by Frank Bruni

More the gourmand than the gourmet, former New York Times food critic Bruni takes us through his love/hate relationship with food and catalogues everyone who ever fed him and what they served, every diet he went on and his fraught-even dangerous-relationship with food in this excellent memoir.

by Wendy Burden

A descendant of Cornelius Vanderbilt presents an insider's tour of America's old-money wealthy class, profiling the members of her dysfunctional family while identifying toxic factors and behaviors that have influenced their downfall.

by Dave Eggers

Amid countless digressions, Eggers relates two tales: his mostly successful, if unconventional attempt at raising his much younger brother following their parents' deaths and his years founding and then witnessing the slow demise of Might magazine. 

by Tan France

With his trademark wit, humor, and radical compassion, Tan reveals what it was like to grow up gay in a traditional South Asian family, as one of the few people of color in South Yorkshire, England. 

by Phoebe Robinson

Wouldn't it be great if life came with an instruction manual? Of course, but like access to Michael B. Jordan's house, none of us are getting any. Thankfully, Phoebe Robinson is ready to share everything she's experienced in hopes that if you can laugh at her topsy-turvy life, you can laugh at your own. 

by Tim Guest

At the age of six, Tim Guest was taken by his mother to a commune modeled on the teachings of the notorious Indian guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The Bhagwan preached an eclectic doctrine of Eastern mysticism, chaotic therapy, and sexual freedom, and enjoyed inhaling laughing gas, preaching from a dentist's chair, and collecting Rolls Royces.

by Tiffany Haddish

Haddish grew up in one of the poorest parts of South Central Los Angeles. Her mother wound up with a debilitating brain injury after surviving a car accident. Tiffany never fit in anywhere: not in the households she rotated through in the foster care system, and certainly not the nearly all white high school she had to ride the bus an hour to attend. 

by Bess Kalb

A grandmother speaks to her granddaughter from beyond the grave, telling, with candor and humor, stories from both their lives--of kinship, loyalty, tenacity, and love

by Jenny Lawson

Lawson realized that the most mortifying moments of our lives -- the ones we'd like to pretend never happened -- are in fact the ones that define us.This memoir takes readers on a hilarious journey recalling her bizarre upbringing in rural Texas, her devastatingly awkward high school years, and her relationship with her long-suffering husband, Victor. 

The Undertaker's Daughter
 

by Katherine Mayfield

This dark and sharply detailed memoir follows the activities that took place in the author's Jubilee, Kentucky, girlhood home, which also served as the Mayfield and Son Funeral Home. There, she and her family members were cast as "the ghosts of the house," even as dead bodies came and went. 

by Andrew Rannells

A heartfelt and hilarious coming-of-age memoir of a Midwestern boy surviving bad auditions, bad relationships, and some really bad highlights as he chases his dreams in New York City.

by Domenica Ruta

Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, and whose highbrow taste was at odds with her hardscrabble life. 

by Terry Ryan

Married to a man with violent tendencies and a severe drinking problem, Evelyn Ryan managed to keep her 10 children fed and housed during the 1950s and '60s by entering-and-winning-contests for rhymed jingles and advertising slogans of 25-words-or-less. 

by R. Eric Thomas

R. Eric Thomas didn't know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went--whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city--he found himself on the outside looking in.

by Tara Westover

Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag."