Books like Angela's Ashes

01

Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · Memoir

Educated is Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and eventually earning a PhD in history from Cambridge University.

A kindred memoir read.

02

The Glass Castle: A Memoir

Jeannette Walls · Memoir

The Glass Castle is Jeannette Walls's memoir about growing up as the second of four children in a family that moved constantly across the American Southwest and West Virginia, rarely had enough to eat, and existed almost entirely outside conventional institutions.

Shares poverty and resilience with Angela's Ashes.

03

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · Memoir

Maya Angelou's first volume of autobiography covers her childhood and adolescence in Stamps, Arkansas and San Francisco during the 1930s and 1940s, ending with the birth of her son at age sixteen.

Shares resilience and coming of age with Angela's Ashes.

04

Boy Erased: A Memoir

Garrard Conley · Memoir

Boy Erased is Garrard Conley's memoir of attending Love in Action, a conversion therapy program in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 2000s.

Shares family and coming of age with Angela's Ashes.

05

Finding Me: A Memoir

Viola Davis · Memoir

Finding Me is Viola Davis's account of her childhood in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and her path from that starting point to becoming one of the most decorated actors in the history of American theater and film.

Shares poverty and resilience with Angela's Ashes.

06

Lucky Man: A Memoir

Michael J. Fox · Memoir

Michael J.

Shares resilience and family with Angela's Ashes.

07

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

Katherine Boo · History

Behind the Beautiful Forevers is Katherine Boo's account of three years spent in Annawadi, a Mumbai slum built on reclaimed land next to the international airport.

Shares poverty and resilience with Angela's Ashes.

08

Barbarian Days

William Finnegan · Memoir

Barbarian Days is William Finnegan's memoir of a life spent surfing — from his childhood in Los Angeles and Hawaii through decades of obsessive searching for waves across the Pacific, Asia, Africa, and eventually the cold waters of New York.

Both dig into coming of age.

09

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

David Sheff · Memoir

Beautiful Boy is David Sheff's account of watching his son Nic become addicted to methamphetamine through his late teens and early twenties, and of the years Sheff spent trying to understand it, respond to it, and survive it as a parent.

Both dig into family.

10

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

Both dig into resilience.

11

Born Standing Up

Steve Martin · Memoir

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's account of the decade-long grind that preceded his sudden, seemingly overnight fame as America's biggest stand-up comedian of the late 1970s.

Both dig into family.

12

Born to Run

Bruce Springsteen · Memoir

Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run is among the most substantive rock memoirs written, in part because Springsteen is a better prose writer than his public image suggests and in part because he chose to write about the things that actually shaped him rather than the things that made him famous.

Both dig into family.