A comprehensive guide to: non-fiction books.

I find reading non-fiction to be a completely different experience from reading fiction. I read it much slower, and I have to really be interested in the topic or I just can’t do it. I often read at the end of the day or at times when I’m stressed out, and in those cases I am looking for something fun and fluffy that I don’t have to concentrate that hard on. So if I’m going for a non-fiction book, it has to be something I really want to read.

I love memoirs. I have spent most of my life surrounded by people whose life circumstances weren’t that different from mine, and I have learned so much from just reading stories about people’s lives that are different from my own. I also read a lot about feminism, criminal justice, religion, and politics.

In the past year I have branched out and started listening to audio books. I really enjoy them! I find this to be a great way to consume a non-fiction book that you would maybe have a hard time concentrating on. I think this is a particularly great way to read a memoir, because many of them are read by the author.

Here’s a list of all the non-fiction I’ve read in the past few years that I recommend. Anything I listened to on audio is noted with a *.

If you want a memoir:

• Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner*: This is a memoir about her mother’s illness and eventual death. It’s pretty graphic and very sad, but it’s very well written.

• Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton*: This is the most relatable memoir I’ve ever read. She writes about her experiences in her 20s with dating and just generally being messy, but the reason I loved this so much is because of how she writes about her friendships with women. This is so lovey, so meaningful, I loved it so much. Also listened to and loved Dear Dolly, a compilation of her advice columns.

• Educated by Tara Westover: This was extremely popular, and its for a good reason. This is an incredible memoir about Tara’s childhood growing up with survivalist parents in the mountains in Idaho. This is an extraordinary memoir.

• Hunger, A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay: Roxane writes about her body, being fat, her relationship with food, and her family in this really great memoir. Content warning for sexual assault.

• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado*: Exquisite memoir about the author’s experience in a queer, abusive relationship. This is the type of writing that makes me made because it is so, so good.

• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson: Everyone, everyone, everyone should read this book. Bryan Stevenson is a national hero. He started the Equal Justice Initiative and is one of the leading anti-death penalty advocates in the the country. I have learned so much about racial justice from reading and watching his work. This book tells his story of starting EJI and several of the cases he has taken on over the years.

• Know My Name by Chanel Miller: This is an absolutely stunning memoir, one of the best I have ever read. Chanel is the woman who was sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, and this book follows her from the night it happened, through the trial, and her life afterwards. She also talks a lot about her family and her childhood. This is astonishingly well written, an incredibly moving reclamation of her autonomy and power. I wish everyone would read this book.

• Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive by Stephanie Land*: Stephanie’s story of working as a house cleaner trying to make ends meet while being a single mother trying to leave an abusive relationship. A deeply painful portrait of what it is like to live in poverty, and I wish I could make everyone who doesn’t support government assistance programs read it. The show based on it, on Netflix, is also excellent.

• Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed by Lori Gottlieb: This is both about Lori’s experience with therapy and her experience as a therapist. I found it so interesting, and a great portrayal of how helpful therapy can be for anyone and everyone.

• One in a Millennial by Kate Kennedy*: Not quite a memoir, but a collection of personal essays about girlhood in the early 2000s and 2010s. One thing I really appreciate about Kate is how frankly and honestly she has spoken about struggling to decide whether or not she wanted to have kids over the past few years. I wish more people would talk about this choice publicly, because it’s so often presented as black and white and think there are probably a lot of women, particularly millennial women, who are somewhere in the grey area.

• Solito by Javier Zamora*: This is a memoir about the author’s experience at nine years old, migrating from a small town in El Salvador to the US. He travels with a group of strangers, including a coyote his parents have paid to lead the group, and the trip that is supposed to take two weeks ends up taking two months.

• Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford*: Excellent memoir about Ashley’s life growing up with a father who was incarcerated. She talks about how it affected her whole family, about how finding out why her father was incarcerated affected her, and about what happened when he finally got out of prison. Very good.

• The Sound of Gravel by Ruth Wariner: RIVETING memoir about Ruth’s life growing up in a Fundamentalist Mormon polygamist community (important to be clear that this is very different from mainstream mormonism). Similar to Educated, and I think just as good.

• Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope by Megan Phelps-Roper: Megan chronicles her life growing up in the Westboro Baptist Church, a religion she so staunchly believed in that she ran their social media accounts. Conversations with people on the internet made her come to realize the hypocrisies within the church, and she eventually decided to leave with one of her sisters, effectively severing herself from her family.

If you want a celebrity memoir:

If I am being honest, these get graded on a bit of a curve. I am here for the gossip. But I find them so entertaining!

• A Heart That Works by Rob Delaney*: This is about his son Henry, who was diagnosed and eventually died from brain cancer when he was only two. This is deeply sad but also so full of love.

• Becoming by Michelle Obama: I mean. Obviously. This is not just about politics, but about Michelle’s whole life. I loved it.

• Going There by Katie Couric*: This was riveting! I was making up chores around my house so I could keep listening. She talks about her first husband’s battle with cancer, her career in journalism, and a lot of gossip. There’s a whole section about Matt Lauer. The audiobook is really well done and uses clips from the actual news stories she is talking about.

• I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy*: Extremely bleak but also very funny memoir about McCurdy’s relationship with her abusive mother. Trigger warnings for eating disorders, sexual abuse, and whole bunch of dark stuff. This one is actually very, very good. One of the best memoirs I’ve ever read.

• Mean Baby by Selma Blair*: This one is very well written. Wouldn’t have called myself a big Selma Blair fan but this is very compelling. She writes about her career and her MS diagnosis, among other stories from her life. Very moving.

• Open Book by Jessica Simpson*: This is the celebrity memoir that convinced me that celebrity memoirs can be good. It has so much good gossip and is so honest and vulnerable.

• Pageboy by Elliot Page*: This is a very well written memoir. It is so vulnerable and I really admire him for writing this. I did not love that it is not written in chronological order, and that often made it hard for me to follow. Every time a new chapter started it took me a minute to figure out what phase of his life he was talking about. Still worth reading though.

• Paris: The Memoir by Paris Hilton*: I am being so serious when I say this was so good. Her life story is so interesting and she has been through a lot.

• Spare by Prince Harry: I think this is worth reading only if you are interested in what it was like to grow up in the Royal Family. There is a lot of gossip, he does talk about everything that happened after he met Meghan, but it’s not some salacious take down of the monarchy. You need to actually want to learn about him and his life for this to be interesting.

• The Woman in Me by Britney Spears*: It’s really good. It’s quite short (the audiobook is only five hours!) and I feel like there’s so much more for her to say, but what she does say here is shocking and sad and really powerful. The people who come out of this looking the worst are obviously her dad, but also Justin Timberlake and her sister. Michelle Williams read the audiobook and does an incredible job.

A bunch of random topics:

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou: This is the definitive book on Theranos, written by the reporter who broke the story. There are some passages in here that get deep into the science, which was not what I was here for, but for the most part this is compulsively readable and a wild story.

• Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow: I loved this so much. It’s sort of a memoir about Ann and Aminatou’s decade long friendship, but its also just about friendship in general and how our society doesn’t value these relationships as much as romantic ones.

• Burn it Down by Maureen Ryan*: Maureen Ryan has been a television critic for decades, and this book is basically about all the ways in which the industry is just rife with abuse. Some chapters focus on specific people, some focus on specific shows, and at the end several chapters cover some ideas for what could be done to try to start to fix these problems. This is scathing and she is not afraid to name names. I learned a lot, but it is quite heavy at times.

• Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow: A recounting of the year that Ronan spent trying to publish an article on Harvey Weinstein and his abuses. This is a crazy story, and I flew through this book.

• Cultish by Amanda Montell: This is all about cults and the language that they use (Amanda is a linguist). It covers everything from violent cults that we all know about, like Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, to multilevel marketing companies and boutique exercise brands like Soul Cycle and CrossFit. It was so interesting to see all the ways the language these different groups use is connected.

• Dopesick by Beth Macy: A good companion read to Empire of Pain, this book tells the story of the opioid epidemic through the lives of the people who have been affected by it. Very sad, but again, I think its important.

• Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe: A very comprehensive history of the Sackler family, who created Purdue Pharma, which created OxyContin, and then lied about the addictiveness of the drug and started the opioid epidemic. This is infuriating, but I think very important.

• Extremely Online by Taylor Lorenz*: Chronicles the rise of the internet, specifically social media and influencers. It starts in the earliest days, and goes in depth into all the major online platforms from the past two decades. Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, Vine, etc. And she explains how people started making money from content creation, how the companies didn’t really know what to do with that, and how influencer culture has become what it is today.

• I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way Through the TV Revolution by Emily Nussbaum: Emily wrote the television column at the New Yorker for years, and this is a compilation of some of her old columns and newer essays. I have always appreciated how she takes television seriously, and vehemently argues against the idea that watching television is a waste of time.

• Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears by Michael Schulman*: A very thorough exploration of the history of The Oscars, starting from the 1930s all the way to today. I found the earliest years a little boring but I was very into it once I got to the 1950s. I learned a lot about the different people who got blacklisted for being communist sympathizers, which was super interesting. It gets into Spielberg and Mirimax and many other influential figures, and there’s a whole section about La La Land and Moonlight.

• Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond*: This is a searing, scathing examination of poverty in America and a consideration of why the number of people living in poverty in this country hasn’t really changed in decades as the rich have only gotten richer.

• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe: Absolutely fascinating book about The Troubles, a period of conflict in Ireland in the 1970s. I learned so much from this, and Patrick Radden Keefe has a talent for writing deeply researched books that read like novels.

• To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger, and Hope by Jeanne Marie Laskas: I loved this book. It’s about how the Obama Administration dealt with constituent mail, and features a lot of real letters sent to him throughout his presidency. It’s so good.

• Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino: Jia is one of my favorite writers and I really liked this essay collection. She writes about such interesting issues— drugs, religion, the internet, celebrity culture, etc. I love her perspective and she is just such a good writer.

• What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat by Aubrey Gordon: Excellent book that I wish I could force everyone to read. She writes about being a fat person and our society’s biases against fat people. I also listened to and recommend her second book, “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People.

Crime/Criminal Justice/Psychology:

• Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis: A foundational text of the prison abolition movement and a really great place to start if you are interested in these issues.

• I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara: This chronicles Michelle’s obsession with the East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer and recounts the case, his many crimes, and the investigations that took place while trying to find him. Michelle died before they found him, and before the book was finished, so her research partner and her husband, Patton Oswalt, finished the book.

• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann*: In 1920s Oklahoma, many Osage people became rich after oil was discovered on their land. Then, white men schemed to murder a lot of them for their money.

• The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson: Just a really interesting book about psychopathy, how to identify a psychopath, what being a psychopath actually means, etc.

• Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe*: This is about our society’s obsession with true crime, explained through four true stories about women and popular crime obsessions.

• So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson: This is SO interesting. Talks about a bunch of different instances of public shaming, how the internet has made this more common, and how it can affect a person’s life.

• The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule: Probably the most famous true crime book ever written, this book is the insane story of how Ann was coworkers with Ted Bundy while he was killing people, and she was also the journalist assigned to cover the story of all of the murders for the newspaper she worked at. This is wild.

• Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv*: Rachel Aviv is one of my favorite working journalists, she’s a staff writer at The New Yorker and everything she publishes is an automatic click for me (I think about this article all the time). In this book she tells the stories of several different people who have struggled with mental illness, and its very very good.

• Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer: About the foundations of Mormonism, fundamentalists Mormons, and murder in Utah in the 1980s.

• We Do This ‘til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba: This essay collection is a very good introduction to prison and police abolition. Mariame Kaba is one of the leading activists on this issue and this collection is very approachable if you are new to these ideas.

Race and Feminism:

• Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay: An essay collection full of cultural criticism and discussion of issues in feminism. If you’ve never read something like this, I think this is probably a good one to start with.

• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson: This is as good as everyone says. Makes the argument that race is America is a caste system, like that of India or Nazi Germany. I learned so much from this.

• Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister: I will read everything Rebecca Traister writes. I really love her writing, and this book is no exception. This book chronicles how women’s anger has been a motivating force behind most significant political movements, and how women’s anger is perceived compared to men’s. Highly recommend.

• Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall: Very good essay collection all about issues of intersectional feminism. Would recommend to pretty much anyone.

• How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith*: This is an incredible book. Each chapter is about a different place that is relevant to the history of slavery in America. Clint Smith is such an extraordinary writer and I learned so much from this. I cannot recommend this highly enough, I think everyone should read this book. It provides so much history, but not in a way that feels at all boring or distant. He is so clear about why all of this information is important to understand and still relevant today, and his writing style is so personal it is impossible to do anything other than agree.

• Hysterical by Elissa Bassist: Part memoir, part cultural criticism about chronic pain and mysterious illness and the patriarchy. I found her voice very relatable.

• Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo: Again, I think Ijeoma is so good at writing about these difficult issues in a clear and concise way. This book is about how the last 200 years of American history have been dominated by mediocre white men in power, and why that is a detriment to all of us.

• Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit: Rebecca Solnit is a leading feminist writer and has been for decades. This collection includes one of her most well known essays, the one the title of the book comes from, where she was one of the first people to write about the concept of mansplaining. This is just really good.

• Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong: An excellent essay collection about Asian American identity. Hong is a poet and her writing is beautiful.

• The Right To Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan*: One of the smartest essay collections on feminism I have ever read. Great if you have read a lot of more “entry level” work on these issues and want to dig a little deeper.

• So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo: I am sure everyone has heard about this, but I really think it should just be required reading. It’s so succinct, straightforward, and really helpful.

• The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee*: Incredible book. This talks about a lot of different issues: student loans, housing, education, voting, etc., and discusses how the system is designed on a zero sum basis meant to harm people of color, but it actually hurts all of us.