Fans pick 65 books like Safekeeping

There is nothing like this groundbreaking memoir—it is as good as it gets—and it has probably influenced every memoir since (including my own).

Kingston is a poet, and I find it impossible not to sink into the striking, gorgeous language and imagery as she describes growing up between multiple worlds: the China her parents emigrated from, the California of a first-generation daughter of immigrants, the ghost-filled China of her mother’s “talk stories,” and her inner life and growing awareness. She weaves family stories, famous myths, and her own girlhood experiences into a beautiful and unforgettable narrative.

I probably re-read it once a year.

This book made my heart both soar and ache.

I follow Renkl’s wonderful writing in the New York Times about the nature in her own neighborhood (and occasionally Southern politics), and Late Migrations is a collection of essays in which she ties together the loss of family with the losses of beloved wildlife.

She wrote such a gorgeous last paragraph about living with grief. “And that’s how I learned the world would go on. An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, ‘It’s benign.’ Someone was saying, ‘It’s a boy.’ Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, ‘Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!’ I tear up every time I read those lines.

Because my first introduction to bell hooks was through her scholarly writing, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this memoir. A few pages in, I was already dazzled, challenged, and addicted to her storytelling genius—I read it in one sitting and immediately began reading it again. The perfect memoir for those who are looking for unconventional storytelling, hooks uses techniques like point-of-view shifts to paint a realer-than-real-life portrait of her childhood in rural Kentucky.  

This landmark book by the Iranian-American writer Azar Afisi is an account of the oppression of the Islamic Revolution in her native Iran and an ode to the liberating power of literature and truth.

In her book, Nafisi recounts the experiences of a group of students she worked with as a professor of English at the University of Tehran. She was dismissed from that professorship in 1981 for refusing to cover her hair and 16 years later, emigrated to America, where she teaches, writes, and is an internationally respected voice for press and personal freedoms.

The best memoirs, to me, are not only records of past events. They are also the record of a writer grappling with how best to tell the story. Jeannie Vanasco takes this idea to an entirely new level in this brilliant meta-memoir that not only chronicles a sexual assault she experienced in college, but also her present-day investigation into her rapist’s memories of the event, his motives, and his present-day thoughts about what happened. This book challenged me to think in new ways—not only about sexual assault, but also about the ways we remember it and write about it. 

Arisa White grew up with the looming absence of her biological father—a man whose genes and behaviors haunt her. Finally White, an award-winning poet and teacher who was “born into a bracket of boys,” decides to visit this man in his far-away country to learn more about where she came from and who she may or may not be. The book moves chronologically. It swirls with poetry. It doesn’t always make for easy reading, but every line is well designed and, often, shattering. As a memoir-in-essays, it reaffirms the power of the crystalized scene and the intentional white space.

“In an earlier life,” Miller writes, “I was a baker, in a bakery on a cobblestoned street.” It takes Miller just one single paragraph to tell this whole tale—how she proofed yeast, how she scraped her spoon, how she made loaves for children: “It was my only kindness.” In every successive chapter—most all of them short, many of them formally inventive—Miller deconstructs her life and soul—the roots of her unease, the startling incidents of loss, her learning to sleep, and her learning to live with the person she becomes. Miller is a stellar choreographer, knowing just where to place which expertly fashioned scene and knowing, always, what to leave out.

“Ever since the chemo leaked, your toes have had no feeling. So start there. This is the beginning. Eternal. Cold. A dizzying loss of balance.” These words, high on the first page of Kitchen’s mesmerizing book of pieces, announce what is to come—the mystery of living, the mystery of dying, and the transitory in-between. Kitchen is battling the cancer that will kill her. Her mind takes her back and forth, between her present day and her youth. Stories tug at her and she can’t quite find the center, and there is no room, or time, for extended passages. This is poetry as memoir-in-essays, and it will take your breath away. 

This novel is beautifully written, a gentle, faith-filled love story with characters I couldn’t help but care about from the start. Recently widowed and expecting a baby, Jessica is struggling with the tragic loss of her husband and daughter—and the secret knowledge of her late husband’s betrayal. Her new next-door neighbor, Ridley, has his own secrets, which is why he’s attempting to keep a low profile in this small-town setting. I loved watching their friendship evolve into something more and how their faith grew as they dealt with the difficulties they faced. And as a lifelong animal lover, I have to say I was especially fond of Ridley’s dog, Kris, who played the perfect little matchmaker!

There can be no question greater than “Is there life outside the Earth?”. Sara Seager places her own search for planets outside the Earth - almost 5000 planets in other solar systems have been discovered in the past three decades, including Earth-like bodies - against her own life story and struggles as a scientist weathering the unexpected loss of a spouse and the raising of her two young sons. Astronomers estimate there are billions of undiscovered planets just in our Galaxy. Seager paints our very own Earth as a bright point of community and connection in the vastness of space as she gives a first-person account of the technical challenges of seeking other planets and life elsewhere.