100 books like Push

I almost chose a fifth book by an author more readers will likely have heard of (Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower), but I’m going with a second autobiography, Anne Moody’s, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

Between ages 13 and 16, I read my blue paperback cover of this book more times than I can remember. It’s about Anne Moody’s growing up amid poverty and Jim Crow, beset by sexism and danger from within and outside her community due to her gender and race.

It chronicles her childhood in Mississippi to her evolution into a Civil Rights Activist as a teen and college student. It’s so unforgivingly honest, detailed, and visually rich on the page - it humanizes the history like an Eyes on the Prize documentary but way more personalized.

I think it taught me further about the value of writing very visually,  the power of our individual… show more.

Unfortunately, Toni Morrison’s first major novel The Bluest Eye has long been targeted on banned book lists, which is unfortunate.

Told through the narration of Claudia - a Black girl character after my own heart with the same on-point, justifiably defiant thinking I had as a young girl, we get the story of Pecola and a community that is shaped by both the history of white supremacy and it’s own cultural richness and texture.

Morrison’s writing is so visual and visceral, and the storytelling so honest it spoke to my own war against Black girl invisibility in my own world. I’ve read it many times, and it still emotionally shakes me as so much memorable writing and stories tend to do.

And like other books by this Nobel Prize winner author, The Bluest Eye should be required reading for advanced grade high school students rather than banned. 

We all know the incomparable poet, writer, and speaker she became, but before that was her coming-of-age story. Raw and painful yet written with Maya Angelou's lyrical and insightful eye, this too was a book I started and could not put down.

Drawn into her world as a girl feeling imprisoned inside herself for terrible reasons, she finds that self-love and kindness and the world of words, books, poetry, and writing unlock the cage she was in.

As a woman, as a girl, I would never know the cruel racism she experienced, but her journey into art and its ability to heal and set one free was something I felt kin to.

Another great read of my teens that had me looking for real versions of the people described in this book, aka I wished I lived in this book!

It was like an action-packed movie; all the details of the story came to life in my head at the time I read it. Books like this one made me wish I could tell stories like this.

A lot of people don’t know that the movie Precious is based off of a novel. Sure... It doesn’t have any ghouls, monsters, descriptive sentences filled with gore and macabre, but if you were like me, and decided to read the book after watching the film…. This movie goes down as probably one of the scariest novels of all time…like V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic scary. It’s hard reading novels that involve the abuse of children, but this book literally had me speechless and horrified like the first time I watched an episode of, My 500 Pound Life.

I read this book in high school and it messed. Me. Up. So much so that I remember it in vivid detail to this day and credit it with my desire to write dysfunctional family fiction.

I’d be hard-pressed in real life (thank God) to find a family suffering from issues ranging from incestuous relationships through moral superiority and unforgiving rigidity up to greed and murder… all of which feels like the tip of the iceberg.

Reading the tale of a family who has gone so far off the rails will, if nothing else, make you appreciate the mundane problems your own family has. And isn’t that why we read this genre?

The younger the victim, the more egregious the act seems. This true story is a riveting read. Dixon repressed childhood incest memories until, ironically, she became a nurse helping others with similar pasts. The book is an insightful look at how hidden pain manifests itself in our current lives regardless of what walls the mind has erected to protect us. Woven into the memoir is helpful advice for survivors, counselors, lawyers, and others working with abuse victims. I was mesmerized.

I Hadn't Meant to Tell You This is one of my favorite novels for its subtlety. It's almost like sleight of hand because you aren't sure where to look. The story kind of unfolds all around you. One of the hardest things after a sexual assault is opening up to someone about it, so I am a fan of books that give people a blueprint of how to go about it. There is no single right way to tell someone about abuse and assault, but it helps to have examples. 

This was another book that I read in high school, and I revisit it every few years. Block’s language is sheer poetry, and every line is perfection. I have to content myself with knowing that I will never write this well, and that’s okay.

The book centers around narrator, Laurel, who lives with her mother and father in a perfect dream house in Los Angeles. When Laurel’s father falls sick and goes to the hospital, and her life begins to unravel, she begins to have visions of a skeletal lover who visits her when no one else is around. Is he real, or just a projection of her nightmares? Read this book if you want to fall in love with the Los Angeles canyons and a different view of the city. Perfection.

Laura Davis hits it out of the park with this epically honest and human memoir.

In it, she tells the story of how, after decades of estrangement due to family abuse and incest, which her mother denied, she decides to care for her elderly mother. I believe any woman will find value, wisdom, and relief in The Burning Light of Two Stars, but it is especially poignant for mothers and adult daughters who have struggled, are estranged, and/or are navigating reconciliation.

It is in revealing and speaking the truth, that healing, even when it's messy and emotional, can take place.