Books like Open: An Autobiography

01

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight · Memoir

Shoe Dog is Phil Knight's account of the first two decades of Nike, from the $50 loan he borrowed from his father in 1964 to fund his first shipment of Japanese running shoes to the company's IPO in 1980.

Both dig into identity.

02

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption

Laura Hillenbrand · Biography

Unbroken follows Louis Zamperini from his juvenile delinquency in Depression-era California to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where he ran the 5,000 meters at nineteen and briefly caught Hitler's attention.

Shares identity and redemption with Open: An Autobiography.

03

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.

04

The Sixth Man

Andre Iguodala · Memoir

Andre Iguodala won four NBA championships and a Finals MVP award, but The Sixth Man is less interested in the games than in the social and psychological landscape those games happened inside.

Shares identity and sports with Open: An Autobiography.

05

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 identity and redemption with Open: An Autobiography.

06

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 identity.

07

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.

08

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad · Memoir

Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two and newly graduated, living in Paris with her first real job and a boyfriend, when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

Both dig into identity.

09

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.

Both dig into identity.

10

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

Susannah Cahalan · Memoir

Brain on Fire is Susannah Cahalan's account of the month she spent in a New York hospital in 2009, during which she experienced psychosis, paranoia, violent behavior, catatonia, and seizures — and was nearly committed to a psychiatric facility before a doctor correctly diagnosed her with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a newly described autoimmune disease in which the body attacks the brain.

Both dig into identity.

11

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

Both dig into identity.

12

Crying in H Mart

Michelle Zauner · Memoir

Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner's memoir of her mother's death from cancer and the loss it made her confront: not just of a parent but of the Korean half of her identity.

Both dig into identity.