Books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

01

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · Memoir

Anne Frank's diary, kept during the two years she spent hiding with her family in a concealed Amsterdam apartment, stands as one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

Shares identity and coming of age with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

02

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.

03

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · Memoir

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

Shares resilience and coming of age with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

04

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.

Shares identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

05

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 identity and coming of age with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

06

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 identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

07

Greenlights

Matthew McConaughey · Memoir

Greenlights is Matthew McConaughey's memoir-philosophy hybrid, built around decades of journals he kept starting in his teens.

Shares identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

08

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 identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

09

Lucky Man: A Memoir

Michael J. Fox · Memoir

Michael J.

Shares identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

10

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby · Memoir

Jean-Dominique Bauby was the editor-in-chief of French Elle when he suffered a massive stroke in December 1995 that left him with complete paralysis of his body except for his left eyelid.

Shares resilience and language with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

11

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 identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

12

The Light We Carry

Michelle Obama · Memoir

The Light We Carry is Michelle Obama's second memoir, published in 2022 as a follow-up to Becoming.

Shares identity and resilience with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.