The best memoirs to read to learn why memoir can be both literature and art

This first memoir in what would become a canon of the life of a woman of extraordinary courage and talent introduced me while reading it in college to a writer who would be an example of what one can do with one’s life and how writing can be poetic, vivid, and unforgettable.

The beautiful creation of family, place and the pivotal role that silence can play in our lives remain in my memory as indelible imprints. Maya wrote about her grandmother’s pride and her mother’s love with unflinching truth and made every person in this memoir complex and complicated and therefore unforgettable.

Bragg’s homage to the strength of his mother, who picked cotton and survived an abusive marriage, his ode to the beauty and strangeness of his southern roots, and his journey out of the South into the wider world while carrying The South in his bones is an entirely satisfying and moving story of creating identity and finding home inside yourself.

I often teach this book in my memoir workshops and it is always one of the most popular reads.

In the introduction to the first edition of Black Boy, Richard Wright acknowledges that while inspired by his life the book is both a record of his life and an imagined autobiography of all the “black boys” he knew who like him came of age in the segregated south.

Wright’s book is an early example of the use of creative nonfiction techniques that make this memoir gripping, suspenseful, deeply psychological, and a testimony to the power of dreams and the will to prevail against adversity.

Elaine Brown served as head of the Black Power Party during the incarceration of the founder Huey P. Newton. 

This memoir is written with all the qualities that made Elaine Brown give herself wholeheartedly to the Black Panther Party, passion, brilliance, keen intelligence, and fearlessness. Brown plumbs the depths of her motivations, the Party’s accomplishments and failures, and fissures that despite her ascent included sexism and brutality.

Brown had incarnations as a writer and singer before joining the Party and in telling her story and the story of a pivotal moment in social history she brings the skill of an artist.

This memoir informed me of the psychological price of immigration and displacement on young children in ways that were searing and deep because of Wang’s mastery of the child’s perspective.

She lived in New York’s Chinatown with her parents two professionals who immigrated from China and experienced poverty, isolation, fear of deportation, working in a sweatshop. She was saved by her love of books and reading, and her mother’s determination to realize the life she left China to have. Wang creates innocence and trauma with a deft, poetic skill that makes this a classic.