100 books like My Name Is Why

This list wouldn’t be complete without a first-person memoir, a woman’s lived experience in a woman’s voice. And what better memoir to choose than Winterson's searingly honest account of how she reclaimed her childhood through the power of language.

In writing that is naked and brave, Winterson reveals a childhood that was ghastly, even Dickensian, but that was the crucible for Winterson’s incendiary talent.

The author’s account of grinding, unrelentless poverty and neglect, set against her eventual, miraculous escape to a different life made me cheer.

Bravely, Kerry Hudson returns to the scenes of many crimes committed against her to really understand why the past refuses to let her go and whether anything has changed for deprived families in those rundown British towns she grew up in.

In an early chapter the author recalls being pushed between two adults across a table. She thought it was a game, but her parents were in fact arguing over who should keep her. Neither was willing.

This is an important and shameful piece of British social history and an unflinching examination of a dysfunctional family with different recollections of the past. 

I love this book mainly because of her deeply flawed, hard-drinking dad, who still managed to impart wisdom and love. I couldn’t help wishing I’d had a dad like him.

When Karr grew up, she had her own substance abuse issues that she talked about in another memoir, but this book is my favorite because her family is so screwed up and yet so brave and so tough. To me, they epitomize all that is good and bad about the South.

Personally, I love lyrical, poetic language, and Karr’s writing is transcendent! This is a book that will be with me forever. (I almost got to go to a workshop with Mary Karr, but the pandemic got in the way.)

Kit and I share some life similarities, she’s a working-class girl with a Birmingham background, published later in life, and I was keen to read her story. Written as scenes from childhood with sharp observation and wit, her book illustrates an unpredictable childhood. The daughter of an Irish mother and Caribbean father in a large and sometimes chaotic family, where there is love in the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but not always at home. There are the familiar places, the family dynamics observed with the clarity of a child, and the tit-for-tat games her parents play - dad buys a new car, the next week, mum a harmonica and Davy Crockett hat. All quirks observed and challenging situations related with a lightness of touch and wit, a genuine pleasure to read.

We’re all familiar with wartime images of young evacuees gathered together on railway stations. But over fifty percent of children were not evacuated from British cities, and it is they that Penny Starns has studied. Once we get past the mothers’ ‘keep or send’ moral dilemma, there are the issues of discipline, education, health, food, and psychological development to consider. Starns takes these subjects chapter by chapter, relating stories of disease, poverty, criminality, and terror (including one child who spent the night in a shelter within reach of an unexploded bomb). These tales she counterpoints with examples of unexpectedly increasing emotional and physical wellbeing amongst some of the stay-behinds. This is an important record of the experiences of a demographic that war histories often ignore.

We all know Beatrix Potter wrote and illustrated Peter Rabbit and other children’s books, but how many people are aware that young Beatrix was a groundbreaking mushroom scientist? In Beatrix Potter, Scientist, Metcalf unveils the secret scientific side of Beatrix Potter, long before her books became classics. Beatrix studied all sorts of fungi, discovering a mushroom known as the Old Man Of The Woods, but as a female she was prohibited from presenting a scientific paper to London’s Linean Society. I love one of this book’s underlying messages, that someone can be an artist AND a scientist; there’s no need to choose one or the other. There’s also a terrific author’s note and strong supporting end matter for further study.

My own kids absolutely devoured non-fiction when they were middle-graders, and this book would have topped their lists. Torpedoed tells the story of the torpedoing and tragic sinking of the SS City of Benares, an ocean liner bearing English evacuees to Canada. Full of photographs, excerpts from letters, first-person accounts, and ephemera like packing lists, other evacuation paperwork, and even the ship’s emergency drill instructions, Deborah Heiligman’s book belongs in every middle-grade non-fiction collection. There is heartbreak and tragedy in these pages, but there is also extraordinary bravery and heroism. I can’t recommend this one highly enough.

I was heavily influenced by the storytelling and humor in this memoir, as well as the comic and childish cover and illustrations. Although I had a very different upbringing, I wrote in a similar style. Roald Dahl's tales of his own childhood are completely fascinating and fiendishly funny, especially for adults. He tells of crazy conflicts in his English schools with headmasters and teachers, and I had similar experiences. He writes of a visit to a chocolate factory, whereas our town’s factories were not so innocent. The air was filled with the by-products of pesticide, herbicide, plastics, fertilizer, and steel castings production, as well as a slaughterhouse. Roald Dahl employed a professional illustrator to add humor, whereas I decided to learn how to draw, coming up with over 50 illustrations to amplify the humor.

I loved this book because it ties in with an obsession of mine, the interface between modernity and the past.

It is the autobiography of Edmund Gosse, who grew up with strict, devout parents (even by mid-19th-century standards). However, the father was a biologist just at the time Darwin’s Origin of Species was published. I was intrigued by Gosse’s growing awareness that his parents’ worldview was so out of sync with the times, just as I was fascinated by the father’s anguish as his faith pulled him one way and his reason another.

Gosse’s description of the passing of a world is so entrancing (even from today’s perspective), yet the closeness (and neurosis) of family bonds is endearingly the same.

Elizabeth’s journey explores her early teen years with her tumultuous family, touching on her mother’s faint but tainted memory and her ailing father’s neglect, framed within the royal trappings.

This is a great book to share if you love British history and culture, and it gives a very interesting though somewhat tamed perspective of growing up in England during the reign of Henry VIII, all while placing the universal experiences of wanting to fit in, finding yourself the family outcast, and discovering the pains of politics.

Along with this series, Dear America and My Name is America series are all recommended as well. I have read many, if not all of them, and I’d like to read them with my kids, too.