Today’s Monday contest celebrates the memoir! We’re giving away five personal stories that caught our attention over the past few months. From the story of a twisted family (The Orchard) to the ups and downs of parenting (Bloom and Immortal Bird), to the heyday of Madison Avenue (Mad Women), to the rigors of ruling a kingdom (King Peggy), these are life stories you can get lost in.
TO ENTER: Comment on this post with the title of your favorite memoir.
CONTEST DETAILS: One winner will be chosen by random.org from among entries received by 5 pm CST on Friday, May 11. The winner will receive the five books listed above. Prize must be shipped to a North American address, and Rhode Island residents are not eligible. (Full contest rules here.) Good luck!
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ETA: Congratulations to our winner, Laura! She loved Blood, Bones and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton.
Thank you to all who entered. Contest is now closed.
Not a genre I read frequently, much to my best friend’s distress. She loves memoirs. I am looking forward to reading Bloom as I have heard very good things about it.
“My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan”
Awesome book! The Lady can really dish the dirt!
Thanks, must read this one.
“Just Kids” by Patti Smith
Absolutely gorgeous writing!
I love memoirs!
I just recently finished Paris in Love, by Eloisa James, and loved it.
My favorite is Angela’s Ashes.
My favorite is “Mean Little Deaf Queer”!
Memoirs of a Geisha seems appropriate – and an all time favorite.
So many to choose from! !!! I loved All Over But The Shouting by Rick Bragg and An Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krause Rosenthal.
My favorite memoirs are a pair by Beverly Clearly: A Girl From Yamhill and My Own Two Feet.
Memoir is my favorite genre. I have enjoyed Half Broke Horses and others by Jeannette Walls, Rolling Pennies in the Dark by Doug MacKinnon, No Biking in the House without a Helmet by Melissa Greene, and Alexandra Fuller’s stories of her family life in Africa among others. Too hard to pick a favorite.
A Stolen Life Jaycee Dugar
It’s Not about the Bike, Lance Armstrong
Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls….or Angela’s Ashes.
The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer, but also loved Lit by Mary Karr.
There are a ton of memoirs I love, so I willl list my most recent favorite. I absolutely loved Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
Hit by a Farm by Catherine Friend is my favorite because it made me laugh out loud! Thanks for a great giveaway!
I have read The Orchard and found it unnerving but wonderful. I also really liked And I Shall Have Some Peace There by Margaret Roach.
Augusten Burroughs is one of my favorite writers: Running With Scissors and Dry are two hilarious, moving accounts of his life.
I just finished Paris in Love by Eloisa James. It made me feel like I was there.
Elizabeth McCracken’s powerfully sad An Exact Replica of A Figment of My Imagination is an amazing memoir of loss. Not exactly a favorite, but one of the best memoirs I’ve read. Also Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.
Angela’s Ashes was great.
“Seriously, I’m Kidding” by Ellen DeGeneres, or “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” by Portia DeRossi.
Three Weeks with My Brother by Nicholas Sparks and Micah Sparks.
I have two favorite memoirs. “The Glass Castle” by Jeanette Walls and “Wild, From lost to found on the Pacific Crest Trail”, by Cheryl Strayed. Both of these are amazing. I encourage you to read both. I find the strength in humility and truthful accounting of a painful and sometimes fantastic childhood inspiring in both memoirs.
Without a doubt, MAD WOMEN!!!
“All That Is Bitter and Sweet,” by Ashley Judd
“From This Moment On,” by Shania Twain
The Glass Castle by Jeannete Walls, one of my favorites. A children hood of hopes and dreams and dread and sadness, but a very good read for all of us.
So many great ones…Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls & The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr- both so well written!
Two memoirs that touched me are “Life is So Good” by George Dawson and “365 Thank Yous: The Year a Simple Act of Daily Gratitude Changed My Life” by John Kralik. Outstanding books!
All of these books look well worth a read!
Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors. Though Keith Richards recent autobiography is a close second.
The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels was a fun read.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir: Jeannette Walls Such a good book of overcoming the odds of life/family.
I love memoirs. Some of my favorites: The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Lucky: A Memoir by Alice Sebold; Lit: A Memoir by Mary Karr. I could go on and on!
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
well, I am now reading “A Natural Woman” by Carole King-and it may become my new favorite! love it so far.
Pretty much anything by David Sedaris. If I have to pick one, I’d go with Me Talk Pretty One Day.
Memoirs are my favorite genre – too hard to list just one so here are a few I’ve loved that I’ve read lately – some hysterically funny, some devastatingly sad and some simply moving or thought provoking…
The Mighty Queens of Freeville by Amy Dickinson
Notes from the Underwire by Quinn Cummings
Cowboy and Wills by Monica Moriarty (keep Kleenex handy)
Drunkard by Neil Steinberg
The Unlikely Disciple by Kevin Roose
Laughing without An Accent by Firoozeh Dumas
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma
The Liars’ Club – Mary Karr
My Life In France – Julia Child
My Life in Orange – Tim Guest
My favorite memoir ~ The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer is one of my favorites.
I loved “Eat, Pray, Love.” Now I’m devouring travel memoirs.
Lit by Mary Karr is one of my favorite memoirs.
Paris in Love by Eloisa James
The glass castle
We read memoirs in our book group every month and really enjoy them.
The Invisible Wall by Harry Bernstein. Everyone I recommend it to thanks me.
The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
My favorite memoir so far was by Rita Hayworth, co- written with much love and compassion by her daughter Princess Yasmin. You will learn so much about her, nothing like you assume from her movies.
There are so many memoirs I love! The Glass Castle, Wild, Angela’s Ashes, and on and on…
Not your typical memoir, but love The Art of Racing in the Rain, my life as a dog! I have too many others that I like to mention.
So far this year… The Glass Castle!
I love reading about other people’s lives. I just read Wild by Cheryl Strayed about her trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. Wonderful!
Driving with Dead People by Monica Holloway
My favorite is “No More Words” a moving and compassionate memoir by Reeve Lindberg of the final seventeen months of her mother’s life. A must read!
To narrow it down to just one memoir is impossible. All the books by Dave Pelzer (A Child Called ‘It’ and others) have stuck with me the most. Absolutely heartbreaking!! Angela’s Ashes, Running with Scissors are two others I think of.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. How the majority of the children in her family turned out to be “normal” adults is a wonder!
i like memoirs too
Memoirs are a new genre for me and I have really enjoyed “Late for Tea ate the Deer Palace” by Tamara Chalabi. Fascinating story of one family in Iraq for the last 100 years or so. A good history lesson as well about that troubled country.
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
These all look good. The Glass Castle is one of my all-time favorites.
I loved all three of Mary Karr’s memoirs:
The Liars’ Club
Cherry
Lit
My favorite memoir of all time is Angela’s Ashes, with a close second being The Glass Castle.
Laura Bush’s Spoken from the Heart. Though we don’t share the same general ideological opinions, I loved her narrative and the initiation of the National Book Festival.
My favorite genre–loved Glass Castle; Eat, Pray, Love and am reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
My absolute favorite is probably Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted, though I can’t talk about memoirs without bringing up Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s I’m Not Myself These Days as well. Hornbacher’s is amazingly written, but Kilmer-Purcell’s is fantastically hilarious.
I loved ‘The Soloist’. I also loved ‘My Year with Eleanor’.
Memoirs are awesome.
Katherine Graham’s Personal History
My favorite memoir is The Long Hard Road Out of Hell by Marilyn Manson.
I’m a Stranger Here Myself by Bill Bryson is one of my favorites and really hilarious.
There are so many great ones but I’ll go with “All Over But The Shoutin’” by Rick Bragg.
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – and the sequels.
I really like “Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamott. Her thoughts and words are beautiful.
“Autobiography of a Face” by Lucy Grealy
By the Iowa sea By Joe Blair.
Jeannette Walls
It’s tough to pick a favorite, but Q by Quincy Jones was the first one to come to mind. It’s not your typical celebrity memoir. He reveals himself warts and all and even includes a chapter written by his exwife, actress Peggy Lipton.
Safe passage by Ida Cook.
Thank you for offering this wonderful prize. My favorite memoir in recent years was Patti Smith’s award-winning Just Kids.
See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody by Bob Mould and Michael Azerrad – amazing book!
I read “Season to Taste” several months ago and loved it!
I loved all above but my favorite is, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,by Maya Angelou,she has become more than she ever dreamed…we can always dream,they do come true…Happy Mother’s Day To all Mothers
I loved In Revere, In Those Days by Roland Merullo.
Probably my favorite would be My Life In France by Julia Child!
Wild by Cheryl Strayed,this was so interesting to me,wishing I were with her it sounded so good…
I loved Expecting Adam by Martha Beck. More recently I enjoyed
By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair.
Surprised by Joy, by C.S. Lewis.
Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady- Florence King
I enjoyed reading Half-Broke Horses very much as I am from West Texas which is so very much like the environment of the book.
Glass Castle by Jeanette Wells.
How can I pick just one?? I looooove memoirs. So I’ll go with a sentimental favorite – James Herriot’s “All Creatures Great And Small” which I loved growing up.
THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeanette Walls has been my favorite so far!
My favorite memoir is the powerful I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (followed closely by Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes).
The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
“Drifting on a Headwind” by Jim Harlan was definitely an exciting travel memoir that chronicle’s the author’s adventures around the world over the last 30 years. It was a really fun and interesting book! I love living vicariously through others, especially if it takes me around the world.
http://uncommonadventurespress.com/
A good memoir is hard to beat. Loved The Tender Bar by JR Moehringer.
Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls also Half-Broke Horses
Love memoirs–my second-best genre after historical fiction!
2 of my all time favorites are Glass Castles by Jeanette Walls & Change me into Zeus’ Daughter by Barbara Robbinette Moss – 2 fabulous inspiring stories of women who overcame against all odds – I LOVE memoirs!
Stitches by David Small –amazing, dramatic, powerful graphic memoir
My favorite has to be Angela’s Ashes.
Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
All Over But the Shoutin’, Rick Bragg
I love memoirs! My new favorite is Guts, by Kristen Johnston.
I loved All that is Bitter and Sweet by Ashley Judd and of course
My Life in France by Julia Child who was a very complex character!
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