Best Memoirs of 2023
My pics from "best of" lists from around the web.
The World at My Back by Thomas Melle (Paperback 2023)
Released in paperback in May, Melle’s memoir about living through alternating manic-depressive states was a finalist for the German Book Prize. In addition to his sheer talent as a writer — Melle is an award-winning German novelist and playwright — what sets this book apart is his self-deprecating humor.
I chuckled at an account of one of his manic periods, during which he was to perform a reading at a literary event in front of several revered writers and other high-brow literary folk (and also, his mother):
I arrived late because I’d missed the train again, I smoked even though it was forbidden, I provided rude and meaningless answers, almost wrecked the microphone… [I] sat down at the piano, and played like hell. I hardly need to mention that I can’t play piano.
Molly by Blake Butler (Paperback 2023)
One of Book Marks best reviewed books of 2023, Molly is the story of Butler’s beloved wife and her struggle with mental illness. After Molly takes her own life, Butler discovers “shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.”
Check out this excerpt in The Paris Review.
Mother, Nature by Jebidiah Jenkins (2023)
This memoir is about a son who, after spending decades away from his family of origin, decides to take a 5,000-mile hike across the U.S. with his mother. It is the same trek she took with her husband (his father) thirty years before. Jenkins, who is gay, leaves home at 19 to pursue his own interests, and now, with his mother turning 70, ponders what he gave up to pursue an independent life. He poses the question many of us who have moved away from home inevitably ask ourselves:
I don’t think I moved to California to get away from my mom, but if I interrogate my motivations, I do think I wanted to go far away to stretch out and try on different ideas and freedoms…But now she is in her seventies and I am approaching forty, and I have been away from her for twenty years. And I wonder if I’ve been a good son. If I’ve chased myself at the cost of being part of a family.
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial by Viet Thanh Nguyen (2023)
I look forward to reading this memoir, which appeared on numerous best of lists in 2023. Nguyen’s story chronicles his childhood, when his family was forced to leave Vietnam as refugees and settle in America. One there, he is removed from his family and placed with a white couple.
He later resettles with his Vietnamese family, but struggles with what it means to have two identities. Written in both first and second person, Nguyen’s pace is quick and engaging. He weaves his personal story with the stories of other refugees and American culture.
I appreciate anyone who can make me laugh in the face of so much tragedy. On his parents’ decision to move to San Jose, he writes:
Warmer weather, better opportunities, many more of our countrymen. So, in 1978, we moved. Thank God.
Just kidding Harrisburg. I don’t even believe in God.
No really, I am just kidding, Harrisburg. I was happy with you—state capital of Pennsylvania!—but a seven-year-old, so long as someone loves him, can be happy anywhere, even if it is only fifteen miles from Three Mile Island, site of the worst nuclear disaster in the United States the meltdown occurring a year after we left.
In Case You Missed It: A few of this year’s Monthly Memoir picks landed on multiple best of 2023 lists: A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung, Monsters by Claire Dederer, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith.
p.s. I did not include any celebrity memoirs, which get more plentiful by the year. Here’s a fairly exhaustive list of from AARP (I love that AARP has a celebrity memoir list).
If you’re a stand-up comic fan, check out SNL star Leslie Jones’s “Leslie F*cking Jones” and one of my all-time favorite comedians, Maria Bamford’s “Sure I’ll Join Your Cult.” I haven’t read either yet, but I laughed many times listening to Jones on NPR’s Fresh Air and Bamford on Neal Brennan’s Blocks podcast.