The best mixed-genre and/or deliciously out-of-the-box memoirs by women

The Dead Ladies Project follows Crispin’s inner and outer journey across Europe following her suicide attempt. As a way of trying to make sense of her own fragile condition, Crispin researches the lives of other artists who also fled abroad in order to find themselves. 

I first read The Dead Ladies Project while researching my own hybrid memoir. It was a revelation and an inspiration, this elegant weaving of Crispin’s personal story with the stories of those she imagines traveled a similar path as herself, both geographically and emotionally. 

At this time of overly curated, highly sanitized social media depictions of our lives, Crispin’s unflinching humanity is not just brave, but like water poured on arid soil.

Love it or hate it, this is a truly unique book. Slater presents herself as the ultimate unreliable narrator, describing her life-long struggles with epilepsy, only to reveal that her diagnosis is a lie. (Or is it? Apparently, even she is not sure.) Which makes the experience of reading Lying a slippery head trip. One becomes easily absorbed in Slater’s evocative prose and haunting descriptions, only to be reminded a sentence later that it may all be complete BS. 

Some readers might be turned off by what is, admittedly, a bit of a mind fuck. Me, I’m fascinated by it. Lying offers the opportunity to vicariously inhabit a mind not quite tethered to truth… thus forcing readers to contemplate our own relationship to Truth.

Having been abandoned in New York City by her new lover, Laing works through her grief by contemplating the nature of loneliness. 

“Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism,” she writes, “we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling—depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage—are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to… doing time… in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.” 

Yes. That. So very much that. With its combination of personal story and existential analysis, The Lonely City is a delicious meal for our hungry human yearnings and is one of these “hybrid memoirs” that continues to inspire my work. 

Described as a “genre-bending memoir,” The Argonauts is a beautiful, life-affirming meditation on the nature of desire, intimacy, self-identity, love, and the way in which our inevitable blind spots make the confronting of these themes fraught with confusion and contradiction. Nelson allows us to be a fly on the wall of her mind as she works through her concerns in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The New Yorker called The Argonauts, “An exceptional portrait… of the collaboration between Nelson’s mind and heart.” Indeed, The Argonauts is a much-needed reminder for us (both as writers and as human beings) not to shy away from the complex, often contradictory, nature of human experience. That’s where the good stuff lives.

Volume 1 of Nin’s series is my rainy day read when I don’t want to leave the house but still want to feel connected to humanity. It’s sleepy. There’s no real plot. What drama occurs takes place primarily within the author’s mind as she reflects upon what it is to be an ambitious writer (specifically, an ambitious female writer) in 1930s bohemian Paris. There is plenty of Eros in it—most famously her relationship with Henry and June Miller. But, again, this remains primarily within the author’s mind, acting as further fodder in her quest to uncover her truest emotional core. 

**What exactly is the difference between a “memoir” and a “diary”? Please write to me via my website if you have thoughts on this.