Why the Best Memoirs About Resilience Hit Differently Than Any Other Genre
There is a reason readers return to resilience memoirs again and again, especially during the hardest stretches of their own lives. The best memoirs about resilience are not motivational speeches dressed up as books. They are honest, often brutal accounts of people who faced something enormous — illness, failure, grief, collapse, humiliation, or profound loss — and somehow found a way to continue. What makes these books so powerful is not the triumph at the end. It is the texture of the struggle in the middle, the specific and deeply human details of what it actually feels like to fall apart and choose, slowly and imperfectly, to keep going. That experience of being seen in one's own breaking point is what keeps readers up until two in the morning with a book they cannot put down.
The genre of resilience memoirs spans an extraordinary range. Some of these books are about surviving cancer diagnoses or catastrophic accidents. Others are about losing a career, a family, a fortune, or a sense of identity. Some of the most powerful ones are about quieter collapses — the slow erosion of a person under relentless professional pressure, the grief that accumulates over years, the identity crisis that arrives when everything you built your life around suddenly stops making sense. What all of these books share is the author's willingness to sit inside the worst of it on the page, to resist the urge to rush toward the resolution, and to tell the truth about what survival actually costs. That honesty is what separates a great resilience memoir from a generic success story.
If you are searching for the best memoirs about resilience — whether you are going through something difficult yourself, looking for your next deeply compelling read, or trying to understand how human beings endure what they endure — this list is for you. These are books that do not offer easy comfort. They offer something better: genuine companionship in the dark, and the quiet proof that it is possible to come back from almost anything.
What Makes a Resilience Memoir Worth Reading?
Not every memoir about hardship earns the label of a resilience memoir. The genre has its own standard, and the bar is set by books that do something specific and difficult on the page. A true resilience memoir does not simply document suffering and then announce that the author survived. It takes the reader into the interior experience — the fear, the doubt, the moments of genuine despair — and shows how a person navigates forward even when they cannot see a clear path. The best of these books resist the neatness of a redemption arc and instead show the messy, nonlinear, profoundly unglamorous reality of rebuilding a life or a self from difficult circumstances.
What separates the great resilience memoirs from the merely good ones is specificity. The authors who write the most powerful versions of these stories do not speak in generalities about strength or hope. They give you the exact moment — the conversation in the hospital hallway, the email that arrived on a Tuesday afternoon and changed everything, the morning they woke up and realized that the life they had been living had quietly become unsustainable. That specificity is what creates the emotional resonance that readers feel in their chests when they describe a memoir as "the book that changed me." It is not the broad theme of resilience that does the work — it is the precise, irreplaceable detail of one person's experience that makes the universal visible.
The memoirs on this list were selected because they meet that standard. Each one takes a different approach to the subject — different backgrounds, different types of adversity, different outcomes — but every single one of them offers something that is genuinely difficult to find in any other genre: the lived proof that human beings are more resilient than they believe themselves to be, and that the most difficult chapters of a life can become, over time, its most defining ones.
Terminal Success by Jason Mandel
Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is one of the most distinctive resilience memoirs to emerge from the world of high finance, and it earns its place at the top of this list precisely because it refuses to tell the story readers might expect. Mandel spent years at the highest levels of Wall Street — holding senior positions at institutions including Cantor Fitzgerald and D.E. Shaw — and built what looked from the outside like an exceptional career. But the interior of that life, as he renders it on the page, tells a far more complicated story about what it costs to pursue success in environments that treat human beings as instruments of production rather than people with limits, needs, and breaking points.
What makes this memoir genuinely compelling as a resilience story is that Mandel does not frame his experience as a simple cautionary tale about Wall Street excess. Instead, he excavates something more nuanced: the psychology of someone who has internalized the belief that their worth as a person is equivalent to their output and net worth, and what it takes to dismantle that belief and rebuild an identity on more honest ground. The book is acutely observant about the culture of Wall Street — the addiction, the pressure, the competitive toxicity that becomes normalized over time — but it never lets the environment fully absorb the responsibility that belongs to the individual. That balance is what makes it read as a genuine reckoning rather than a complaint.
Readers who love memoirs about professional reinvention, burnout recovery, or the deeper questions of what a meaningful life actually looks like will find Terminal Success by Jason Mandel both challenging and deeply rewarding. It belongs on the shelf alongside the best Wall Street memoirs and the best business memoirs, but it earns a separate place in the resilience category because of how honestly it tracks the internal work of changing — not just circumstances, but one's own sense of what success is allowed to mean.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
Few memoirs have captured the imagination of readers as completely as The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, and fewer still have done so while maintaining the degree of emotional generosity that Walls brings to her extraordinary story. Growing up with parents who were, depending on the day, brilliantly inspiring or dangerously neglectful, Walls and her siblings navigated a childhood defined by poverty, constant relocation, and the particular chaos of living with adults whose visions of freedom consistently overrode their responsibilities to their children. What could easily have been a memoir of grievance becomes instead something much rarer — a book that holds complexity and contradiction, that loves its subjects even while refusing to excuse them.
Walls's resilience in this book is not the dramatic, sudden variety. It is the slow, grinding, determined kind — the resilience of a child who decides, quietly and completely, that she is going to build a different life for herself, and then actually does it. She makes her way to New York, becomes a journalist, and builds the stable, secure adulthood that her childhood so conspicuously denied her. But the book's real emotional power comes from the scenes of her childhood, rendered in prose that is both clear-eyed and luminous, and from the fact that Walls never quite leaves those scenes behind even as she moves forward. The title's promise — the glass castle her father always swore he would build for them someday — haunts the book as both an image of beauty and a symbol of everything that was perpetually promised and never delivered.
For readers who connect most strongly with memoirs about family resilience — with stories of children who find ways to survive and eventually thrive despite genuinely difficult circumstances — The Glass Castle is essential reading. It is a book about the complicated love that exists between imperfect parents and the children who must find a way to grow beyond them, and it is told with a grace that makes it both painful and profoundly hopeful at the same time.
Educated by Tara Westover
Educated by Tara Westover is the kind of memoir that readers describe as unputdownable and then immediately press into the hands of everyone they know. Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that rejected mainstream education, government institutions, and conventional medicine. She did not attend school, was not given medical care when injured, and grew up in an environment shaped by her father's increasingly extreme beliefs and her brother's violent behavior. The fact that she eventually made her way to Brigham Young University and then to Cambridge, earning a PhD in intellectual history, makes for a story of almost unbelievable transformation — but the book's power comes not from that transformation itself but from the detailed, honest rendering of what it cost.
What Westover does extraordinarily well is trace the interior conflict of someone who loves the people who have harmed them, who has been shaped by a worldview she must ultimately reject, and who experiences the process of education not as liberation but as a kind of ongoing grief. Every book she reads, every class she takes, every new framework of understanding she acquires comes with the shadow cost of moving further from the family and the identity she started with. Resilience, in Westover's account, is not a simple or triumphant thing — it is a series of difficult choices, each one requiring her to choose the self she is building over the self she was born into.
Educated belongs in any conversation about the best memoirs about resilience because it captures something that many books in this genre miss: the ambivalence of survival. Westover does not present herself as a hero, nor does she present her family as straightforward villains. She presents the truth, which is far more complicated than either of those framings, and in doing so she writes a memoir that is genuinely transformative for the reader — one that invites serious reflection on identity, knowledge, and the relationships we must sometimes leave behind in order to become ourselves.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
Paul Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon at Stanford who was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at thirty-six years old, just as he was completing his residency and preparing to begin the career he had spent the better part of a decade working toward. When Breath Becomes Air, which he wrote in the months before his death in 2015, is one of the most profound meditations on mortality, meaning, and what it means to live well that the memoir genre has ever produced. It is a book about resilience in the deepest possible sense — not the resilience of survival, but the resilience of continuing to find meaning and to act with purpose in the full knowledge that time is running out.
What gives this book its extraordinary emotional weight is the clarity of Kalanithi's prose and the depth of his intellectual engagement with the questions his diagnosis forces him to confront. He had spent his career as a doctor making decisions about life and death on behalf of his patients. Now, suddenly, he is the patient, and the frameworks he has used to understand human mortality must be applied to his own. He writes about this transition with remarkable honesty — about the fear, about the grief, about the fierce love he has for his wife and for the daughter born during his final months — and what emerges is a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a philosophical testament.
For readers searching for memoirs about resilience in the face of terminal illness, When Breath Becomes Air is an incomparable choice. It is also one of the books most likely to change the way its readers think about their own lives — about the choices they are making, the work they find meaningful, and the question of what it would mean to live well in the time they have. It is a book that demands to be read slowly and returned to again and again.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken is the story of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic runner who survived a plane crash over the Pacific during World War II, spent forty-seven days adrift on a life raft, and was then captured by the Japanese military and held as a prisoner of war for more than two years. It is, by almost any measure, one of the most extreme survival stories ever committed to the page, and Hillenbrand tells it with the propulsive momentum of a thriller and the emotional precision of the finest literary nonfiction. The result is a book that is simultaneously impossible to put down and impossible to forget.
What makes Unbroken more than a pure survival story — what elevates it into the territory of genuine resilience memoir — is the attention Hillenbrand pays to Zamperini's interior life throughout his ordeal. She traces the psychological strategies he develops to maintain his sanity and his sense of self during captivity, the relationship between his earlier athletic identity and his ability to endure extreme hardship, and the long aftermath of his experience in which he struggles with post-traumatic stress and eventually finds a path toward healing. The arc of the book is not the survival itself but the question of what it means to return from something that broken — and how a person reassembles themselves after experiences that would destroy most people.
Readers who love narrative nonfiction with the pacing of great fiction will find Unbroken one of the most gripping books they have ever read. It is the kind of memoir that makes you put it down periodically just to take a breath, and then immediately pick it up again because you cannot bear not to know what happens next. As a story of human resilience, it is genuinely extraordinary — a reminder that human beings are capable of enduring almost unimaginable things and still finding their way back to life.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his teenage son, and it is one of the most searing, intellectually courageous, and emotionally complex memoirs in recent American literature. The book is a meditation on what it means to exist in a Black body in America — the specific, daily, accumulated weight of that experience, the fear that becomes a constant companion, and the ways in which an entire system shapes and constrains the lives of people who have done nothing to invite that constraint. It is a book about resilience, but it is also a challenge to the very frameworks that resilience narratives are often built on.
What Coates does in this book that is so essential and so unusual is refuse the comforts of a redemption narrative. He does not offer the reader the relief of a neat resolution or the reassurance that things are fundamentally improving. Instead he insists on the truth of the present moment, the reality of what the world is rather than what we might wish it to be, and in doing so he writes a kind of resilience that is more demanding and more honest than the aspirational variety. His resilience is the resilience of a person who sees clearly, who does not flinch from what he sees, and who chooses to continue thinking, writing, loving, and engaging with the world anyway — not because he has been given reasons to hope, but because the alternative is a kind of death.
Between the World and Me is a book that changes its readers, and it belongs on any list of the best memoirs about resilience because it expands the category in important ways. It reminds us that resilience is not always personal and individual — it is also collective, historical, and political — and that the most powerful stories of human endurance are often the ones that refuse to separate the interior life from the social forces that shape it.
Option B by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant
Option B by Sheryl Sandberg is a memoir that emerged from one of the most sudden and devastating losses imaginable: the unexpected death of her husband, Dave Goldberg, while on a family vacation in 2015. Sandberg, then the COO of Facebook and one of the most publicly visible female executives in the world, found herself suddenly widowed with two young children, and the book she wrote — co-authored with psychologist Adam Grant — is a deeply personal account of the grief that followed and the process of learning to live inside it. It is also, because of Grant's involvement, an unusually well-researched examination of what resilience actually looks like in the aftermath of loss.
What makes Option B so valuable as a resilience memoir is its honesty about the non-linearity of grief and its resistance to the idea that resilience means bouncing back to the life you had before. The title itself comes from a phrase Sandberg used in the aftermath of her husband's death, when she was told that the person she wanted to speak at an event was not available and responded that she wanted "Option A" — her husband — but since that was not possible, she was going to "kick the shit out of Option B." That framing — of resilience as the determination to make the best possible life from the circumstances you actually have — runs through the entire book and gives it both its emotional authenticity and its practical usefulness.
Readers who are navigating their own experiences of loss, or who want to understand how human beings process grief and rebuild their lives in its aftermath, will find Option B one of the most useful and genuinely comforting books in the resilience memoir genre. It does not pretend that loss can be undone or that grief has a final destination. It says something truer and more useful: that it is possible to carry grief and still build a life of meaning and joy, and that doing so is not a betrayal of what was lost but an honoring of it.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley, is one of the foundational texts of American resilience literature, and its power has not diminished in the decades since its publication. Malcolm X's life story is one of the most dramatic transformations in the history of American public life: from a childhood shaped by racism, violence, and family dissolution, through a period of criminal activity and imprisonment, to a profound religious and intellectual awakening, and finally to his emergence as one of the most powerful and controversial voices of the civil rights era. Each chapter of his life represents a complete reinvention of self, and the book reads as a sustained meditation on what it means to keep choosing transformation over defeat.
What gives this memoir its enduring force is the intellectual honesty with which Malcolm X approaches his own story. He does not present himself as a passive victim of circumstances or as a hero beyond reproach. He looks clearly at his own choices, his own failures, his own complicity in systems that harmed him and others, and he does so with the same unflinching clarity he brought to his analysis of American society. The resilience this book documents is not the quiet, private kind — it is the resilience of a person who reinvents himself repeatedly and publicly, who is willing to change his most fundamental beliefs when the evidence demands it, and who maintains his intellectual courage even as his safety is increasingly threatened.
For readers interested in the best memoirs about resilience, personal transformation, and the relationship between individual experience and historical forces, The Autobiography of Malcolm X remains essential. It is a book that rewards rereading — one that reveals new dimensions depending on the moment in life at which it is encountered — and it stands as one of the most extraordinary accounts of a human being's capacity for growth and change ever written in the English language.
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
Trevor Noah's Born a Crime is many things at once: a memoir about growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, a love letter to his extraordinary mother, a coming-of-age story about a boy navigating the treacherous social cartographies of a system designed to exclude him, and one of the funniest books in the memoir genre despite dealing with subject matter that is genuinely dark. The title refers to the literal fact of Noah's birth: under apartheid law, his existence — born to a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father — was illegal. He entered the world as a crime, and the book traces what it means to build a life from that starting point.
What makes Born a Crime a great resilience memoir is the way Noah uses humor not as an escape from the gravity of his subject but as a means of illuminating it. He understands, as all great comic writers do, that laughter and pain are not opposites — that the most accurate account of a difficult situation often contains both at once, and that the ability to find absurdity in suffering is itself a form of resilience. The book's most affecting sections are the ones about his mother, Patricia — a woman of such ferocious faith, will, and love that she seems almost mythological, and whose own resilience in the face of poverty, violence, and systemic oppression is the emotional backbone of everything her son becomes.
Readers who want a resilience memoir that will make them laugh as well as move them deeply will find Born a Crime one of the most satisfying books in the genre. It is a book that earns every emotional note it plays — the humor never trivializes the difficulty, and the difficulty never overwhelms the joy — and it leaves its readers with a genuine sense of what it means to find one's place in a world that was not designed with your existence in mind.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Cheryl Strayed's Wild is the memoir that single-handedly made the Pacific Crest Trail famous and introduced millions of readers to the idea that physical extremity can become a vehicle for interior transformation. Strayed's life, in the years before she decided to hike eleven hundred miles of the PCT alone, had collapsed almost completely: her mother had died of cancer, her marriage had dissolved, and she had spent years numbing herself with heroin, destructive relationships, and self-isolation. She was not an experienced hiker. She had never backpacked alone. She set off on one of the most physically demanding trails in North America as a form of radical intervention in her own life — a way of giving herself something real to struggle against when the formless grief and self-destruction had become unbearable.
What Strayed captures in this memoir is the particular value of physical suffering as a clarifying force. Out on the trail, in blisters and exhaustion and fear, the noise of her interior life quieted in ways nothing else had managed. She did not hike her way to a simple resolution of her grief — her mother was still dead at the end of the trail, and the losses she had accumulated were not erased by the miles. But she emerged from the experience with a clearer sense of who she was, what she could endure, and what kind of life she wanted to build. That sense of self, hard-won and deeply earned, is the resilience the book documents.
Wild is one of the best memoirs about resilience for readers who respond to the intersection of physical narrative and interior transformation — for people who understand, or want to understand, the relationship between pushing the body and clarifying the mind. It is also a beautiful piece of nature writing, a moving account of grief, and one of the most honest depictions of the complicated relationship between self-destruction and self-discovery that the genre has produced.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart is a grief memoir and a food memoir and a coming-of-age story all at once, and it is one of the most emotionally devastating and beautifully written books in recent memory. Zauner, the musician behind Japanese Breakfast, wrote this memoir in the aftermath of her Korean mother's death from cancer, and she structures her account of grief around food — the specific dishes her mother cooked, the meals they shared, the Korean grocery stores and restaurants that become, after her mother's death, the only remaining connection to a heritage that now exists only through her own body and memory. The result is a memoir that is simultaneously intimate and universal, specific and encompassing.
The resilience this book documents is the resilience of someone who has lost not just a parent but a primary source of cultural identity — who must figure out how to be herself, how to carry forward the parts of her inheritance that mattered most, without the person who was their living embodiment. Zauner does not rush through her grief or tie it up neatly. She sits inside it on the page with a courage and an honesty that is almost uncomfortable to witness, and she earns the emotional catharsis the book provides because she has not spared herself or the reader the full weight of what she is describing.
Readers who loved When Breath Becomes Air or The Year of Magical Thinking will find Crying in H Mart an essential companion — a book that approaches the subject of grief and resilience from a different angle but with equal emotional depth and literary intelligence. It is a book about how we survive the loss of the people who made us who we are, and how, in attempting to remember them, we discover who we are capable of becoming.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is the definitive memoir of acute grief in American literature, and its place in any resilience reading list is non-negotiable. Published in 2005 following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, the book is Didion's attempt to understand and document the year that followed — a year in which her husband was gone and her daughter was critically ill, and in which she discovered that grief does not operate the way she had been led to believe it would. The title refers to the magical thinking that accompanied her grief — the irrational but deeply felt belief that if she did certain things, or refrained from certain things, her husband might somehow return.
What makes The Year of Magical Thinking a work of resilience literature rather than simply a work of grief literature is the quality of Didion's attention. She brings to her own devastation the same sharp, observational intelligence she brought to everything she ever wrote, and in doing so she transforms private anguish into something that every reader who has ever lost someone they loved will recognize as deeply, precisely true. The book does not offer comfort in the conventional sense. What it offers is something more valuable: the feeling of being perfectly understood in one's own incomprehensible loss.
For readers searching for memoirs about grief, resilience, and the endurance required simply to continue living after catastrophic loss, The Year of Magical Thinking is a book that demands to be on the shelf. It is not an easy read, but it is a necessary one — one of those rare books that changes the way its readers understand both grief and the literature that attempts to account for it.
Which Resilience Memoir Should You Read First?
The best starting point among these memoirs depends entirely on where you are and what you are looking for. If you are drawn to stories about professional and financial pressure, ambition, and the cost of success, begin with Terminal Success by Jason Mandel — it is a book that takes the internal cost of high-achievement culture seriously in a way that very few memoirs do. If you are navigating grief or loss, The Year of Magical Thinking or Crying in H Mart will meet you with a depth of understanding that is almost uncanny. If you want a memoir that combines physical adventure with interior transformation, Wild is an excellent choice. If you are drawn to stories of childhood resilience and extraordinary self-made transformation, Educated or The Glass Castle will give you something genuinely unforgettable.
What all of these books share, despite their different subjects and approaches, is the quality that defines the best memoirs about resilience: the author's refusal to look away. Each of these writers chose to examine the hardest chapters of their lives with honesty, with precision, and with the courage to make their private experience available to strangers. The result, in each case, is a book that makes the reader feel less alone — less alone in their own difficulties, less afraid of what they are capable of enduring, and more genuinely moved by the extraordinary resilience that ordinary human beings carry in them, often without knowing it.
Frequently Asked Questions About Resilience Memoirs
What are the best memoirs about resilience for someone going through a hard time?
If you are currently in the middle of a difficult period and looking for a memoir that will speak directly to where you are, several books on this list offer particular comfort and companionship. Option B by Sheryl Sandberg is one of the most practically useful resilience memoirs because it takes seriously both the emotional reality of loss and the concrete question of how people begin to rebuild. Wild by Cheryl Strayed is an excellent choice for anyone who feels paralyzed by grief or self-destruction and is looking for the story of someone who found a way through by changing their physical circumstances and forcing themselves into forward motion. When Breath Becomes Air is the right book for anyone grappling with questions of mortality and meaning. And Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is essential reading for anyone who has built their identity around professional achievement and is beginning to question whether the cost has been worth it.
Are resilience memoirs different from inspirational memoirs?
There is overlap between the two categories, but they are not identical, and the distinction is worth understanding. Inspirational memoirs often have an explicit motivational dimension — they are designed, in part, to leave the reader feeling energized and hopeful, and they tend to emphasize the triumphant arc of their story. Resilience memoirs, at their best, are less concerned with inspiration than with truth. They document the full weight of difficulty without rushing toward the resolution, and they are willing to sit inside the uncertainty and the pain in ways that purely inspirational books sometimes are not. The best resilience memoirs are inspiring, but that is a byproduct of their honesty rather than their primary aim. Educated, Between the World and Me, and The Year of Magical Thinking are all deeply moving and in some sense inspiring, but none of them would be accurately described as motivational books. They are too honest for that label — and that honesty is precisely what makes them so powerful.
What memoirs are similar to Educated by Tara Westover?
Readers who loved Educated tend to be drawn to memoirs that combine extraordinary childhood circumstances with a story of self-created transformation and that are written with the kind of literary intelligence that elevates the personal story into something with broader resonance. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is the most natural companion — another story of a chaotic childhood with unconventional, difficult parents, and another account of a person who builds a stable adult life through sheer determination. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah shares Educated's quality of examining, with both love and clear eyes, the family and social structures that shaped the author in ways both damaging and profound. And Between the World and Me, while its subject is different, shares Westover's refusal to simplify a complex social reality into easy narratives of oppression and triumph.
What are the best short resilience memoirs for busy readers?
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi is one of the most powerful resilience memoirs ever written and is also one of the shorter ones — at roughly two hundred pages, it can be read in a single sitting or over a weekend, and its impact is entirely disproportionate to its length. Between the World and Me is similarly lean and concentrated, written in the form of a letter with the economy and precision that format demands. Crying in H Mart, while somewhat longer, reads quickly because of the propulsive quality of Zauner's prose and the way she structures her narrative around specific, vivid sensory memories. For readers who want the full emotional and intellectual experience of a resilience memoir without the commitment of a longer book, these three titles offer some of the most concentrated and powerful reading available in the genre.
How do resilience memoirs compare to self-help books about resilience?
This is a question many readers ask, and the answer illuminates something important about what makes the memoir form so uniquely valuable. Self-help books about resilience offer frameworks, strategies, and principles — they give you tools and tell you how to use them. Memoirs about resilience give you something different and, for many readers, more valuable: they give you lived experience. When you read Terminal Success by Jason Mandel, you are not receiving advice about how to avoid burnout — you are living alongside a person as they navigate it. When you read Wild or Educated or The Glass Castle, you are not being told that people can rebuild their lives — you are watching it happen in granular, specific, irreducible detail. That specificity is what changes people. The research on why narrative is so powerful consistently points to the same finding: we do not change our behavior or our beliefs because we have been given better information. We change because we have been given a story that allows us to see our own experience differently. Resilience memoirs do that. The best self-help books about resilience point at the truth. The best resilience memoirs put you inside it.
Suggested Internal Links
Readers who enjoyed this guide may also want to explore our lists of the Best Inspirational Memoirs, Best Cancer Memoirs, Best Memoirs for Book Clubs, Best Grief Memoirs, and Best Memoirs About Mental Health — all available on MustReadMemoirs.com.