The best memoirs of 2023 (so far)

Journalists estimate that between 1 and 3 million Uyghur people are currently being held in detention camps by the Chinese government as an act of cultural genocide. That we in the U.S. know about this is largely due to the courageous reporting of Uyghur American journalists such as Gulchehra Hoja. In her stunning memoir, A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival, Hoja recounts her childhood and education in East Turkestan, as well as her love for her family, language and culture, precious things that she has had to leave behind as an activist in exile in the U.S.

Located in the northwestern corner of mainland China, East Turkestan is the homeland of the primarily Muslim Uyghur, whose culture is rich with ancestral traditions in music and dance. Coming of age in an educated and musical family, Hoja trained as a dancer before turning to acting. She produced and hosted the first Uyghur language children’s TV show, gradually becoming aware of the increasing censorship and control the Chinese government exerted over both Uyghur people and the media. A trip to Europe in 2001, and a first glimpse of an uncensored internet, led Hoja to immigrate to the United States, where her journalistic skills quickly landed her a position at Radio Free Asia.

Hoja’s exile in the U.S. and persistence in reporting on the suppression of the Uyghur people by the Chinese government has resulted in grave consequences for her family back home. A Stone Is Most Precious Where It Belongs dramatizes the violation of Uyghur human rights by grounding the political in the personal. Family and friendship are as much a part of Hoja’s story as the larger national and political context, reminding readers that every missing Uyghur is a person with a story of their own.

Uyghur American journalist Gulchehra Hoja’s stunning memoir recounts her love for her family and homeland, both of which she had to leave behind.

Art, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Art

All the Beauty in the World

Review by Anne Bartlett

by Anne Bartlett

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is a treasure trove of world art, with its own stately corps of guardians: the hundreds of people in blue uniforms who keep order and help perplexed visitors find the Renoirs and the restrooms. Behind their sober miens, the Met security guards are an interesting bunch. For example, there’s Joe, who fled political persecution in Togo; Emilie, a working artist with a Brooklyn studio; Mr. Haddad, who moonlights as a professor of Islamic art history; and Patrick Bringley, who has written a lovely book about all of them and their unusual workplace called All the Beauty in the World.

After college, Bringley had a promising job at The New Yorker magazine. Then his adored older brother, Tom, was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Emotionally gutted by Tom’s death, Bringley realized he needed a different path while he healed. So he applied for “the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew.”

Bringley liked working at the Met so much that he stayed for 10 years. A lifelong museum lover, he reveled in his daily proximity to masterpieces, formed friendships and never stopped enjoying the museum’s visitors, especially the newbies. Among the book’s most delightful passages are those detailing Bringley’s encounters with harried moms looking for dinosaurs (there aren’t any, so he sent to them to the mummies instead), rambunctious school kids who want to touch everything and stunned first-timers who can barely fathom it all.

Bringley gives readers sensitive descriptions of his personal favorite artworks, as well, and directions for how to find them. Even better, he describes what’s below ground, outside the public gaze: forklifts carting around crates of priceless art, the security command center, the locker room, the craft workshops—even a real armory.

The author eventually decided to move on from the Met, but his joyous experience there still lives within him. If you’ve been to New York, there’s a good chance you’ve been one of the Met’s millions of annual visitors. If you go back, pack this memoir; you will see the museum with new eyes.

If you’ve been to New York City, there’s a good chance you’ve been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This memoir by a former museum security guard will allow you to see it with new eyes.

Family & Relationships, Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir Family & Relationships

B.F.F.

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

by Carla Jean Whitley

Christie Tate confronted her eating disorder head-on. She worked through her tendency to date men with alcoholism and even found a healthy relationship with a man she would eventually marry. This meant she’d tackled her issues, right?

Tate recounted this recovery process in the New York Times bestseller Group, but it turns out the work of healing doesn’t end at “I do.” Her fear of intimacy had improved in some areas of her life, but Tate soon realized that her friendships needed attention, too.

In B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost and Found, Tate writes about her journey toward friendship using the language of recovery and 12-step programs. Such meetings brought numerous influential women into Tate’s life, including Meredith, who pledged to work through her own friendship issues alongside Tate.

Tate had previously allowed friendships to fade whenever she moved from one life phase to the next. When Meredith came along, however, she pushed Tate to reflect on why she felt separate from others, which allowed Tate to begin recognizing patterns from her childhood. For example, Tate’s mom and sister had shared a bathroom when she was growing up, and they sat beside each other at the family dining table. Meanwhile, Tate had shared a bathroom with her father and brother, who also separated her from her mom and sister at meals.

Tate explores these memories and her adult friendships with the same vulnerability that made Group such a captivating read. She’s unafraid to share the unvarnished truth about her insecurities, such as when a friend with whom Tate felt competitive considered joining one of her therapy groups, and Tate reacted by gouging a bloody line into her own arm.

But Meredith modeled lasting friendship for Tate, even when it was uncomfortable. One memorable day after Meredith had been diagnosed with a terminal illness, Tate told Meredith she planned to write about their friendship. Meredith gave her blessing: “Tell them how we changed by holding each other’s hand as we looked honestly at ourselves. Tell how one life can alter another.”

B.F.F. is an openhearted examination of the power of friendship from people who love us exactly as we are.

In B.F.F., Christie Tate explores her adult friendships with the same vulnerability that made her first memoir, Group, such a captivating read.

LGBTQ, Memoir, Nonfiction, Religion & Spirituality

Nonfiction Religion & Spirituality Memoir LGBTQ

Hijab Butch Blues

Review by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

As an immigrant from a “rich Arab country,” Lamya H was often asked by acquaintances in the American LGBTQ+ community how she could possibly remain a practicing Muslim, given Islam’s reputation for oppressing women and queer people. Hijab Butch Blues, Lamya’s memoir, is a generous, probing and candid response to that query.

Through its 10 chapters, the memoir generally follows the arc of Lamya’s life, beginning when she was a young girl in an international Islamic school, discovering her attraction to women and sometimes feeling suicidal. She moved to New York City at 17 to attend university, feeling unsure of her sexuality and of America’s gay culture. Now in her mid-30s, she has found love, her people and a life she could not have imagined as a teenager.

What is beautiful and brilliant about Hijab Butch Blues is that in each chapter, Lamya evokes a formative moment in her life through emotional and intellectual dialogue with a story from the Quran. The first chapter, “Maryam,” centers on a narrative that Christians will recognize as a version of the story of the Virgin Mary. As a young teenager, Lamya was transfixed by it because of how a despairing Maryam considers committing suicide, just as Lamya herself had. Thoughtful and questing, Lamya continued reading and found in Maryam’s story a way forward. The year she discovered this story, she writes, is “the year I choose not to die. The year I choose to live.”

Lamya H reflects on what was gained and what was lost by writing her debut memoir under a pseudonym.

In a chapter on Allah, Lamya recounts her questions about the nature of God, which she began asking as a 6-year-old. Is God a woman? A man? A pious religious teacher told her that Allah is not a man or a woman. This was a mystery and a revelation, and it helped her in later years as her family attempted to mold her in traditionally gendered ways. She learned how important it was “for me to use the pronoun they for God,” she writes, “my God, whom I refuse to define as a man or a woman, my God who transcends gender.”

Chapter by chapter, readers will feel a growing appreciation for Lamya’s intelligence, eloquence and courage. Along the way, we learn vivid details about her life and outlook—that, for example, she was a diligent, bright student with a disruptive sense of humor; that her parents immigrated to an Arab nation from a South Asian country for better opportunities and, as a result, that she and her brother experienced bias because of their brown skin; that she was immediately uncomfortable in New York’s gay bar scene and struggled to feel “authentically gay”; that she is ambivalent about America; that she loves her parents and feels OK not coming out to them.Lamya H is a pseudonym, and her reasons for using one make sense. But even without using her real name, in Hijab Butch Blues she is observant, passionate and anything but voiceless.

Lamya H’s memoir is a generous, probing and brilliant response to the question of how she could be both a queer person and a practicing Muslim.

Memoir, Nature, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Nature Memoir

Holding Fire

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

by Becky Libourel Diamond

“We’re getting it wrong in this beautiful, ravaged place,” writes author Bryce Andrews (Down From the Mountain) in Holding Fire: A Reckoning With the American West. “Over and over, we find a lovely valley, shoot it through the ecological heart, grind its bones to dust, and pour the foundation of an edifice less interesting than what existed before.” It is his ah-ha moment in this vibrant, candid account of his experiences working as a cowboy in Montana.

Although it’s labeled as a memoir, Holding Fire also has many elements of regional nonfiction, natural history and even social science. As a result, it is structured in a fresh and unpredictable way, with each chapter opening a new window into Andrews’ thoughts, feelings and prior experiences. Framed around the inheritance of his grandfather’s gun, a Smith & Wesson revolver, each reflection focuses on a particular idea that has helped Andrews comprehend the fragility of life and inevitability of death.

As Andrews ruminates on his personal history, he dots his musings with descriptive, emotive prose. “In quiet moments all through childhood,” he writes, “I entertained a Western fantasy in which the sky’s broad dome appeared first, its sun a magnet tugging upward on my heart.” Guns were never a big part of his life until he lived and worked on a ranch, where he had to hunt and keep critters at bay. These encounters provided life lessons and new proficiencies, particularly when hunting with fellow rancher Roger, whom he calls “the lodge’s wrangler and outfitter.” But the more Andrews lived with the gun, the more it led him to realize the destruction caused by violence. He eventually forged the gun into a useful gardening tool, learning blacksmithing in the process.

Holding Fire is a meditation on the past, present and future of not only Andrews’ own life but also the lives of all mortal creatures.

Bryce Andrews’ vibrant, candid account of working as a cowboy in Montana provides a moving meditation on the fragility of life and inevitability of death.

Memoir, Nonfiction

Nonfiction Memoir

The Love You Save

Review by Catherine Hollis

by Catherine Hollis

Goldie Taylor’s absolutely stunning memoir is dedicated to “the women who made me.” Taylor’s mother, her Auntie Gerald, Auntie Killer and Grandma Alice come to shimmering life in this tough and tender book. The Love You Save depicts Black life in East St. Louis in the 1970s and ’80s, evoking Taylor’s family’s voices and experiences with cinematic detail and novelistic prose.

Taylor has a robust public role as a news correspondent at MSNBC and CNN, a journalist, an editor and a human rights advocate. These professional successes, however, are shadowed by a legacy of childhood sexual abuse. This memoir tells the whole story of Taylor’s experiences with rape and sexual violence, which were terrible for her as an individual and terrifyingly common in her community.

Taylor’s traumatic personal history ran parallel to Taylor’s adolescent accomplishments as a gifted student and public orator. Her intellectual development via public libraries and a few good teachers buoys the narrative, as a young Taylor reads James Baldwin, Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. The reader will cheer as her teachers recognize Taylor’s exceptional intelligence and grit, even as Taylor reminds us that Black excellence is often forged in the crucible of systemic racism and sexual violence.

This memoir is an important read for several reasons. It shows how complex trauma shapes a person’s life and psychology, especially someone who is a high-achieving public figure. It also shows how important public schools and libraries are as places to cultivate children’s creativity and intelligence, particularly for low-income and BIPOC children. And finally, in its portrayal of a Black family’s dynamic women, it offers a vibrant portrayal of survival and love.

Goldie Taylor’s absolutely stunning memoir depicts Black life in St. Louis, Missouri, in the 1970s and ’80s with cinematic detail and novelistic prose.