Books like Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

01

When the Body Says No

Gabor Maté · Health

When the Body Says No is Gabor Maté's investigation into how chronic stress and emotional suppression contribute to serious illness.

Both dig into trauma.

02

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel van der Kolk · Psychology

The Body Keeps the Score is Bessel van der Kolk's account of four decades spent studying and treating trauma, from Vietnam veterans at the VA in the 1970s to survivors of childhood abuse, accidents, and domestic violence.

Both dig into trauma.

03

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.

Both dig into identity.

04

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · Memoir

Wild is Cheryl Strayed's account of hiking 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone in 1995 at twenty-six, with no prior backpacking experience and a pack so heavy she could barely lift it.

A kindred memoir read.

05

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Both dig into identity.

06

Hunger

Roxane Gay · Memoir

Hunger is Roxane Gay's memoir about her body, the trauma that shaped it, and the world's persistent refusal to accommodate it.

Shares body image and trauma with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

07

Know My Name: A Memoir

Chanel Miller · Memoir

Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir of being sexually assaulted behind a dumpster at Stanford University in 2015, being identified publicly as only "Emily Doe" throughout the subsequent trial, and the experience of navigating a legal process while the perpetrator — Stanford swimmer Brock Turner — became the more visible subject of the story.

Shares trauma and identity with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

08

Writing My Wrongs

Shaka Senghor · Memoir

Writing My Wrongs is Shaka Senghor's account of his journey from a childhood marked by abuse and neglect in Detroit, through a murder conviction and nineteen years in Michigan prisons — seven of them in solitary confinement — to his emergence as a writer, activist, and advocate for criminal justice reform.

Shares trauma and identity with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

09

Adult Children of Alcoholics

Janet G. Woititz · Psychology

Adult Children of Alcoholics is Janet Woititz's clinical guide to the lasting psychological patterns that develop in children raised in alcoholic families.

Shares trauma and identity with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

10

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe · History

Say Nothing opens with a scene that sets its register precisely: Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by a gang of masked strangers in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

Shares trauma and identity with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

11

The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

Sonya Renee Taylor · Psychology

Sonya Renee Taylor's central argument is that the way societies teach people to hate, distrust, or feel ashamed of their bodies is not a personal failing but a political and economic system — and that dismantling it begins with what she calls radical self-love.

Shares body image and identity with Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

12

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into identity.