Books like Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

01

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi · Memoir

Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable.

Shares identity and resistance with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

02

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts

Maxine Hong Kingston · Memoir

The Woman Warrior is not a conventional memoir.

Both dig into identity.

03

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.

Both dig into identity.

04

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · Memoir

Born a Crime is Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and its chaotic aftermath.

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.

Shares identity and resistance with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

06

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · Memoir

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his life from a rural Xhosa childhood in the Transkei to his release from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and ends with his election as South Africa's first democratically chosen president in 1994.

Shares identity and resistance with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

07

Letters and Papers from Prison

Dietrich Bonhoeffer · Philosophy

Letters and Papers from Prison is a posthumous collection of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's correspondence written during his imprisonment at Tegel military prison in Berlin between April 1943 and October 1944, along with some earlier papers and the poem "Who Am I?" written near the end.

Shares identity and resistance with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

08

Turning Pro

Steven Pressfield · Self-help

Turning Pro is Pressfield's follow-up to The War of Art, taking the Professional/Amateur distinction and developing it into a full examination of what the shift actually looks like — and what it costs.

Shares identity and resistance with Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood.

09

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.

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 identity.

11

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.

12

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.