Here are 79 books that No Ashes in the Fire fans have personally recommended if you like
No Ashes in the Fire.
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I discovered BTS a few years ago right in the middle of an era when the world was falling apart and everyone was stuck at home. I know they’ve gotten a lot of people through hard times, but for me they did something arguably more life-changing: they inspired me to write my debut novel featuring a Kpop band who has also achieved worldwide domination, but in my fictional story, must face cancellation, violence, and a retributive girl band who disbanded under the most tragic of circumstances. Now that we’re waiting for BTS’ return from military service, I hope that these books will help hold us over until their return.
In my defense, I read this book long before Jungkook recommended it, and it single-handedly became my gateway drug into memoir. I had never heard of Japanese Breakfast beforehand, but no matter—hers was the kind of story around food and loss that I found incredibly relatable in feeling, even if not in the actual details.
The New York Times bestseller from the Grammy-nominated indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up mixed-race, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity in the wake of her loss.
'As good as everyone says it is and, yes, it will have you in tears. An essential read for anybody who has lost a loved one, as well as those who haven't' - Marie-Claire
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer,…
I am an adult child of an alcoholic father and an abusive and dysfunctional stepmother who ran away from home at sixteen and fell into the wrong crowd in my search for love and family. Yet after years of hard personal work, I have overcome and triumphed over these obstacles to become stable, happy, and successful, in a good marriage, raising a great son in a loving, stable home. I’ve gone on to help and inspire others to do the same, including writing the book Redeemed, A Memoir of a Stolen Childhood.
I identified with Tara Westover while reading her memoir because of her secluded and restrictive upbringing. Like her, my upbringing made me feel left out, “other,” different from normal kids, not allowed the usual activities that other kids could do and kept from learning and growing in my own way.
I didn’t understand how these rules affected me until I saw my angst in her own words of isolation, yearning, and rebellion. It gave me hope that our desire for self-fulfillment and actualization is universal and stronger than the people who try, for good reasons or bad, to keep us down.
It is an amazing book. I could barely put it down.
Selected as a book of the year by AMAZON, THE TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, GUARDIAN, NEW YORK TIMES, ECONOMIST, NEW STATESMAN, VOGUE, IRISH TIMES, IRISH EXAMINER and RED MAGAZINE
'One of the best books I have ever read . . . unbelievably moving' Elizabeth Day 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told' Louise O'Neill 'A memoir to stand alongside the classics . . . compelling and joyous' Sunday Times
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate…
Before
becoming a psychotherapist and author focused on the stage of adulthood
between adolescence and midlife, I survived those years myself. The
stage of development that I now call “Quarterlife” is a complex and
rich period of life. Countless fictional heroes and protagonists in
novels are in Quarterlife, yet the emphasis on these years within
psychology and memoir is lacking. I personally love memoirs about this
period of life and think they offer so much to others who are struggling
through Quarterlife themselves and the trials of “adulting.”
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.
Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in a…
My father introduced me to the world as we paged through his old pre-WWII atlas. We traced borders and rivers with our fingers and he spoke names that were magical incantations and invitations to a world more exciting and mysterious than our midwestern home. As a reader, I was drawn to books about travel and as a budding writer, I was inspired by the adventures of “Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter” featured in the Sunday comics of my youth. I packed my bags early and my passport is never out of date. I continue to read traveloirs, and I write in my journal every day. Oh! The places I will go.
Suleika Jaouad’s memoir, the most recent travel memoir I’ve read, is about a woman traveling the world alone, though Suleika traveled with her dog, Oscar.
She set off on in a van a 15,000-mile road trip across the country to meet some of the people who had written letters to her during her years in the hospital in treatment for leukemia and a bone marrow transplant.
Like me, Suleika had a dream of being a writer, in her case a war correspondent. The journey she set out on was also one of healing that began with the question: How would she reenter the world and live again.
She continues to inspire me through her life and her writing as she brings connection, love, and wonder to the world through “Isolation Journals,” which I receive in my inbox regularly.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the author of the Life, Interrupted column in The New York Times
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist • “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New…
I’m a novelist and a professor of black queer and feminist literature at Georgetown University. But the truth is, my connection to these books goes deeper than that. These books give me life. When I was a little girl, I spent more days than I can count scouring my mother’s small black feminist library in the basement of our home in Harlem, poring over the stories of girls like me: fat, black, queer girls who longed to see themselves written in literature and history. Now I get to create stories like these myself, and share them with others. It’s a dream job, and a powerful one. It thrills me every time.
This is the kind of book you want to savor, line by line. It’s a powerful and necessary exploration of black gay writing and life in the 1980s and 1990s.
Bost transports us to the world of important writers like Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Melvin Dixon, showing us how their writing, their living, and their loving were all intertwined. With gorgeous, poetic prose, Bost shows how violent structures like racism, classism, homophobia, and AIDS may shape aspects of our lives, but they cannot stop our living.
Evidence of Beingexplores how these writers used their work to create community, belonging, and survival. My favorite thing about this book is that Bost gives us a vision of what he calls “black/queer optimism,” in which shared experiences and creative expression form a basis for LGBTQ+ life far into the future.
Evidence of Being opens on a grim scene: Washington DC's gay black community in the 1980s, ravaged by AIDS, the crack epidemic, and a series of unsolved murders, seemingly abandoned by the government and mainstream culture. Yet in this darkest of moments, a new vision of community and hope managed to emerge. Darius Bost's account of the media, poetry, and performance of this time and place reveals a stunning confluence of activism and the arts. In Washington and New York during the 1980s and '90s, gay black men banded together, using creative expression as a tool to challenge the widespread…
Raised by activist feminist parents and schooled by Quakers, I am surprisingly amusing. Eartha Kitt once held my left hand for five minutes. I work primarily as a playwright; Not a Cat is my first children’s book! Now when I show up at a little kid’s birthday instead of bringing a play I wrote, I can give the tot age-appropriate reading material. For me, reading a memoir is this intimate exchange with a writer where they’ve shared everything, and I’ve revealed nothing. What’s better than a good story beautifully curated? Okay, a cookie, but that’s it. I hope my book reaches all the kids out there who are told: be less this and more that.
This one is a true outlier, because I don’t know Brian Broome, but after reading his incredible memoir, I wish I did because he’s an amazing human and a wonderful storyteller. His book is dealing with blackness, queerness and the expectations surrounding black manhood and his struggle to reject violence in favor of love and ultimately, of self-love as well. I haven’t seen him up close, but in photos, he totally looks super pretty, so he has that in common with every one of these authors. I loved his book and can’t wait for his next.
WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK • NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, LIBRARY JOURNAL, AMAZON AND APPLE BOOKS • A TODAY SUMMER READING LIST PICK • AN ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY BEST DEBUT OF SUMMER PICK • A PEOPLE BEST BOOK OF SUMMER PICK
A raw, poetic, coming-of-age “masterwork” (The New York Times) about Blackness, masculinity and addiction
“Punch Me Up to the Gods obliterates what we thought were the limitations of not just the American memoir, but the possibilities of the…
I’ve been reading queer fiction for, well, I guess about 50 years. First, brilliant novels by James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and cheesy lesbian pulp novels. In the eighties, feminist presses and a wealth of new queer literature sprung into existence. It’s easier now to find great queer fiction, if you dig a little. My approach is to read widely, all kinds of authors, from all kinds of backgrounds. So the whole idea of a “best 5” is hard for me to get my mind around. I could have listed 25 more. Thank you for reading!
A perfect fit for the not-the-same-old-queer novel list, Taylor’s story features a Black gay biochemist who is working on his degree at a Midwestern university.
I love this book for the intimacy in its portrayal of the protagonist, Wallace, the way his thoughts and feelings and decisions are revealed with such precision. I felt his joys and his pains so clearly.
A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
As a journalist, author and screenwriter, my work has always pondered loss and grief. I think this has something to do with the fact that of my mother’s religion; she was a convert to Hinduism and started conversations about the inevitability of death and how the soul and the body aren’t the same when us children were at a very young age. It probably also has something to do with the constant presence of death within my family and communities as a Black and queer person in a violently anti-Black and queerantagonistic world. I currently volunteer at a hospice, and provide community-building programming to death workers from diverse communities.
Rasheed Newson's powerful debut is an eye-opening exploration of historical injustice and the resilience Black and queer people in particular have cultivated to overcome it.
The protagonist, Trey, comes into his political awakening through his work volunteering at an AIDS hospice, with many parallels to my own journey. Though this book is set in the past, it offers profound insights into the systemic issues that persist today.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE
The debut novel from television WRITER/PRODUCER OF THE CHI, NARCOS, and BEL-AIR tells a fierce and riveting queer coming-of-age story following the personal and political awakening of a young, gay, Black man in 1980s New York City.
"Consistently engrossing." —New York Times Book Review
“Full of joy and righteous anger, sex and straight talk, brilliant storytelling and humor... A spectacularly researched Dickensian tale with vibrant characters and dozens of famous cameos, it is precisely the book we’ve needed for a long time.” —Andrew Sean Greer,…
My father and I have written three books of narrative history. We tell stories from the American past that have a theme of interracial collaboration. Not sentimentally, but so that in a clear-eyed way, we can learn from moments in our history that may offer us hopeful ways forward. Growing up, I was shaped by narrative history techniques such as Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America's Struggle for Equality by Richard Kluger and Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years trilogy. For this list, I wanted to share five favorite civil rights movement memoirs.
Like Andrew Young, Vernon Jordan was another generous, legendary person who I treasured interviewing for Nine Days. Sadly, he passed away this year, but left us a captivating account of his life, from childhood in Georgia to being a young lawyer under Donald Hollowell facing life and death stakes to surviving an assassination attempt. Jordan was a masterful orchestrator of change who appreciated his mentors and taught us all through this book.
As a young college student in Atlanta, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's post-luncheon siestas, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss."Vernon can read!" the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly fifty years later, Vernon Jordan, now a senior executive at Lazard Freres, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders and one of the most charismatic figures in America, has written an unforgettable book about his life and times. The story of Vernon Jordan's life encompasses the sweeping…
I’m a scholar of gender and state violence, and I live and work at the US-Mexico border. For the past several years, I’ve worked collaboratively with large teams of Latinx-identified students to study the impacts of US immigration policies on migrants from Mexico and Central America. We realized that even though about half of immigrants are women, around 95% of deportees are men. So, we started to think about how US policies criminalize immigrant men. I became especially interested in how immigration enforcement (at the border and beyond) intersects with mass incarceration. In the list, I pick up books that trace the multinational reach of the carceral apparatus that comes to treat migrants as criminals.
This is Albert Woodfox’s shocking and amazing life history of spending most of his life in Angola, the most brutal prison in Louisiana.
It’s an exposé of prison brutality and dehumanization. But it’s also a stunning account of his own courage and spirit. On top, the writing is sparse, stark, and beautiful.
FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN NONFICTION Named One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019 Winner of the Stowe Prize Named the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, Publishers Weekly, BookBrowse, and Literary Hub Winner of the BookBrowse Award for Best Debut of 2019 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“An uncommonly powerful memoir about four decades in confinement . . . A profound book about…
