Books of the Teens: Top 5 Memoirs I've Read This Decade

Finally, some positive reviews for books I would recommend.

Although I would not think of myself as an avid reader of memoir, looking back over the teens, I found that I read several and that five have stuck with me over the years.  The authors form a diverse set of people, which is cool.

Best Memoirs

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, Elna Baker, 2009, read in 2011

I heard Elna Baker on an incredible live episode of the incredible Marc Maron's WTF podcast.  And that was sometime in or before 2011, for all you Johnny-come-latelies to Maron and his podcast.  That appearance came a few years after this book was published, but it made me very curious to read it.  In this memoir - yes, it's a memoir with that crazy long title - Baker details her life as a Mormon in New York City.  Baker is a standup comedienne, and the book is funny, but that's not what made it so gripping for me.  She went on to work at This American Life after publishing the book. Baker details her struggles and questions with her Mormon faith in the midst of her lively social life in New York City.  Mormonism as much as any other faith enforces social norms of behavior that are understood to manifest in a long line of "no's".  No drinking, no drugs, no sex.  And caffeine is a forbidden drug.  Baker shares incredibly frankly her hopes and fears in relation to remaining committed to her church while being pulled toward life outside of it.  The real action comes (not really spoiling here) when she meets an atheist whom she really, really likes.  Her family members definitely play their roles in her narrative a la David Sedaris; she lives with her older, more beautiful sister in New York.  Her parents sound like generous, awesome people.  I've been highly recommending this book for its honesty and page-turning narrative.


Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun, Geoffrey Canada, 1995, read in 2010

I became aware of this book long before I read it, and I can't remember exactly where I first heard about it.  I've heard Canada interviewed several different times on public radio shows and seen him speak once.  I have a total intellectual man-crush on this guy.  He approaches urban strengths and challenges with such unique insight.  The subtitle "A personal history of violence in America" gives the title its context of progression.  Canada talks about growing up in tough neighborhoods of New York City and almost reminisces about how simple violence was before most anybody could carry a handgun.  In hand to hand combat, even with a stick or a knife, violence had limits, and the herd enforced those limits.  Gun violence privileges the rogue and creates the possibility that any argument could escalate to the deadly without a moment's notice.  From this background, Canada has done an impressive amount of work in Harlem since the publication of this book with the Harlem Children's Zone to create a path out of violence and despair for today's families who live there.  A terrific read and a must-read to understand how Canada got to where he is today.

Orange is the New Black; My Year in a Women's Prison, Piper Kerman, 2010, read in 2013

With the Netflix television show being discussed at every gathering of late summer 2013 and NPR fawning over it, I heard that the book on which the show was based was really very good.  This memoir is flat out fantastic.  An unlikely prisoner, Kerman describes her experience over a year in primarily a minimum security prison with some additional time at different facilities.  She has no idea what to expect, living among women who are largely of a different class from her.  What she discovers horrifies and heartens her and her readers.  I don't want to give away too much more.  If I have a quibble, it's that she sometimes stops short of describing why certain aspects of prison life were terrible, leaving the reader to fill in the blanks.  A friend who has read the book said she turned off the TV show after five minutes because it's "too raw".   Perhaps Piper was saving her dear readers by being oblique.  My Competent Wife and I watched several seasons of the show, and I really adored the narrative gadget of flashing back to the characters' lives before prison and showing the circumstances that put them there.  We quit watching, however, when the narrative and market demands of keeping the show on the air distorted the narrative so that the Piper Kerman-based character had to keep doing implausibly stupid things in order to stay in prison.  Because it's a prison show.  I heard the last season is really fantastic.  But the book is still better.


The Long Haul; a Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road, Finn Murphy, 2017, read in 2018

I read this fantastic book in a most unusual fashion for me.  Essentially in one sitting.  We were flying back to Pittsburgh from Washington state, where we'd been on vacation.  I'd just barely started the book - I believe I was still on the introduction - when what was to be a 75-minute layover in Dallas turned into 3.5-hour lightning delay.  At the gate, I set to reading the book and found that I was gobbling up pages quickly.  The infotainment on the flight consisted of free wifi if you downloaded the American Airlines app.  By then, I was well into the book, and I just kept reading.  I finished the book in bed after we arrived home at 2:30 in the morning.  So, sort of one sitting.  It's terrific.  I heard Murphy interviewed on Fresh Air.  He confesses in the book that he's always had a crush on Terri Gross's voice and because she asks interesting guests interesting questions.  He's a long-haul mover of the high-end executive type, and he just describes how he got into that field in the first place, what it's given him, what it's barred him from, and the interesting things that have happened to him over a decades-long career.  He was basically an educated middle-class guy who decided that a job job was not going to be for him and that manual labor wasn't all bad.  I loved it.  It made the whole travel nightmare feel like a boon.  I think about and recommend this book regularly still.

 
How About Never?  Is Never Good for You?; My Life in Cartoons, Bob Mankoff, 2014, read in 2015

This book had been on my list for a while, since I'd heard Mankoff interviewed on Fresh Air in 2014.  It's very cleverly assembled.  I choose the word "assembled" advisedly because this memoir combines text and New Yorker cartoons (both accepted and rejected) and other illustrations.  Apparently, Mankoff has worked out this format on his blog.  By the time it got to book form, it was humming.  Of course, it would have been impossible to write about cartoons and what makes them funny without the visuals.  Fortunately, they didn't have to be lumped into a center section and numbered - they can just be sprinkled throughout the text.  Mankoff is funny and has thought a lot about what makes things funny, but he hasn't thought about that so much as to not be funny about it. He comes across as pretty honest in this memoir, which includes some moments of arrogance and chutzpah.  A really enjoyable read that I looked forward to picking up every time.