Author: Kendra Winchester

Raechel Anne Jolie grew up as a working-class kid on the outskirts of Cleveland. When she was just a girl, her father was hit by a drunk driver, which ended their way of life forever. From there, her childhood was spent moving from home to home, never seeming to stay for long. She finds the alt scene downtown and begins to discover a whole new world that she feels irrevocably drawn to. This tiny memoir is a shining testament to a love of working-class people, the Midwest, and queer culture.

Brian Broome couldn’t wait to leave northeast Ohio. He spent his childhood as a queer, Black kid, never fitting in. But no matter where he moved, he still faced racism and homophobia. He describes how he coped with sex and drugs, always trying to forget the trauma he’s experienced while searching for belonging. Broome’s prose is incredible; every word is there for a reason. His memoir is full of heart and a deep sense of longing.

Michelle Obama is back with a second book. The Light We Carry is a collection of essays that each expands on her ideas around standing her ground and going high when they go low. She also shares about her family’s experience weathering the pandemic. Her essays are kind, supportive, and encouraging while firmly making her points. I highly recommend listening to the audiobook, which Obama reads herself. Listening to the audiobook feels like you’re sitting down with her for a cup of coffee while she shares encouraging anecdotes from her own life. So, if you’ve had a rough year (haven’t we all), then this is a perfect holiday gift for yourself.

Hands down, Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette is one of my favorite memoirs. In it, Gadsby shares what it was like to grow up as a queer, autistic kid in Tasmania, Australia. Gadsby is well-known for her comedy special Nanette, which you can still watch on Netflix. Her memoir expands on the ideas in Nanette and gives us a closer look into how Gadbsy’s life led to her creating this incredible one-woman show. The audiobook is out of this world. It’s hilarious and heartbreaking all in one book.

While Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s mother is Japanese, her father comes from a family of wheat farmers in Nebraska. After spending years getting to know her family in Japan, Mockett decides that her next writing project will look at her father’s family. Every year, migratory harvesters arrive at the family farm to help harvest the wheat. So, Mockett decides to travel with the harvesters to get to know them and better understand their world. Starting in Texas, Mockett travels with the group of men and women for weeks as they make their way up to Nebraska. Mockett discovers she carries a lot of assumptions about this more conservative group of blue-collar workers and begins to challenge her own perception of their lives. This book proved endlessly fascinating for me as Mockett began to better understand the world of her father’s family and the people who helped them out on the farm. She portrays herself in all of her messy humanity, making mistakes along the way but always looking to better understand the people around her.

Sarah Smarsh is the first woman in many generations of her family to go to college instead of starting a family right away. After breaking this family norm, Smarsh begins to think about her life as a working-class girl from Kansas and tries to better understand where she comes from. Focusing on the different generations of women in her family, she looks at the history of the heartland and the people who live there. Her prose is intimate, practical, and straightforward. Every word pulls its weight as Smarsh describes her childhood living with a family just trying to scrape by. As a teen, she didn’t have time for a lot of friends or boyfriends; she was going to college. I appreciated Smarsh’s take on her hometown, both the good and the bad. She perfectly captures the feeling of not being able to stay home and achieve your dreams. But having left, you know you will never be able to return, and nothing will ever be the same.

Heading into Monsters, I had imagined that it would be instructive or at least informative. But instead, Monsters is more a memoir of the author taking us along her thought process as she wrangles with the age-old question, can we separate the art from the artist? Dederer looks at a series of great artists (mostly men) who have done horrible things and asks herself how much her knowledge of their biographies impacts the way she engages with their art. Over and over, she poses this question as she discusses terrible person after person. Monsters would make a great pick for book clubs that love to discuss the theory and philosophy of living. Or maybe you want to discuss this topic with a friend. Monsters doesn’t come to a singular conclusion but rather poses a series of questions for readers to engage with, for us to make our decisions about the art we are willing to consume.

Enjeti and her family moved to the South when she was small. Since then, she’s called the South her home. But as a mixed-race Brown girl, many people there didn’t necessarily make her feel welcome. Now an adult, Enjeti writes about her experience with racism as well as her complicity in systemic racism. These essays feature her thoughts on feminism, the new South, gun violence, voter suppression, and so much more. Enjeti’s South is different than you might imagine. It’s complex, vibrant, and ever-changing.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize back in 1975. Dillard, a master prose stylist, describes her life at Tinker Creek. She chronicles the changing of the seasons and shares the comings and goings of the other living creatures around her. There’s just something beautiful about the calm her writing creates. I love her ability to see the tiniest things and communicate their vast importance to the reader. She has an obsession with parasites and the way they exist in the world. Admittedly, I don’t share this fascination, but I respect the way she loves them.

In 2019, Sarah M. Broom won the National Book Award for The Yellow House, which follows the story of her family and their connection to New Orleans. She describes her family’s history through the Yellow House, the childhood home that her mother owned for decades. We learn about Broom’s family history and the history of New Orleans. Her writing is vibrant and engrossing. You come to love her family and the Yellow House. This book is such a beautiful work of nonfiction, and I can’t recommend it enough.

For years, Naomi Klein has found herself continuously confused with Naomi Wolfe. They are both Jewish women who have historically moved through feminist spaces. But in the last decade, Wolfe has steadily become more connected with extremist right-wing politics. In this one-of-a-kind book, Klein details the history of the confusion and misidentification the two women have experienced online. From there, Klein expands into what she calls the mirror world, a place where men like Steve Bannon go off about stolen elections and forced mask mandates. Wolfe joins Bannon on his popular podcast, which astounds Klein as she listens to Wolfe’s guest appearance after guest appearance. Doppelganger is a fascinating look at the evolution of American politics and how we got to the chaos that we’re experiencing now.

bell hooks’ backlist is slowly but surely being turned into audio editions, so I’ve been making my way through them. Most recently, I picked up Breaking Bread, which is a series of conversations between bell hooks and Cornel West, two of the greatest minds of their generation. I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to sit in on conversations like this, and Breaking Bread brings us in on that conversation. hooks and Cornel describe their experience being in community as Black intellectuals. They include essays about each other, showing such admiration for each other’s work. It’s a beautiful testament to their friendship and mutual respect.

As I chopped vegetables, made cranberry sauce, and prepped my turkey brine, I listened to Thin Skin by Jenn Shapland. In her essay collection, Jenn has several long pieces about her experience traveling alone and the role that clothes have played throughout her life. With each of these base ideas, she connects her personal experiences to ideas in wider society. For example, in her essays about clothes, she ties together ideas of consumerism and how clothes help us perform societal expectations. I was struck over and over again by how Shapland’s work contains multiple layers of depth and meaning. Her prose feels so intentional, as if she’s already thought of and discarded every other possible way of expressing what she wants to say.

Just a few hours ago, I saw that the second season of Netflix’s High on the Hog has been released! Based on Jessica B. Harris’ book of the same name, the docuseries chronicles how enslaved Africans brought their culinary traditions to America. In her book, Harris describes how African cooks created one of the primary foundations for American cuisine as we know it today. She follows African American foodways, describing the growth of Black Southern cooking and how those food traditions traveled across the country during the great migration. High on the Hog is a must-read book (and now a must-watch docuseries) for any food lover.