5 Great Memoirs I Read This Summer

Domestic abuse and drug addiction and eating disorders, oh my.

In case you missed it, check out July’s memoir of the month “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” by Maggie Smith. It is my #1 pick for the year!

1. Blood Orange Night: A Memoir of Insomnia, Motherhood, and Benzos

by Melissa Bond

Melissa Bond takes readers on a harrowing journey through her addiction to benzodiazepines, the class of drugs that includes Ativan, Valium, and Xanax. After the traumatic birth of her first child, she struggles with insomnia, sleeping just a few hours a night for months on end. After trying every other remedy she can think of, she finally resorts to prescription medication. She starts with Ambien, and when that doesn’t work, she begins seeing a doctor who overprescribes benzodiazepines. With no data from her medical team, Bond soon researches this class of drugs and discovers they are highly addictive. By that time, she has taken so much of the medication for so long that she fears she has done permanent damage to her brain chemistry.

Bond accidentally gets pregnant again and finds herself home alone with a newborn and a toddler with special needs, reeling from the side effects of both too much medication and continuing insomnia that leaves her stumbling throughout the day. The threat of her crumbling marriage raises the stakes in this gripping memoir.

2. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (2023)

by Claire Dederer

Former film critic Claire Dederer asks how we should feel about the brilliant art of bad men. She writes about Roman Polanski (child rapist) and Woody Allen (same?), two men whose work she loves. This book is based on an essay she wrote, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men,” for The Paris Review.

I asked my husband, attempting to explain the book’s central question, “Like, how should we feel about Michael Jackson’s music?”

“Depends on the song,” he said. Ha ha.

(Note: This question about Michael Jackson is examined in an excellent podcast called “Think Twice: Michael Jackson.”)

In light of her newfound knowledge, Dederer watches the offenders’ movies again — Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Allen’s Manhattan, in which Allen’s character (42 years old) dates Mariel Hemingway’s character (17 years old). She attempts again and again to objectively judge their work, but she is never able to completely extricate her assessment from her own biases.

3. In The Dream House: A Memoir (2019)

by Carmen Machado

“I loved that book,” the bookstore clerk told me as I passed him on my way out with this book under my arm. It did not disappoint.

Carmen Machado writes about an abusive, queer relationship through the singular theme of a Dream House. Each chapter references the Dream House: “Dream House as Lost in Translation,” about trying to understand her abuser’s behavior; “Dream House as Deja Vu,” upon arriving again and again at the love they feel for each other; and my favorite, “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure,” which (without spoiling it) creatively pulls the reader into a deeper understanding of how Machado keeps reliving her abuse again and again.

Here’s an excerpt from an early chapter “Dream House as Not a Metaphor,” which ends like this:

…it is important to remember that the Dream House is real. If I cared to, I could give you its address, and you could drive there in your own car and sit in front of that Dream House and try to imagine the things that have happened inside. I wouldn’t recommend it. But you could. No one would stop you.

4. A Living Remedy (2023)

by Nicole Chung

Chung writes about loss and grief when her father dies unexpectedly. She scrutinizes her own actions: Had she said the right things? Did he know all the ways she loved him? Had she visited enough?

Chung’s relationship with her parents is complicated by the fact that she is adopted. She grapples with what it means to be a Korean child raised by white parents. Chung faces racism in school, an experience her parents do not share. Complicating matters further, her parents were advised to fully integrate Chung into their family and to raise her as if she were white. Alas, they never speak about race.

Chung attends college far away from her Oregon roots. The physical space between her and her parents enables further examination of the differences between her new life and the working-class life in which she was raised. Chung returns again and again to a central theme of the book, the crossroads of her parents’ healthcare needs and the exorbitant cost of meeting them. Her parents lived at times without health insurance and were forced to forgo or delay necessary treatment, which Chung believes led to her father’s untimely death.

The book is an ode to her parents, an examination of society’s responsibility to help them, and a question of what to do with the immense grief after losing those you love most.

5. Unraveled: A Climber's Journey Through Darkness and Back (2022)

by Katie Brown

From an early age, Katie Brown excelled at rock climbing. As one of the youngest climbers to compete at the highest level of the sport, she had that magical combination of natural talent and innate determination all professional athletes possess. Fellow climbers called her the best female sport climber in the history of the sport.

But her home life was a different story. Her devoutly religious and overprotective mother was emotionally abusive towards Katie, a sensitive and quiet child. This dynamic contributed to Katie’s declining mental health and disordered eating. When her mother takes her to the doctor, there is no mention of an eating disorder, even though she is dangerously thin. Her mother latches on to a misdiagnosis of ileocolitis (inflammation of the colon) and Crohn’s disease, which significantly delays Katie’s recovery:

My anorexia had become even more complicated because, in addition to the mental aspect, eating now exacerbated the unbearable physical pain I was in. Even if I wanted to eat more, most of the time I physically couldn’t.

Katie is unable to eat solid food, yet somehow she travels to Arco, Italy to compete in and win a major international climbing competition. I found myself rooting for this sweet, talented little girl while witnessing her long struggle and eventual transformation.