A Few of My All-Time Favs

If you like these memoirs too, we should probably be friends. Text me!

Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls (2020)

by Nina Renata Aron

Aron recounts her relationships with partner K. and sister Lucia — both of whom suffer from addiction. Aron struggles with addiction herself before getting sober. She contemplates the usefulness of Al-Anon, which she both participates in and dismisses at different times in her life. The book’s black cover hints at a story just as dark.

After my experience with my sister, I believed I would never allow heroin back into my life — about that, I had thought I was resolute— but I was otherwise tolerant of the daily dance between individuals and the substances they chose to mitigate or obliterate life’s aches and pains. I did that dance myself.

Three Women (2020)

by Lisa Taddeo

I devoured this book in three days while on Christmas vacation on Sanibel Island, two years before the hurricane took out the only bridge to the mainland. Taddeo spent eight years researching the stories of three women: A suburban mother in a passionless marriage who reconnects with a former flame; a fifteen-year-old student who falls in love with her English teacher; and a young woman whose marriage involves regular threesomes and a submissive/dominant dynamic. Although at times the writing feels contrived (Taddeo writes as an observer in these women’s bedrooms, even though she most certainly was not), I credit the book with originality. It was the first in-depth, nonfiction account I’d ever read with such raw stories of female desire.

Reasons to Stay Alive (2015)

by Matt Haig

Matt Haig, author of the best-selling novel The Midnight Library, wrote one of my all-time favorite memoirs about depression. Organized into short chapters and the occasional list (e.g., “Things You Think During Your 1000th Panic Attack”) I read his heartfelt memoir in one sitting. Haig is funny and sensitive while attempting to explain what depression feels like, all the while knowing his words are insufficient. Like many things in life, one must experience it to fully understand:

It [depression] is like explaining life on Earth to an alien. The reference points just aren’t there. You have to resort to metaphors….The sun sinks behind a cloud, and you feel that slight change in weather as if a friend has died.

In the Land of Men (2018)

Adrienne Miller

Miller’s book In the Land of Men recounts her experience as the youngest and only female fiction editor at Esquire magazine. While working there, she meets and dates David Foster Wallace. This was around the same time that his masterpiece, Infinite Jest, was published. She has a term for writers like Wallace — great male narcissists — yet she cannot resist him.

I, too, work in a male-dominated industry and share Miller’s observations. But even more than our shared experience, her brilliant voice is what makes this book so appealing. I wanted to follow her around New York listening to what she thought — about the famous writers she encounters, about her relationship with Wallace, and about her experience working for a men’s magazine in the late 1990s.

Her writing style places her apart from her life rather than within it, but it works because she is so smart. Even while she is dating Wallace, her style renders her an observer instead of a full participant. Of an early encounter with him, she writes the following:

The weird candor of whatever it was David had been offering, the relationship fast-trackiness, had merely been some sort of performance of intimacy. I could see that now. I could see that quite clearly.

And one of my favorite lines:

Our subjective self always exceeds our objective self, meaning you always know your own possibilities, even when no one else does. Or, to put it another way: if you are a woman, you will always be underestimated.