Fall Road Trip Books and Memoirs!

Everyone and their mother’s brother is talking about this memoir— and for good reason! Former Nickelodeon star Jenneatte McCurdy writes about her life as a child star, a job she never really wanted, but one her mother insisted she have. What’s more, McCurdy shares how her mother was incredibly abusive, forcing McCurdy to submit to intimate inspections of her body, even into her teen years, and restricting McCurdy’s diet to keep her looking younger longer.

McCurdy’s reflection on her mother can be very clinical, removed from emotions of the event, which reflects how she kept herself from thinking too deeply about her and her mother’s relationship. But after her mother dies from cancer, McCurdy must confront the trauma from her childhood if she is ever to truly move on.

Year of the Tiger was, hands down, one of my most anticipated books of the year. In the disability community, Alice Wong is a legend. She’s such a strong advocate for disability justice, and her memoir is a gift. She shares stories from her life, excerpts from articles she’s written for various publications, and transcripts of interviews she conducted in the last several years. I really appreciated her multimedia approach to her memoir, which gives it a unique feel, like snapshots from her life.

Because of my own disability, I listen to books via audio, and I wondered how all of the photos and illustrations would translate to a different medium. Most of the time, audiobooks with a lot of visuals just have a PDF that comes along with the audiobook. But Wong ensured the narrator— the wonderful Nancy Wu—read image descriptions so listeners can better picture the more visual parts of the memoir in our heads. This kind of attention to detail and dedication to making her work as accessible as possible is why Wong’s work is so important and why her work should be widely read.