Books that make you feel like inviting the writer over to dinner
Just Kids, Patti Smith
The punky rocker’s boho life in late-1960s New York with her friend Robert Mapplethorpe is honest, funny, sad and impeccably written.
Experience, Martin Amis
All that Amis does best is right here, in vivid snapshots of his life: his savage humour, his tender, mixedup feelings about his father, his lost child and his murdered cousin.
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
Graves revisits the trenches, where he befriended Wilfred Owen before being wounded. This moving memoir marks his leave-taking, both of his bitter memories and of an England where he no longer felt at home.
Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America,
Barbara Ehrenreich
After doing minimum-wage work in disguise as a waitress, cleaner, shelfstacker and so on, Ehrenreich wrote this account of being exploited in an affluent world. It’s elevated by her humanity and humour.
Instead of a Letter, Diana Athill
Athill has slowly established herself as one of our best memoirists. This look back at her life, written 20 years after a devastating heartbreak, is a model mix of clear-eyed analysis and deep, unashamed feeling.
I I Feel Feel Bad Bad AboutMy AboutMy Neck: Neck: And And Other Other Thoughts Thoughts on on Being Being aWoman, aWoman,
Nora Nora Ephron Ephron
A candid look at women and the sometimes daunting process of growing older, full of truths about tribulations of the empty nest and the other challenges of older age. Intimate, disarming and hilarious.
Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
In this travelogue, Gilbert sets out on a journey of soul-searching and self-discovery. This makes for an engaging read that recalls anguish with touching candour.
Stuart: A Life Backwards,
Alexander Masters
It’s impossible not to be beguiled, charmed and moved as Masters attempts to write the memoir of a downand-out man he befriends and to find the source of his troubles
Bad Blood, Lorna Sage
“Almost unbearably eloquent” was how a reviewer from the Guardian described Sage’s memoir when it came out. The power of this tale of the stifling effect of her Welsh family on the author has not dimmed.
A Heart breaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
For once, a book title that (almost) doesn’t lie. Eggers is effervescent and irrepressible as he recounts how he brings up his younger brother after both their parents die.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
Jeanette Winterson
Propulsive and gripping: the story of a young adopted girl brought up by working-class evangelist parents, and her struggles to find herself.
The Hare with Amber Eyes,
Edmund deWaal
DeWaal’s memoir of his family’s inheritance of a trove of miniature Japanese carvings, as they pass from a patron of Renoir to deWaal’s relatives killed in the Holocaust, is an impeccably intricate sculpture.