Books like The Liars' Club

01

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 memory.

02

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.

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.

Both dig into family.

04

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.

Shares trauma and survival with The Liars' Club.

05

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 trauma and survival with The Liars' Club.

06

Night

Elie Wiesel · Memoir

Night is Elie Wiesel's account of his deportation from the Transylvanian town of Sighet in 1944 and his survival of Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

Shares memory and survival with The Liars' Club.

07

Gulag: A History

Anne Applebaum · History

Anne Applebaum's Gulag is the first comprehensive English-language history of the Soviet forced labor camp system, drawing on KGB archives opened briefly after 1991, survivor memoirs, and interviews with former prisoners and guards.

Shares memory and survival with The Liars' Club.

08

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe · History

Say Nothing opens with a scene that sets its register precisely: Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, is dragged from her Belfast flat by a gang of masked strangers in December 1972 and never seen alive again.

Shares trauma and memory with The Liars' Club.

09

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · Memoir

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's posthumously published account of his years in Paris during the 1920s, when he and his first wife Hadley lived cheaply in Montparnasse while he apprenticed himself to the work of becoming a writer.

Both dig into memory.

10

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 family.

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 survival.

12

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.