The 10 best memoirs of the 2020s, from Mariah Carey to Michelle Zauner
Calling all bookworms! Welcome to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter.
Calling all bookworms! Welcome to the L.A. Times Book Club newsletter. I'm Meg. I write shut up and read, a book newsletter. I'm also on BookTok.
I just flew through Amy Griffin's 'The Tell.' Her memoir — a powerful investigation of repressed memories, sexual trauma and the quest for perfection — took me less than two days to finish. Instead of walking to the gym, I took the train, just so I could have more time to read. Then I picked up Lauren Christensen's 'Firstborn.' My waking hours were at the mercy of the memoir, a moving account of the loss of her first child, Simone. I fought off sleep to keep reading and when I awoke, the book was the first thing I reached for.
I turn to the stories of other people's lives to make sense of my own. There's no memoir I won't read, except for Melania Trump's. I'm a glutton for the juicy celebrity tell-all, but there is nothing like being surprised by an unexpected or unknown author. As we approach the decade's halfway mark, I thought I'd share some of my favorite memoirs from the past 5 years, as well as the titles I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this year.
'The Meaning of Mariah Carey' is best experienced as an audiobook. Carey's memoir is an incisive deep dive into her elusive persona. Come for the reflections on her long-spanning career — and the true account of her rags-to-riches story — but stay for Mimi bursting sporadically into song.
André Leon Talley's 'The Chiffon Trenches' is also a wonderful audio experience. His distinctive voice oozes charisma and authority, and his front row seat to the fashion world provides 50 years' worth of stories—about Karl Lagerfeld, Diana Vreeland, and of course, Anna Wintour.
Dr. Michele Harper pulls back the curtain on life as an emergency room physician in her debut memoir, 'The Beauty in Breaking.' Through her patients, Harper discovers how to heal, all while contending with the racism and sexism in an overwhelmingly white and male-dominated profession.
'Minor Feelings,' Cathy Park Hong's book of essays, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Memoir. In her collection, Park Hong blends cultural criticism and memoir to examine the covert racism that is pervasive in our country. Her work is a celebration of her identity as an Asian American artist and a call to question white colonialist notions.
A member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, Elissa Washuta unpacks the commodification of Native American spirituality in 'White Magic.' Through layered essays, Washuta explores the effects of colonialism on sacred practices, as well as her heritage, and her struggles with men, drugs and alcohol — and how magic runs through it all.
When I first read 'Crying in H Mart' by Michelle Zauner, I stayed up all night to finish, and I wept the whole way through. In her debut memoir, Zauner (who performs under the alias Japanese Breakfast) celebrates mother Chongmi's life, and mourns her early death. Zauner's tender tribute — and reckoning of who she is without her mother — is transformative.
Suleika Jaouad's 'Between Two Kingdoms' is one of those memoirs that will knock the wind out of you. Jaouad's world turns upside down when she receives a leukemia diagnosis at 23. Four years later, she has survived, but is unsure of how to reenter the world, so she set out on a 100-day road trip to find out.
My copy of 'In Love' by Amy Bloom is stained with fat teardrops. After Brian Ameche, Bloom's husband, receives an Alzheimer's diagnosis, he decides to end his life on his own terms. Bloom details their journey to Switzerland, where a nonprofit offers legal suicide, and paints us full vignettes of their love story along the way.
Ina Garten's 'Be Ready When the Luck Happens' is a a four-course meal — plus dessert. Garten's words sing off the page. Reading her memoir makes you feel like you're in the kitchen with her, and Jeffrey! Getting a glimpse into Garten's life story is fascinating, and her cheerful demeanor and can-do attitude will galvanize you to chase your dreams.
'Grief Is For People' by Sloane Crosley grapples with the complexities of loss. She shared a piece of advice in an opinion piece she wrote for The Times in 2024: 'Give the grieving person a reprieve from the interrogation, the lion's share of which they will conduct themselves. Give them this for the same reason you would offer to do their dishes or run their errands: so they can get some rest.'
Honorable mentions:
(Please note: The Times may earn a commission through links to Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.)
Anyone who's anyone is going to be at The Times' Festival of Books next month, including National Book Award winner Percival Everett, 'Wicked' director Jon M. Chu and aughts pop icon Joanna 'Jojo' Levesque. Scheduled for April 26 and 27, the 30th anniversary of the annual literary festival brings more than 550 storytellers to the USC campus across seven outdoor stages and 15 indoor venues.
Itching for a mystery? Here are the four best crime novels to read right now, taking you everywhere from Alaska to Maine to Kaua'i to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is pressing pause on his press tour for his new book following his vote to move forward with Republican spending legislation last week.
In 'A Better Ending,' James Whitfield Thomson looks back on the events of summer 1974, when his younger sister Eileen died at the age of 27 from a gunshot wound to the chest. His sister's death was quickly ruled a suicide, although it bore all the hallmarks of murder.
There have been so many noteworthy memoirs released in the last five years, and the next five promise to make this a decade filled with notable works. Here are 10 due out in 2025 we can't wait to read.
See you in the stacks — or on Goodreads!
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Washington Post
10 hours ago
- Washington Post
The perfect man exists. He's called a ‘book boyfriend.'
He's respectful. He listens when she talks and remembers what she says. He would probably kill for her — and he would definitely die for her. Needless to say, he would not have to be begged to take out the trash. He is what romance readers call a 'book boyfriend.' On BookTok and Bookstagram — the thriving social media communities dominated by romance and fantasy readers — the term has become ubiquitous. 'Book boyfriend' describes characters who seem to have strode, galloped or brooded onto the page from somewhere in the recesses of the reader's deepest desires. If you have ever closed your eyes and imagined waking up in Pemberley to a shirtless Fitzwilliam Darcy asking if you would do him the honor of accompanying him on a turn about the park, you could say that you've had a book boyfriend. Simply put, a book boyfriend is a character you can't stop thinking about — and longing for — beyond the page. Conversations about book boyfriends tend to be as wry and playful as two protagonists flirting on a yacht off the coast of Italy. Readers use the term as shorthand to convey a particular reading experience. It does not describe imaginary friends. 'We know what we read is fiction,' said Jeanette Moreno, a BookToker whose running list of top book boyfriends features 49 carefully selected names. 'We're not delusional.' 'When we read a romance book, and the main character is a billionaire who takes a woman on a date and flies her to France, we know that's not real,' she said. 'We don't care that he's a billionaire or that he buys her jewelry. We care that he remembered she doesn't like pickles in her sandwich, and he takes her coffee to bed. It's the little thoughtful things that really stick with us.' Romance book sales continue to soar, bolstered in part by readers who pass around these lists of fictional men as if sharing the details of a particularly gentle dentist or a skilled massage therapist. Publishers market new romance books with the words, 'Let me introduce you to your new book boyfriend.' The phenomenon seems to speak to a new, or more heightened, way that some readers are fulfilling their emotional needs through fiction. It also seems to reflect strain in heterosexual dating dynamics: Men are from Mars, women are conducting emotional affairs with fictional astronauts. 'If you want to talk about what romance really is, it is a genre that tells us about how people want to live their lives,' said Marcela Di Blasi, an assistant professor in the Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies Department at Dartmouth who is working on a book about the politics of romantasy, the popular genre that combines romance and fantasy. 'People who don't read romance or romantasy might hear the term 'book boyfriend' and come to the same conclusions that people came to when 'Madame Bovary' came out,' she said. In Gustave Flaubert's classic 1857 novel, Emma Bovary reads so many romance novels that she 'became herself, as it were, an actual part of these imaginings,' slowly ruining her life by living as if she were a romantic heroine. But book boyfriends aren't just an escape into fantasy, Di Blasi said. They give readers a blueprint for talking to their loved ones about how they want to be treated and how they don't. Consider Malakai, the romantic lead in the 2022 novel 'Honey & Spice' by Bolu Babalola. Malakai has a 'lethal' smile, and he makes the protagonist laugh. He appreciates her mind and tells her, 'I like me better when I'm with you.' Babalola said that hearing that her character has been heralded as a book boyfriend is 'the biggest honor.' But she doesn't see the man she wrote as an exercise in fantasy. 'I want people to come away thinking that there's hope to find people like this in real life,' Babalola said. 'The things that I give a male protagonist, they are not far-fetched things: It's kindness, it's tenderness, it's seeing the woman as an individual and knowing her ambition.' Are fictional men, with their jutting cheekbones, thick wallets and bottomless wells of empathy turning women off flawed-yet-corporeal men? Female romance readers sometimes struggle with the question. Some men feel that book boyfriends have set an unreasonable ideal. Moreno said she hears from men all the time who tell women readers, 'It's so hard for us because you compared us to the book characters that you read!' But are men really suffering from comparisons to their fictional counterparts? Moreno says that in her actual dating life, few men do things as basic as offering to pay for coffee, holding a door open or texting her to ask if she got home safe. Reading about better men in novels, she said, 'makes you think, 'Wait — no, I do deserve better!'' 'Why do men get so frustrated about us having book boyfriends?' she wondered. 'Is it just because they can't step up?' Indeed, the real-life book boyfriend is not a contradiction in terms: On social media, a man who raises his girlfriend's chin to kiss her gently on the head, or a man who reads in bed, is labeled a real-life book boyfriend. And plenty of real-life couples keep lists of book boyfriends, while also staying true to their real-life boyfriends and husbands. Great book boyfriends who live in books may tell us about how we want to be loved. But they don't offer a set of instructions that can or should be followed precisely in life. Peeta Mellark of the Hunger Games series is considered an iconic book boyfriend for his yearning heart and strategic mind — so committed is he to Katniss that his love only waivers when the government injects him with a venomous mind-control substance. On the other hand, Rhysand from the mega-popular 'A Court of Thorns and Roses' by Sarah J. Maas is widely celebrated as an all-time great book boyfriend in part because he heals and protects protagonist Fayre. But he also sexually humiliates her and coerces her into spending time with him. Of course, neither the fantastical nor the problematic book boyfriend is new. In 1848, a literary magazine reported that 'New England States were visited by a distressing mental epidemic, passing under the name of the 'Jane Eyre fever.'' Boarding schoolgirls and governesses were the most likely to be afflicted, the writer reported, as well as young men who, inspired by the book's male protagonist, 'began to swagger and swear in the presence of the gentler sex, and to allude darkly to events in their lives which excused impudence and profanity.' This was, presumably, a result of women and girls expressing attraction to a made-up character who kept his wife in an attic and who, the text tells the reader repeatedly, isn't even handsome. Like today's book boyfriends, Mr. Rochester's impact seems to be a joint production of the writer's deftness and the readers' wild imaginations. As in 'Jane Eyre,' book boyfriends in the 'dark romance' genre commit acts that would send real boyfriends to prison. 'I think readers are very aware that there is a difference between a fictional man on the page written by usually a woman or femme, and an actual human man who has been shaped by society,' Di Blasi said of violent and controlling book boyfriends. 'Having these characters is a way for a lot of readers to explore those things in a safe way.' A more unique and recent trend, Di Blasi noted, is romance novels in which 'men learn from their mistakes.' In books such as those by the writer Adriana Herrera, 'they are accountable,' Di Blasi said. 'They don't wait to be educated by the women in their life.' This is quite a contrast to Jane Eyre who, 178 years ago, had to go crawling door-to-door begging for porridge and then nearly married her creepy cousin before Mr. Rochester was changed enough for the two lovers to reconcile. Recently, Babalola gave a talk about her books at a high school. A teenage girl raised her hand and said that she loved reading 'Honey & Spice,' and confessed: 'It made me not want to date these guys in high school.' If a guy wasn't going to act like her best friend, be fun to hang out with and add value to her life, what was the point? Babalola was happy to hear a teenager articulate that you don't have to just accept whatever a man offers if it isn't what you really want. 'At the crux of it, I just want women to maintain their standards,' she said. 'And here's the thing: I don't think it's necessarily 'high standards' to want a man who's kind, and loving, and tender.' Jenny Singer is a freelance writer in San Francisco.
Elle
a day ago
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That ‘We Were Liars' Plot Twist Leaves a Major Question Unanswered
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. Spoilers below. In an addendum published in the deluxe edition of E. Lockhart's 2014 bestseller We Were Liars, the author mentions The Sixth Sense as one of several inspirations for the memory loss that protagonist Cadence Sinclair endures throughout Lockhart's story. As it turns out: Cady does, indeed, see dead people. This revelation will come as little surprise to fans of the book. The plot twist is exactly what propelled We Were Liars to infamy amongst readers, especially BookTok acolytes, who pushed the title back onto the bestseller list during the pandemic. But for those watching the new Prime Video adaptation without this context, the finale is likely to land much harder. Episode 10, 'My Friends Are Lying in the Sun,' at last pulls the curtain away to reveal a horrible truth: There's a simple reason the Liars—Gat, Johnny, and Mirren—didn't call Cadence for months after the events of so-called Summer 16. They weren't alive to do so. Short answer: As Johnny later puts it, the Liars 'really didn't know how to do arson.' Long answer: By the end of the Summer 16 timeline, the Liars have uncovered enough family secrets, backstabs, and betrayals to convince them they can no longer willingly participate in the Sinclair legacy. They decide they want to make a statement. They want to prove the family's obsession with inheritance is fickle, cruel, and unjustified. They want to, literally, burn it all down. They decide to set Clairmont—the main house on Beechwood Island—ablaze. (It's worth mentioning that they are also a little drunk.) As they wipe the wood floors with gasoline and craft Molotov cocktails on the gleaming marble countertops, they execute a reckless plan. Gat takes up his position at the boat station. Mirren turns her mother's bedroom into a tinderbox, while Johnny tackles the attic and Cadence the downstairs. At midnight, they strike their matches, but both Johnny and Mirren get distracted: Johnny by a picture of their grandfather, Harris, and Mirren by a painting in her mother's bedroom. By the time they attempt to run out of their rooms, the smoke has become too thick for them to see where they're going. Meanwhile, Cady successfully escapes the house, only to go charging back when she hears her family's golden retrievers whining from inside. The Liars have forgotten that Cady's mother locked the dogs in Clairmont to keep them calm during the evening's planned fireworks. By the time Cady reaches the goldens, everything around her is burning. 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Cady interacts with each Liar once more after learning their fates: with Johnny, who admits his own fear of hell but believes Cady will spend the rest of her life doing good things to earn a tier in heaven; with Mirren, who wishes they would have 'let themselves be messy sometimes' so that they 'actually could have seen each other'; and with Gat, who isn't sure if he's 'real' but knows he loves her still. The ghosts only finally disappear after all four Liars jump off the dock together one last time. Cady's grandfather, Harris, has eyed Cady as the next heir of the Sinclair empire. When she rejects his gift—her grandmother's black pearls—she thereby rejects his symbolic passing of the baton. Harris decides, then, to threaten her. He reveals that a Time reporter will soon arrive on the island to interview him about his legacy. 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(That book indeed centers Carrie and her sisters as teenagers on Beechwood.) Still, there's no guarantee yet whether Prime Video will end up renewing the series. For now, Johnny will just have to wait.
Newsweek
2 days ago
- Newsweek
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