In Motherwell: A Girlhood(w&n), the late author and columnist Deborah Orr reflects on her childhood in the Scottish town of the same name and her relationship with her formidable mother, Win. Along with excoriating descriptions of Win’s forms of control, Orr vividly evokes working-class life in Scotland in the 1970s and the changing social and economic values that would ease her path to university and a media career. The author, who underwent cancer treatment for the second time in 2019, died before the book was published, but her desire to “take charge, to take full control, of my family, in my own words” was came true.
featherhood (w&n) by charlie gilmour and the consequences of love by gavanndra hodge (michael joseph) deal with issues of parental failure. In the first, Gilmour finds solace in the company of an abandoned baby magpie as he recalls how his father, the poet Heathcote Williams, left him and his mother when he was a baby, subsequently rebuffing his son’s attempts to meet him. Gilmour made headlines in 2010 when he was photographed swinging from the cenotaph during a student protest. “It was not the glorious dead that he wanted to attack that day,” she writes, “but the glorious father.” Meanwhile, The Consequences of Love is an elegant study in grief and memory that begins with the death of Hodge’s younger sister, Candy, at age nine. becoming the mother of two girls, the author realized that she did not remember sweets past the time of her death. So he seeks to fill the “vertigo-induced void” by telling his family’s story, which involves his drug-addicted father, who sold heroin to rich slackers in Chelsea, and his alcoholic mother, who turned to religion to erase her trauma. .
You are reading: Best memoir books 2020
an obedient boy by mohsin zaidi begins on the day its author brings her boyfriend home to meet the family. The story then travels back in time to recount her parents’ move from Pakistan to East London and their upbringing in a conservative Muslim community. At 14, Zaidi realizes he is gay and, fearful of his parents’ disapproval of him, decides to keep his sexuality a secret. his book challenges muslim homophobia as well as the racism of london’s gay scene – some dating site profiles warn: “no asians”. however, zaidi’s writing is underpinned by compassion and an understanding that acceptance can be a slow process, even for those who love you.
house of glass (4th estate) is a stunning family memoir from hadley freeman that examines issues of identity and belonging as it brings together the stories of the glass brothers, the youngest of whom it was his grandmother. , living room. Their stories are varied, vivid, and heartbreaking, each taking place during one of the most traumatic periods in Jewish history.
Terri White’s raw and remarkable Coming Undone: A Memoir (Canongate) depicts her efforts to keep her childhood trauma at bay while seeking solace and escape in alcohol. Born in Derbyshire to a teenage mother, her early years were marked by extreme poverty, violence and sexual abuse by two of her mother’s boyfriends. As an adult, a job in New York sends her into free fall, and White spares no detail as she reminisces about her unraveling.
in hungry (mudlark), restaurant critic grace dent talks about her early years in carlisle and her relationship with her father, who cooked her “sketty” – his name for spag bowl – when she was a girl. Tender and witty, the book is as much a love letter to George, whose eventual decline from dementia she recounts, as it is the food that brought them together.
Broken Greek (Quercus) is Pete Paphides’ humorous and evocative tale of his Brummie childhood as the son of Greek Cypriot parents and his love affair with music. begins in 1973 when the then four-year-old author stops talking to anyone but his close family. however, he never stops listening. Along with the sound of his parents’ bickering, he finds a new soundtrack: pop music. Paphides, a journalist and radio host, is brilliant about the formative impact of his favorite bands and the ways music can help us make sense of the world.
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Notions of home are poignantly explored in raynor winn’s the wild silent (michael joseph), the sequel to the award-winning the salt path, as the author adjusts to living with a roof over her head after a period of financial difficulties followed by homelessness. winn moves to cornwall, where she buys some farmland to rebuild. her evocations of the climate, the landscape, the sea and her love for her partner, moth, who has an incurable neurodegenerative disease, are wonderful.
For author sarah m broom, home was once east new orleans, where her widowed mother, ivory mae, bought a house in 1961 with her late husband’s life insurance. Escoba’s award-winning debut, the yellow house (corsair), is the story of a house, a family and a neighborhood demolished by abandonment, racism and inequality. The youngest of 12 children, she had moved far from the city when Hurricane Katrina hit, but she paints a harrowing picture pieced together from the family’s memories of her. Her anguish is compounded by the city’s treatment of its residents: Mae’s house was eventually demolished without her knowledge, and the notification letter was sent to the abandoned property.
a ghost in the throat (tramp press) by doireann ní ghríofa explores the author’s obsession with an 18th century poem written by an Irish noblewoman. A genre-defying blend of memoir and translation, flights of fancy, and everyday domestic life, it draws connections across the centuries for a captivatingly original meditation on creativity and motherhood.
in inferno(bloomsbury), catherine cho documents her experience of postpartum psychosis, which led her to see devils in her son’s eyes. Cho was eventually separated from her baby and institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital, where she took many notes on her progress and comings and goings on the ward. her book ceases to be a moving story of triumph over trauma; presents, with terrifying clarity, the spiraling pressures of new motherhood and the unvarnished reality of mental breakdown.
Parenting figures prominently in More Than a Woman (Ebury) by columnist and author Caitlin Moran, which examines being a woman and a feminist in midlife. With dazzling and wildly entertaining candor, she muses on caring for aging parents, anal sex, smear tests, botox, big butts and the daily to-do list. But it’s the chapters on parenting that provide the book’s emotional weight, as they recount her daughter’s struggle with an eating disorder and the fear, panic, and parental disorientation that followed. p>
sophie heawood the hangover games (cape), riotously funny, explores unplanned parenthood, from pregnancy and childbirth to the chaotic years of childhood, and withdrawal from her life of the father of her child, known here as the musician. Heawood casts herself as the hapless fool, running from one calamity to the next, but there’s wisdom and poignancy amid the self-mockery as she contemplates a new way of living and finding love where she never knew existed.
top five celebrity memoirs of 2020
the meaning of mariah careyby mariah carey (macmillan)
“I have seen, I have been afraid, I have been scarred and I have survived,” carey writes in this rags-to-riches story that delves beneath the diamond-encrusted public persona to reveal a woman who has overcome childhood abandonment , racism, mental illness and abuse. sparkling humor underpins her account of her post-stardom years in which she acknowledges her “propensity for strangeness” and casts fabulous shadows on j-lo without once mentioning her name.
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until the end of the world by rupert everett (little, dark)
The actor’s third memoir is as much a caustic reflection on the iniquities of show business as it is an account of his decade-long efforts to bring Oscar Wilde’s Happy Prince to the screen. The writing is as brilliant as the anecdotes are riotous: He stands Joan Collins up for dinner and throws up on Colin Firth. Meanwhile, he channels his hero, Wilde, whom he describes as “the patron saint of anyone who has ruined his life.”
there’s no time like the futureby michael j fox (headline)
Life was already tough for the Back to the Future star, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 29. then, in 2018, she underwent surgery to remove a tumor on her spine. In these poignant, often funny memoirs, she reveals how she regained her sense of optimism and reflects on age, family, and living with a disability.
just ignore itby alan davies (small, brown)
While the comedian’s first memoir was an amusing look at his adolescence, this second boldly tackles the parts its predecessor missed. An intimate and candid book, Just Ignore It tells of the “silent, librarian sexual abuse” Davies endured by his father from the age of eight to 13, and the bullying and gaslighting that ensured his silence. Davies was 51 when he finally went to the police, at which point his father’s poor health meant he would never stand trial.
green lightby matthew mcconaughey (headline)
A gloriously wacky effort from the Oscar-winning star of The Dallas Buyers Club: Not a memoir, he assures readers, but a “focus book.” between anecdotes about parents at war, travel, fame, movies and debauchery, he greenlights overflowing with lists, photos, poems and notes scribbled with fortune cookie homilies, all part of his basic philosophy he likes to call “livin’ – there’s no ‘g’ at the end of live because life is a verb.”
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