The best memoirs of quarterlife beyond the crisis

I first read this book in graduate school, and it completely changed the way I think about schizophrenia and the daily experience of living with a mental illness.

This memoir chronicles Saks’ experiences attending Oxford University and then Yale Law School with ever more progressive symptoms of schizophrenia; she details her therapy sessions as she worked closely with a psychoanalyst and then the journey to study psychoanalysis herself. I was captivated by Saks’ experience and her skilled storytelling.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that most commonly emerges in the Quarterlife years and frequently after people have gone away to college. This book is a gift to understanding this experience more fully or for those who want to feel less alone in the struggle with mental and emotional anguish during this time of life. 

This book has been on The New York Times Bestseller’s list for seemingly countless weeks now—and for good reason!

It is a memoir of grief and loss but is particularly powerful because the author was in her mid-twenties when she was caring for her mother as she died from cancer. The writing is captivating, and the book is thickly woven with scenes of Korean food, shopping, cooking, and eating, as well as scenes of the author’s coming of age and interior life.

As her mother passes away, she learns about herself as an adult and has to face her fear of living the rest of her life without her mother. Though there’s sadness on every page, and I ultimately knew how it ended, I couldn’t put this book down. 

It’s been years now since I read Moore’s story, but I find many of the scenes come back to me easily and in unexpected moments.

This book is a beautifully written, captivating story of a Black gay man finding himself and caring for himself in Quarterlife. We see him longing for a father who disappeared early, making sense of lust and dating, navigating a difficult neighborhood, commuting to school, and then experiencing college.

I loved this book and recommend it a lot.

I’d heard about this book many times before I finally got my hands on a copy. It’s a richly told story of battling cancer and grief, but in this case, the author is the patient herself in her early- and mid-twenties.

This beautiful book provided me a much-needed lens into an otherwise unimaginable experience of coming of age as a patient in hospital room after hospital room, fighting leukemia, and losing newly made friends to cancer, all while also sorting out romance and friendship in the most relatable ways.

I read it in a matter of days, and so many images from its pages are etched into my memory. 

I read this book during a time of my life when I needed a page-turner to distract me, and it was a remarkable companion during those days; I read it in bed well into the night and was grateful to have it again in the morning.

This book tells the story of the author’s coming of age in Idaho with survivalist parents and her encounter with mind-expanding education on a journey that ultimately takes her to Oxford.

Westover is a truly masterful writer who paints vivid images through storytelling. I think I could recount almost every chapter in detail many years after reading it.