7 Powerful Memoirs to Read This Summer

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As the late, great James Baldwin reminds us, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” While many of these memoirs tell of extraordinary circumstances—surviving a childhood in a cult, reckoning with unspeakable family tragedy, or adjusting to a world without sound—each also contains the kind of universal truths anyone can relate to.

Through the Groves, by Anne Hull

In her nearly two decades as a national reporter for The Washington Post, Anne Hull earned a reputation (and a Pulitzer!) for rigor and artistry in capturing some of the most urgent stories of our time. In her debut book, she directs her characteristically incisive gaze at her own history, weaving an atmospheric and aching account of her childhood in the sweltering heat of Central Florida and the tumult of the ’60s. Hull grew up riding shotgun in her father’s Ford truck through orange groves her family had worked—without competition or disturbance—for generations. But in 1967, change was in the air; Walt Disney had just broken ground on a new park, Californian “seedless clementines” had recently hit the market, and her father’s drinking was destabilizing her home. Hull captures a richly ambivalent portrait of a world on the brink of disappearing and a family in the midst of radical transformation: afternoons spent chasing the “marshmallow fluff of DDT,” springtime orange blossoms so pungent they burned their scent into clothes, men’s bodies ravaged by pesticide inhalation, and women bucking convention. Hypnotic and tender, this book reminds us that even if we leave our homes, our homes never leave us.

The Wreck, by Cassandra Jackson

Long before Cassandra Jackson was born, her name was already on a tombstone. In the 1960s, a car accident took the lives of her father’s first wife, his mother, his brother-in-law, his sister, and his three-year-old niece, after whom she was named. Growing up, Jackson was taught to never ask questions about “the wreck” or about the dead family her father only spoke about in his sleep. Only as an adult, facing the possibility of her own infertility, does Jackson finally go in search of definitive answers. In archives and fertility clinics alike, she encounters the specter of generational trauma and medical racism, wondering if her body, like her name, is a “haunted thing.” With mesmerizing lyricism and cutting insight, the author of The Toni Morrison Book Club teaches us that any hope for the future requires an honest confrontation with the past.

Losing Music, by John Cotter

At age 30, John Cotter began to notice a ringing noise, over time, escalated to a deafening roar and a daunting diagnosis: Ménière’s disease, an inner ear disorder for which there is “no reliable treatment and no consensus on its cause.” Over time, Cotter will lose the crisp edges of music, the sound of the ocean, his ability to fully communicate, his sense of balance, and his job as an adjunct professor. Like Anne Boyer’s The Undying and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Invisible Kingdom, Losing Music explodes an individual experience of illness into a cultural and medical reckoning; with a sociologist’s rigor and a poet’s lyricism, Cotter takes readers on an odyssey through the social history of disability, the brutal bureaucracy of the American healthcare system, and the intimate violence of living in a volatile body. But this memoir is just as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.

Lesbian Love Story, by Amelia Possanza

“Are you a lesbian or something?” a male teammate asked Amelia Possanza on her explicitly queer adult recreational swim team. She was furious at his lack of recognition, but couldn’t really blame him: “If I had yet to find role models who could show me how to live, where would he have seen a lesbian?” Thus began Possanza’s rabid quest to uncover and animate lesbian stories; lesbians, she suspected, “would have something to teach us all about love.” Drawing from intensive archival research, interviews, and her own whimsical imagination, Possanza brings seven lesbians to life on the page; there are the historical heavy-hitters (hello, Sappho!) and the hidden heroes like Rusty Brown, the World War II hero and drag king renegade. At once a yearning search for a mirror in the fogged glass of history and an uproariously funny skewering of modern queer stereotypes, Lesbian Love Story will radically expand your understanding of lesbianism—and of love itself.

Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder

Today, Rachel Louise Snyder is an award-winning journalist, author, professor, and Guggenheim fellow best known for No Visible Bruises, her groundbreaking exploration of the domestic violence epidemic. But in 1985, she was a homeless high school dropout, surviving off of the scraps of food left by customers, and partying recklessly to keep the ghosts of her past and the gloom of her future at bay. With startling nuance and unexpected bursts of humor, Snyder lays bare the brutalities of her childhood: her mother’s death when she was 8, her father’s turn toward tyrannical evangelisms and abuse, her experimentations with drugs, and her emerging sense of herself as a woman in a violently patriarchal world. As an adult, survival becomes an international investigation rather than a personal struggle as she travels the globe reporting on child marriage, genocide, and gendered violence. For fans of Tara Westover’s Educated, Snyder provides a triumphant story of beating the odds and of radical self-definition—with a punk rock backdrop to boot!

When the World Didn’t End, by Guinevere Turner

On January 5, 1975, Guinevere Turner was 6 and the world was going to end. “All of us had been told to choose our favorite toy and put on our favorite clothes and then wait for the spaceship to come,” she writes. The “World People” were to be wiped off the earth, and Melvin Lyman’s loyal followers would be transported to Venus. When that spaceship didn’t come, the explanation was simple and the repercussions, immediate; some of the members’ souls weren’t ready, and daylight saving time must be abolished. Such was life in the Lyman family. Change was constant and arbitrary. Unworthiness was a given. Drawing from years of meticulously kept diaries, Turner resists the urge to let her “adult hindsight interfere or comment,” and allows us to see life inside the cult as she saw it: through the devastatingly innocent eyes of a child. The result is gripping, raw, and deeply human. It will leave you haunted.

Irma, by Terry McDonell

“After Bob goes down, it is just Irma and me.” So begins Terry McDonell’s tender account of his 1950s boyhood as the only son of a single mother. McDonell’s father, Bob, died serving as a fighter pilot in 1945—before his son could know him. In his father’s absence, McDonell attempts to define his own manhood in opposition to the narrow example presented by his mother’s second husband: “A son hating his stepfather, searching for the character of his true father, is an old story. The center of the story, though, is not one of the fathers or even the son. It is the mother, Irma.” Through compulsively readable vignettes, McDonell assembles a kaleidoscopic view of his mother, his childhood, and his own reckoning with American masculinity.

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