01 Wild Life: Dispatches from a Childhood of Baboons and Button-Downs
Keena Roberts grew up splitting her time between Botswana and an elite Philadelphia girls' school. In Philadelphia, she navigated the social hierarchy and her preppy classmates' expectations. In Africa, she slept in a tent, cooked over a campfire, and worried about giving elephants, lions, and hippos a wide enough berth.
Roberts details what it was like as a sensitive young girl whose unusual life was shaped by her parents' primatology careers and family travel, and she shares how she sometimes struggled to fit into either of these settings.
02 Blood: A Memoir
Moorer is a Grammy- and Academy Award- nominated singer-songwriter whose father killed her mother when Allison and her sister were young. A longtime musical storyteller, Moorer examines her youth and that pivotal tragedy, considering how it has shaped her into her adult self and how much of her identity is separate from that horrifying event.
I didn't know about Allison Moorer before her memoir began getting good reviews. Blood: A Memoir is said to read like a personal journal. The foreword was written by Allison's sister, singer and songwriter Shelby Lynne.
03 The Fixed Stars
Wizenberg is the author of A Homemade Life, a cozy home management book (which I loved with a few reservations in my early married days; my love of and time spent reading and my desire for a cleverly organized house were forces already at war).
During jury duty, Wizenberg is struck by a sudden, paralyzing desire for the female attorney on the case. She has a husband (with whom she owns restaurants) and a toddler, and none of this confusing complication was part of the plan.
Wizenberg fears that her life will unravel if she explores her complex sexuality--but she is even more terrified of what it will mean for her life if she doesn't attempt to live honestly rather than allowing traditional expectations to subsume her true identity.
Have you read some captivating memoirs lately?
The order of my library holds is dictating what I'm reading at the moment. We are still in pandemic-era no-late-fee dreamland, but the memoirs I greedily put on my holds list are due back ASAP. These three women's stories seem like they couldn't be more disparate, and I imagine the tones will be refreshingly varied too.
If you like memoirs, you might also like to take a look at the Greedy Reading List Six Illuminating Memoirs I've Read This Year.