100 books like The Wide Circumference of Love

I was a new mother when I read this Alzheimer’s memoir and immediately felt that I’d found a friend. Elizabeth Cohen is funny, lyrical, and sometimes (understandably) frustrated as she takes on the bruising balance of managing a career while simultaneously caring for her aging father and her young daughter. The book is a testimony to the healing power of story and provided a valuable model to me as I sought to make sense of my own family experience by committing my memories to the page.

The title poem in this collection, (made from lines spoken by the poet’s mother,) manages to embody both caregiver and loved one as Constantine gives gentle structure to a string of seemingly disconnected utterances. Each poem in the book explores themes of loss, memory, and family through a different lens, creating an almost kaleidoscopic vision of the world. The collection is a rumination, a celebration, and a beautiful example of how poetry can expand our perspectives and teach us to speak and hear new rhythms.  

Akin to peering into the pages of a private journal, The Authenticity Experiment, is an unvarnished reaction to a series of heartbreaking losses. Tired of the way social media has forced us to create a relentlessly curated and cheerful version of ourselves, de Gutes presents a museum of true emotion. The consecutive deaths of her mother, a dear friend, and a beloved mentor move de Gutes to map her own identity around the absence of three critical landmarks. Musing on perfectionism, guilt, joy, love, and success, de Gutes finds the route to self-compassion is a long and winding one. We readers are lucky enough to be able to walk beside her.

This was one of the books (along with Anthony Doerr’s The Shell Collector) that inspired me to pursue fiction writing rather than poetry.

For the longest time, poetry was my preferred genre, and while I had dabbled in writing fiction, I struggled. It wasn’t until reading The Girl in the Flammable Skirt near the end of my undergrad that I realized fiction doesn’t have to be straight realism—it can be magical, strange, symbolic, weird, fabulist, dreamlike.

Two of Bender’s stories that had the most impact on me were “The Rememberer,” where the narrator’s lover experiences reverse evolution,” and “Drunken Mimi,” a love story between an imp and a mermaid. Maybe not coincidentally, my book also contains a story about a mermaid. 

As a young Black and West Indian academic and, importantly, an avid early Twitter user, I finally saw myself in the world of nonfiction works about technology when I first read this book.

Before I even got through the introduction, I dog-eared every other page and ran out of room in the margins for my notes (most of which included an embarrassing number of exclamation points on my part). Digital Black Feminism’s wit and historical heft weaves through multi-generational negotiations with Black feminism and beautifully writes Black women’s contributions back into existence.

Baldwin first opened my eyes to the possibilities of memoir. When English teachers held up fiction as the literary ideal, I was drawn to Baldwin’s essays instead. I was a New Yorker, living not far from the author’s Harlem, and growing up at the time of the civil rights movement. Baldwin was writing autobiographical non-fiction that, knitted together individual temperament and social history. “I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here,” he wrote in Nobody Knows My Name. I read that paragraph as the daughter of Czech Jewish immigrants, white people who had survived both Nazism and Stalinism. Baldwin’s voice was like the voices I heard at home telling stories of the Second World War. It was both compelling and trustworthy. Fifty years later, I still think so.

Today, most people know Zora Neale Hurston as a novelist, thanks to her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God. But she was also an accomplished folklorist, anthropologist, playwright, and essayist. And yet, by the late 1930s, she was broke, and she found work with both the Federal Theater Project and Federal Writers’ Project. This book collects Hurston’s writing for the FWP in her home state of Florida, along with an incisive essay by Pamela Bordelon. The sheer variety of material on display here wasn’t unusual for the FWP: you’ll find essayistic meditations on folklife and art, collections of tall tales and children’s songs, and sketches of labor in the turpentine camps and citrus groves—as well as a chilling report on a racist massacre in Ocoee. 

Childress’s novel is a compilation of short pieces originally published serially in two different Black-owned newspapers. In each story, Mildred, a Black domestic worker in New York City, recounts to her friend, Marge, the humorous, infuriating, and all too familiar experiences of working for various white families across the city. She also describes her refusal to remain silent in the face of white employers’ micro-aggressions, outright venom, and fantasies that she’s their loving mammy. Childress’s stories were a powerful salve to the Black household workers and others who first read them in a newspaper. Most of them daily confronted similar situations and worse, but lacked the safety or resources to resist in the same direct ways. 

The gold standard of family sagas. A treasure trove of oral history, indomitable spirit, narrative genius, and breathtaking empathy even for those who might not deserve it. A spellbinding combination of scenery, history, dialogue, emotion, and suspense.

The chapter about the ocean crossing aboard the slave ship shook me physically yet held me firmly in place, for I knew I might never experience literature as muscular as this again.

I’ve always been an avid reader despite not having peer-aged characters who resembled or represented me when I was a child. Fast forward to when my children were little: suddenly, there existed a plethora of African-American children’s literature. With pure delight, I indulged my little ones in magnificent books featuring characters that reflected them. Want to know a secret? I read those books for myself as well as for them. Recently, when finding a young African American girl at the center of Looking for Hope, I felt a delightful connection with my inner child. Make no mistakes. The young protagonist, Hannah “Mouse” Maynard, endures a horrific life event that alters her existence, interrupts her innocence, and thrusts her into a perilous, mature journey that fails to diminish her abiding sweetness.