987)
Marilyn and Me: Sisters, Rivals, Friends by Susan Strasberg (1992)
Ghost Light: A Memoir by Frank Rich (2000)
In Pieces by Sally Field (2018)
Too Much Is Not Enough: A Memoir of Fumbling Toward Adulthood by Andrew Rannells (2019)
My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand (2023)
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino (2025)
The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir by RuPaul (2024)
Impairments
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (1903)
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy (1994)
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997)
Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life by Katherine E. Standefer (2020)
Incarceration
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison by Piper Kerman (2010)
Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison—Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out by Jason Rezaian (2019)
Kitchens and Restaurants
The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher (1943)
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichel (1998)
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain (2000)
Love and/or Marriage
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)
About Alice by Calvin Trillin (2011)
New York, New York
My New York by Mabel Osgood Wright (1926)
Royal and/or Wealthy
Spare by Prince Harry (2023)
Spiritual Transformation
Confessions by St. Augustine (400 A.D.)
The Seven Story Mountain by Thomas Merton (1948)
The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day (1952)
The Late Liz by Elizabeth Burns (pseudonym for Gert Behanna) (1957)
A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy and Triumph by Sheldon Vanauken (1977)
Lovesong: Becoming a Jew by Julius Lester (1988)
Telling Secrets: A Memoir by Frederick Buechner (1991)
From Harvard to Hell and Back! by Eric H. Sigward (2001)
The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness by Karen Armstrong (2004)
Dancing Through It: My Journey in the Ballet by Jenifer Ringer (2014)
Whistleblowers
Permanent Record by Edward Snowden (2019)
Work
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich (2011)
The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road by Finn Murphy (2018)
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land (2019)
WW2 and/or Nazi Holocaust
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (1946 in Germany; 1959 in the U.S.)
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)
Night by Elie Wiesel (1960)
Through the Valley of The Kwai: From Death-camp Despair to Spiritual Triumph by Ernest Gordon (1962)
Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs by Albert Speer (1970)
The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story by Corrie ten Boom (1971)
An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941-1943 (1984)
Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (1991)
The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Eger (2017)
Writers
Les Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782)
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (1933)
Life with Father by Clarence Day (1935)
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1947)
Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott (1994)
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride (1995)
All Over But the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg (1997)
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (2000)
The Tender Bar: A Memoir by J.R. Moehringer (2006)
Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir by Diana Athill (2009)
Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo (2012)
The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander (2015)
Heartland: A Daughter of the Working Class Reconciles an American Divide by Sarah Smarsh (2018)
Where The Light Fell: A Memoir by Philip Yancey (2021)