Category: True Story

Iliana Regan grew up on a small farm in Indiana, going out on foraging expeditions with her family members and learning how to live with the land around her. As she grew older and began to realize she was queer, she tried to bury that knowledge with alcoholism and an intense amount of work in the food industry. As she worked her way up through the restaurant world, she discovered her calling, the thing that gave her purpose. She began to focus more on ingredients, remembering her childhood spent searching for ingredients with her family. Regan writes about her complex inner world, struggling to stay sober and create a better world for herself where she accepts who she is and becomes her best self. Eventually, she started a Michelin-starred restaurant that put her name on the map. What’s more, Burn the Place became the first food-related book in four decades to be longlisted for the National Book Award.

David Chang is known for his food documentaries Ugly Delicious and Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. And before that, he was known as a rising star, chef-owner of his award-winning restaurant Momofuku. But while everyone admired Chang for being a successful entrepreneur and chef, inside, he struggled with anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. He struggled with anger management, yelling at his staff and hating himself after. After several years of therapy, David Chang finally came to the realization that he was, in fact, the problem. In his memoir, Chang describes his life as the child of Korean immigrants, his father pushing him to be the best golfer he could be. But Chang chafed at his parents’ never-ending list of expectations, while simultaneously understanding that pushing him was their form of loving him. Eat a Peach is not a memoir of a man who’s finished his path to healing. Instead, it is written by a man who has just started healing and is now facing the consequences of his actions, just beginning to make amends to the people he’s hurt along the way.

Megan Phelps-Roper was raised in Westboro Baptist Church, which was founded by her grandfather, Fred Phelps. The church became known for their outrageous protests of everything from military funerals to gay pride events. They also rejoiced in natural disasters and devastation from the AIDS crisis. All of this felt normal to Phelps-Roper. What’s more, it felt right. But then, slowly, over the course of years, her mind began to change, and she eventually left the church in 2012. Her memoir describes the isolating nature of her family’s faith, difficulties breaking out of that mindset, and the complicated logistics of trying to leave a place that doesn’t want to let you go.

I love when poets write prose, and Saeed Jones is no exception. He writes so beautifully, with every sentence, every word, carefully chosen. His memoir follows his life growing up as a gay Black kid in the South, trying to find a place for himself when everyone around him kept telling him everything about him was wrong. He was too Black, too gay, too loud — always too much for the people around him, especially some of his family members. Jones has such a beautiful way of writing about his complex relationships with his mom and his grandmother, two women he loved dearly. It’s so difficult to love your family while also understanding that they don’t love ALL of you, just the parts they like. I can’t do this memoir justice, but let me tell you, if you’re a memoir lover, this one needs to be at the top of your list.

I adored Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account. It’s one of my favorite pieces of historical fiction. So when I heard she was publishing a collection of essays, I knew I needed to get a hold of them as quickly as possible. Lalami’s essays examine her experience moving to the U.S. from Morocco, pursuing the American Dream. She’d heard so much about the success one could achieve in America. But when she finally got here, and as she follows her path to U.S. citizenship, she begins to rethink her initial assumptions. She starts to think that the American Dream is really only available for certain kinds of immigrants. Lalami is an incredible prose stylist with such sharp observational skills. I love how she crafts each essay to be its own unique gem, but they all add to the overarching theme of the collection.

Samra Habib grew up as an Ahmadi Muslim in Pakistan, eventually fleeing violence against people from their sect and finding refuge in Canada. At first, Habib thought that all their problems might be solved, but in their new country, they faced racism and Islamophobia. And as they grew up, they began to realize that they weren’t exactly straight. Habib writes their memoir with no fear of presenting themself as a messy, very flawed human being. They work through their sexuality and faith throughout their story, eventually coming to a place that works for them. Their story doesn’t end wrapped up in a pretty bow. Instead it’s more untidy, glorious in its own imperfections. This is a queer memoir unlike anything I’ve ever read and definitely worth your time.

Author Joshua Whitehead made his name with his award-winning novel Jonny Appleseed. Now he’s back with his first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays that discusses the creative limitations of western literary tradition and his perspective of decolonizing queer storytelling. Whitehead examines the role of trauma in his writing, calling his new idea “biostory,” a form of story informed by the body. Making Love with the Land is February’s pick for the Indigenous Reading Circle, a book club led by Erin and Dani, two Native bookstgrammers.

South Carolinian Dorothy Allison is one of the most well known queer writers of her generation. She grew up in rural South Carolina, where I live now, and wrote about her childhood experience with sexual assault in a way that few writers had at the time. She was an example to so many women, giving voice to something far too many young girls have experienced. Her prose is brilliant — so many details in a single sentence. She writes about living as a queer woman, and working through her childhood trauma even as she came into her own as an adult. This book sits right under 100 pages but contains an overflowing wealth of wisdom from one of America’s greatest writers.

Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos took the world by storm when it was released in 2021. This book also received a delightfully ridiculous number of accolades, including being the winner of the 2021 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology, winner of the 2022 Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science, winner of the 2022 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and a finalist position for the 2022 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. Dr. Prescod-Weinstein dives into ideas around physics from her perspective as a Black woman scientist. She discusses how science, like other fields, contains an intense amount of sexism, racism, and other kinds of oppression. I really appreciate her viewpoint, and she deftly explains a scientific field that I have zero background in. There’s something about Dr. Prescod-Weinstein’s enthusiasm for the topic that is infectious.

I’m always looking to learn more about prominent women in history, especially key figures in traditionally male dominated fields. So I love Rachel Ignotofsky’s books about women from history. The first one is about women in science. Each woman is featured on a beautiful two-page spread filled with her biography, fun facts, and incredible illustrations. And if you love this one, there’s also Women in Sports and Women in Art. Yes, I do indeed own them all and would recommend them to anyone and everyone.

There’s a reason this book is much beloved. The way Kimmerer writes about the natural world just sweeps you off your feet. You are there in the water with her trying to save her pond from being reclaimed by the land, or you are right beside her as she leads dozens of students out into nature on a guided hike. Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, also discusses her Native Nation’s culture around plants, and the traditional practices she was taught by her elders that help care for the land. She investigates these traditions, and discusses how these practices work from a scientist’s perspective. Each chapter includes a different aspect of nature that she examines. I found myself endlessly fascinated by her essays.

Like Kimmerer, Hope Jahren is a botanist, and in her memoir, she shares how she found herself in the world of plants, working to make a place for herself in a male-dominated field. She and her lab assistant have a beautiful friendship. They travel the world, collecting samples, and stay in each other’s lives for decades. This memoir won the National Books Critics Circle Award for nonfiction when it was released. And for good reason! The prose is incredible, and even though I know very little about botany, I could still follow along and understand what was going on.

Raechel Anne Jolie grew up as a working class kid in the outskirts of Cleveland. When she was just a girl, her father was hit by a drunk driver, which ended their way of life forever. From there, her childhood was spent moving from home to home, never seeming to stay for long. She finds the alt scene downtown, and begins to discover a whole new world that she feels irrevocably drawn to. This tiny memoir is a shining testament to a love of working-class people, the midwest, and queer culture.

Brian Broome couldn’t wait to leave northeast Ohio. He spent his childhood as a queer, Black kid never fitting in. But no matter where he moved, he still faced racism and homophobia. He describes how he coped with sex and drugs, always trying to forget the trauma he’d experienced while searching for belonging. Broome’s prose is incredible, every word there for a reason. His memoir is full of heart and a deep sense of longing.

It’s been over 30 years since the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act, a landmark for disability rights. But what has actually changed since 1990? Ben Mattlin reports on the world of disability advocacy and activism, chronicling the post-ADA world through his perspective as a disabled man and as a journalist interviewing hundreds of disabled people about their lives. I really appreciated how Mattlin featured a diverse group of perspectives, covering everything from disabled models to the paralympics. Each chapter focuses on a different topic, making the book easy to follow.

It’s been several years since I first read Heart Berries, and I reread it a couple years ago. So much of this memoir stays with me, and I keep thinking about how incredible it is in its craft and storytelling. Mailhot is from the Seabird Island Band, and the memoir starts with Mailhot in a mental health facility, trying to work through traumatic parts of her past. She takes us back through her memories, weaving in and out, touching moments in her history that she’d rather forget. This memoir is a stunning example of the genre.

Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons won the James Beard Award. While Six Seasons focused on vegetables, Grains for Every Season is a new take on how we incorporate grains into the food we prepare. The cookbook is beautifully illustrated, and gives a great background into different grains and how to best incorporate them into our everyday recipes.

I’ve had my eye on this cookbook for years, so you can imagine how excited I was to see it under my tree. Bottom of the Pot is the winner of the IACP 2019 First Book Award presented by The Julia Child Foundation. It combines essays and recipes to create that unique pairing of cooking from a very personal place. Deravian gives us a diverse collection of Persian recipes, adding sections about how to treat individual ingredients so we get the best results.

Roz Chast grew up in New York City, her parents living in the same apartment for decades. As her parents age, she begins to think through how she will care for them when they get older and how she wants to spend as much time with them as possible. But her parents want to have nothing to do with any of these conversations. In her classic sense of humor, Chast captures the ridiculous moments in a very difficult time in her life. This graphic memoir is so good, no wonder it was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Leila Abdelrazaq’s grandfather was one of the thousands of Palistinians who fled Palestine after the creation of Israel and the war of 1948. He and his family spent the next several decades moving from one country to another, facing constant discrimination as they tried to make a life for themselves. At first, they thought that their exile was temporary, but as the years passed, they began to lose hope that they would ever see Palestine again.

In Good Talk, Mira Jacob describes how her son asked her why his Jewish paternal grandparents would vote for Trump, a man who hated immigrants, like Mira and her parents. This question launches her into even more questions that she’s not quite sure how to answer. She works through these conversations in Good Talk, illustrating them on the page and giving readers a fuller picture. I read this graphic memoir while waiting for a delayed flight at the airport. I felt consumed, and barely even noticed spending the extra four hours surrounded by disgruntled passengers.