In her memoir The Great Triumph, Jeanne Estelle Saddler follows the life of her mother, Thelma, from a childhood in a South Carolina sharecropping family to adulthood in Detroit. After the Osborne family joins the Great Migration, Thelma's intelligence brings her into the home of...

Lady Vagabond by Judy DePue is a compelling memoir that chronicles the journey of a graduate student who embarks on a fifteen-month odyssey of discovery before committing to a career as a behavioral psychologist. As she travels from Samoa to Australia, from New Guinea to...

How does a loving home shape a young girl’s outlook in a world divided by race? Can Anything Good Come Out of Jim Crow? is Jacqueline Smith’s memoir about growing up during the era of racial segregation. She grew up in Texas during the 1950s...

Held in the Vanishing by Ti Mougne is a memoir about a dutiful daughter who becomes her parents' caregiver. In this book, Mougne talks about the wonderful, unpleasant, draining, and heart-wrenching moments she, her husband, and her son experienced while living with her parents. Mougne...

Life with Less of Me by Julianna Burmesch is a memoir that follows the author’s life from a childhood with parents prone to hoarding, emotional abuse, and alcoholism. The book starts in 2019, when fifty-eight-year-old Julianna sorts through her mother’s rooms and describes the suffocating...

Full Circles by Kenneth D. Thompson Sr. tells a deeply moving story that starts in a tiny, struggling home on East 13th Street. This memoir walks us through the author’s childhood, where he dealt with forced school busing to Burnet Junior High and the hurt...

In Anthony J. Mohr’s memoir, Every Other Weekend, the author tells the story of a childhood suspended between two contrasting worlds. After his parents’ divorce at a time when divorce was rare, young Tony lives between two worlds: his biological father’s world, Gerald Mohr, who...

Admitted and Afraid is a memoir by Maggie Boday, a trader whose sudden throat pain becomes a medical emergency after swelling alters her voice, then makes swallowing almost impossible. Her sister brings her to the emergency department, where a CT scan rules out a throat...

Born in Taiwan to a Chinese Muslim diplomat’s family, Fawzia Mai Tung spends her childhood learning how often a place can call a child foreign. Rootless Orchid follows her from early schooldays abroad into a life shaped by embassy postings, changing languages, religious duty, family...

In Life and How to Live It, Chaz Holesworth describes being seventeen in 1995 Philadelphia after CIBA, the born-again Christian school that shaped his days, expels him. The same week, Laura, the girlfriend whose future has become part of his escape plan, is forced by...