Turning The Spotlight On Women’s Memoirs
By Guest Contributor Linda Maxie
It’s March, and that means it’s Women’s History Month! To help you celebrate, here are my top ten recommended women’s memoirs.
The Soul of a Woman by Isabel Allende (2020)
Chilean American journalist and novelist Isabel Allende reveals why she became a feminist before she began kindergarten. After watching her abandoned mother struggle to raise three children alone, Isabel decided that women were getting a raw deal. Here, she fearlessly talks about what women want and need and the work that remains to place them on equal footing with men.
Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir by Cinelle Barnes (2018)
Until an unforgettable monsoon hit, Cinelle Barnes lived a fairytale life in the Philippines with her parents, her father, whose success helped the family buy the Mansion Royale where she and her mother lived. But after the monsoon, her father was gone, replaced by her mother’s tyrannical lover. Barnes writes poetically about her fight for survival in her new reality.
Departure Stories: Betty Crocker Made Matzoh Balls (and Other Lies) by Elisa Bernick (2022)
Elisa Bernick recalls growing up in the suburb of New Hope, Minnesota, in a nominally Jewish household in the 1960s and early 1970s. Her red-headed mother’s temper and feminist leanings were only part of what caused her family to disintegrate. Bernick uses memory, archives, and scrapbook fabrics to describe her upbringing during this unsettling time.
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom (2019)
The yellow house is now a memory. After it was wiped away by Hurricane Katrina, one of its youngest occupants, Sarah M. Broom, wrote about nearly a century of her family’s history and how the yellow house became central to it. The New Orleans of her childhood shotgun house was a far cry from the city’s tourist brochures.
A River Could Be a Tree by Angela Himsel (2018)
Angela Himsel’s evangelical Christian family of thirteen, including eleven children, shared a single bathroom in their rented Indiana farmhouse. She details how her strict religious upbringing colored everything she thought about the world. And she talks of the long, slow journey to her connection to God through a mikvah, a ceremonial bath, that led her to become a practicing Jew.
I’m Telling the Truth, But I’m Lying by Bassey Ipki (2019)
Nigerian-born American author Bassey Ipki writes of coming to America in 1980 to be raised by her family in Stillwater, Oklahoma. While her adjustment to American society had the usual tensions, Ipki’s was greatly complicated by her undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She was in her early 20s before a breakdown led to the diagnosis. She has since become a mental health advocate and examines how mental illness impacts those who live with it.
Under the Red Skies: The Life and Times of a Chinese Millennial by Karoline Kan (2019)
Born in 1989, when China drew global attention for the Tiananmen Square massacre, Karoline Kan became a journalist. Here she traces how her family managed to survive massive societal changes. Starting with her grandmother, who helped her family through the Great Famine, and her mother, who defied the government’s One-Child policy to give birth to Karoline, she shares these and other stories of being Chinese today.
Aftershocks: A Memoir by Nadia Owusu (2021)
Brooklyn-based writer Nadia Owusu has lived all over the world. Abandoned by her mother at two, her father raised her until he died when she was thirteen. After that, she lived with her stepmother until she came to the U.S. to attend university at age eighteen. The many homes and abandonments she experienced left her wholly disconnected from her identity. In this memoir, she narrates how she found herself again through her writing.
Consent: A Memoir by Vanessa Springora ( 2020)
When she was thirteen years old, French publishing director Vanessa Springora became involved with a well-known French writer who, in his 50s, considered her his muse. Now she recollects the abusive nature inherent in the relationship that raised few concerns in her society. She examines common themes from children’s fairy tales, French history, and her sad story. It’s time, she says, for gender inequality and sexual abuse of children to end.
Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover (2018)
As a child of Mormon survivalists in Idaho, Tara Westover never went to public school or saw a doctor. Her homeschooling included helping her mother make herbal medicines and helping her father in his junkyard. But at 17, Tara left home to attend school at Brigham Young University and went on to finish her education at Cambridge University in the U.K. The education she gains at these institutions causes her to take a second look at her sometimes violent but still beloved family.
So that’s my list for March. Please let me know if you’ve read any of these books and what you thought of them. I have several on my TBR list already!
My next book will be in late spring or summer of 2023. It's full of recommended biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs of people from all walks of life and in all circumstances, past and present!
If you would like to receive a copy of the Advanced Reader Copy in return for an honest book review, I’ll gladly place you on my launch team. More information will be coming your way soon.
Until next time, Happy Reading!
Linda Maxie
aka "Library Lin"