Category: True Story

When Christine Hyung-Oak Lee was in her early 30s, she experienced a stroke, which changed her life forever. For over a year, she had little to no short-term memory. She wrote details down in a notebook so her future self could reread the things that had happened earlier that day. She tried to take care of herself, making her own food and dressing herself, but she struggled to do everyday tasks. In her memoir, Lee describes herself as “Unstuck in Time,” referring to Kurt Vonnegut’s work, which she read and reread during this time. Lee’s memoir is such an important account of someone experiencing a brain-related illness.

Wang has lived most of her life with schizophrenia. As she’s moved through the world, she’s experienced a countless number of people who have made a lot of assumptions about her based purely on her diagnosis. But most people she’s encountered have little to no idea what living with schizophrenia is actually like. In her essay collection, Wang shares her experience with the condition, highlighting a lot of the lesser-known details of the disease. Her writing is stunning, with incredible prose and insightful observations. The Collected Schizophrenias is such a beautiful book that I love more every time I read it.

I had a different book in mind to talk about today, but I couldn’t stop thinking about this one. T Kira Madden has such a brilliant way of precisely writing the story of her life. She grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, the daughter of a Jewish father and a Chinese Hawaiian mother. While she came from a wealthy family, not all was well in her household. From her child’s eyes, she sees her parents’ struggle with their cycles of addiction. Madden has a brilliant way of communicating with the reader, choosing the precise details to include in each scene. Her writing is so entrancing, so moving. I’ve read and reread Madden’s memoir in essays, and I discover something new every time.

There’s something that I love about a good essay, especially essays about the South. Margaret Renkl is one of the best, and her regular columns are a breath of fresh air. She writes about the complex realities of the new South, with all of its difficult history and present day issues. But there’s also the joy of the successes, no matter how small. Not to mention the incredible nature writing — such descriptions she brings to the page! Each essay is self-contained, a bright, perfectly cut gem. You can read one or all of them if you like.

Winner of the IACP 2019 First Book Award presented by The Julia Child Foundation, Bottom of the Pot celebrates Persion cooking, highlighting the incredible wealth of flavors of the cuisine. Naz Deravian is a home cook based in L.A., and she shares recipes from her childhood and her takes on Persian classics. When she was just a girl, Deravian and her family fled Iran during the height of the revolution. Food has been a way that Deravian and her family have stayed connected to their culture. I loved these recipes, photos, and little snippets that Deravian shares about her past, connecting moments in her life with her recipes.

Victuals, a winner of a James Beard Award, is one of my newest cookbook acquisitions, and I fell in love with it from the moment I saw it. In the last several years, Southern Appalachian cooking has been making its mark on the literary world. Ronni Lundy looks at traditional heritage recipes from Appalachia, celebrating simple ingredients like beans and greens. The photos by Johnny Autry are gorgeous, and take me back to summers watching my grandparents eat salted tomato slices while relaxing on the back porch of their cabin.

Morgan Jerkins follows her ancestry, visiting the different places around the country where her family is from and where they made their home. I love the way she takes readers along on her journey, giving readers a front-row seat to her mental process as she learns new things about her ancestors. She visits places across the South, like South Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. Each new place explores the history of her ancestors in that location, and she discovers both good and bad things about her family’s history. I feel like her writing is so intimate as she shares the many feelings she works through. This book is perfect for road trips or to travel the country through reading Jerkins’ story.

Last year, I finally read Patrick Radden Keefe’s incredible narrative nonfiction book Say Nothing, which follows the Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He begins his story with the disappearance of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten. From there, he jumps around to many of the characters involved in different aspects of the I.R.A., detailing how key events in Northern Ireland’s history impact these characters’ lives. It’s truly an incredible work of nonfiction, and I keep recommending it to everyone and their mother’s brother.

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, her childhood home that her mother owned for decades. We learn about Broom’s family history and the history of New Orleans. Through her vibrant and engrossing writing, 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.

As an Appalachian book lover who adores food writing, I was so thrilled to learn about Erica Abrams Locklear’s book on Appalachian Cuisine. Locklear examines the history of Appalachian food, its influences, and what it looks like today. I loved the way that she delved into the creativity of Appalachian cooks and the stigma against Appalachian food. She discusses chefs like Ashleigh Shanti and Sean Brock, both of whom have a national presence and discuss Appalachian food in all of its historical complexities. This book is perfect for folks with a love of American cuisine and the incredible food it brings to the table.

After Goldbach experiences a mental health crisis, she isn’t able to finish the last step of her graduate work. Instead, she gets a job at the local steel mill, writing down her experiences and the complex and very dangerous work she does everyday. Goldbach examines the realities of being paid very well for a job that is such high risk. She’s able to capture the blurry borders of being a person in academia from a working class background. Is the college debt, years of study, and poor job prospects worth it? How does the prejudice of “blue collar jobs” impact her decision? Goldbach does such an excellent job of balancing out all of these different questions while weaving in her own story.

Cornejo Villavicencio and her family have lived undocumented in America for decades. Her dad could only work “blue collar” jobs that didn’t pay well and took an intense toll on his body. Cornejo Villavicencio showed incredible promise, getting high grades, scholarship, and honors. But at every step, she worried about her and her family’s undocumented status. She also experienced suicidal ideation from an early age, her mind filling with intrusive thoughts and clouding her judgment. The Undocumented Americans is part Cornejo Villavicencio’s story and interviews with other undocumented Americans from around the country, showing the diversity of their lived experiences.

If you love books about cults and how the minds work, Cultish is right in your wheelhouse. This book delves into the details around the language of cults and how everyday exposure to this language influences how people view the world. Through her skill at narrative storytelling and incredible research skills, Montell takes us deep into the influence of cults and the words that help build them.

One of the best biographies in recent years, The Dead Are Arising is an award-winning biography of Malcolm X. Les Payne worked on this book for decades, and when he passed, his daughter, Tamara Payne, continued his work and finished the book. The Dead Are Arising went on to receive dozens of accolades, including winning the National Book Award for nonfiction. This is definitely a book you won’t want to miss!

Matthew Salesses introduces his book by describing how the fiction writing workshop was created by white male writers. Salesses reimagines the writing workshop, examining the elements of writing— plot, character, structure, etc.—from a new perspective. The book includes exercises, giving teachers resources to create better, more inclusive workshops for their students.

A lot of people have a great idea for a book, but where do you even start? Publishing seems so overwhelming. That’s where Courtney Maum comes in. Maum has written my go-to publishing guide for writers who are looking to publish their first book. From finishing your manuscript to book contracts to second books, Maum is here to guide you through it all. She’s structured the book around a Q&A format, using headings and organized chapters to help readers follow along. Maum breaks up a daunting task into different parts, making a seemingly impossible thing actually doable.

In this Audible Original, National Book Award-winning author Imani Perry describes her experience living with Lupus. She brings in work by other chronically ill authors, like Virginia Woolf and Audre Lorde, aligning herself with a more intersectional approach to writing about her disability. Perry intersperses personal stories about her life throughout the essay, and looks at disability from several different angles. I loved that there was always a new way to think about illness in each section, and I found myself pausing the audiobook just to sit with my thoughts on something she said.

In 2020, Penguin issued a new edition of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals, a series of essays where Lorde discusses how illness is treated in society. A large portion of this book is dedicated to examining the reasons why her doctor’s office kept insisting that she wear a prosthetic breast after having one of her breasts removed as part of her cancer treatment. She found the prosthetic uncomfortable and didn’t care that people could see that she’d had a mastectomy. But the doctor’s office said it would make other people more comfortable if she would wear one, which got her thinking about how there’s a lot of dedication to chronically ill people to perform wellness for the sake of the people around us.

I love Julia Turshen. She has such a warm way of describing her love of food. Turshen has written several cookbooks, but Simply Julia is my favorite. This cookbook includes intervals that are like essays in-between sections of the cookbook. There, Turshen describes her inspirations for various recipes and her cooking style. She explains that her wife had to go on a strict medical diet, so to be supportive, Turshen began reworking her recipes so her wife could eat them. The food we cook is often an act of love for the people in our lives, and you feel that truth on every page of Simply Julia. Plus, the recipes are incredible.

I don’t hear enough people outside of Appalachia or the South discuss how incredible Edna Lewis is. Her recipes move with the season, always focusing on what is fresh and readily available. She’s practical, often giving you substitutes in the text as needed. But what I love about her best is the descriptions of WHY she makes certain choices with her cooking. Like why she hates using a lot of baking powder because she hates the aftertaste it leaves in baked goods. Her work is truly vital to both Appalachian and Southern cuisines, and although she is gone now, she has left behind such an incredible legacy.