Books like Scar Tissue

01

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.

Both dig into survival.

02

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · Memoir

Mary Karr's debut memoir about growing up in the oil-refinery town of Leechfield, Texas in the 1960s is widely credited with sparking the memoir boom of the 1990s.

Both dig into survival.

03

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 survival with Scar Tissue.

04

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.

05

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.

Both dig into identity.

06

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.

Shares recovery and identity with Scar Tissue.

07

Life

Keith Richards · Memoir

Keith Richards's Life was written with journalist James Fox and published when Richards was 66, after more than fifty years with the Rolling Stones.

Shares addiction and music with Scar Tissue.

08

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.

Shares addiction and recovery with Scar Tissue.

09

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.

Shares recovery and identity with Scar Tissue.

10

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 identity and survival with Scar Tissue.

11

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 recovery and identity with Scar Tissue.

12

The Basketball Diaries

Jim Carroll · Memoir

The Basketball Diaries is Jim Carroll's account of his teenage years in New York City during the late 1960s, drawn from journals he kept between ages thirteen and sixteen.

Shares addiction and survival with Scar Tissue.