Books like The Basketball Diaries

01

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.

A kindred memoir read.

02

This Boy's Life

Tobias Wolff · Memoir

Tobias Wolff's memoir of his childhood in the 1950s, moving with his peripatetic mother from Florida to Utah to Seattle to the logging town of Concrete, Washington, is one of the finest examples of what might be called the stepfather memoir — a genre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as writers processed childhoods marked by violence, instability, and the particular powerlessness of being a child under an adult's authority.

A kindred memoir read.

03

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.

A kindred memoir read.

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.

A kindred memoir read.

05

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.

06

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 survival with The Basketball Diaries.

07

Scar Tissue

Anthony Kiedis · Memoir

Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's account of his life from a chaotic childhood in Michigan through the formation and commercial peak of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with addiction and recovery as the book's spine.

Shares addiction and survival with The Basketball Diaries.

08

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

Ishmael Beah · Memoir

Ishmael Beah was twelve years old when the Sierra Leone civil war reached his village and he was separated from his family.

Both dig into survival.

09

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.

Both dig into addiction.

10

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 survival.

11

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.

12

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

J. D. Vance · Memoir

Hillbilly Elegy is J.

Both dig into addiction.