My History
by Antonia Fraser | 
Seldom Disappointed
by Tony Hillerman |
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
by Mary McCarthy | 
Burning the Days
by James Salter | 
Kitchen Privileges
by Mary Higgins Clark |
An Accidental Autobiography
by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison | 
The Death of Santini
by Pat Conroy | 
A House Unlocked
by Penelope Lively | 
Too Close to the Falls
by Catherine Gildiner | 
The Imaginary Girlfriend
by John Irving |
Curriculum Vitae
by Muriel Spark |
Let Me Finish
by Roger Angell | 
An Unfinished Woman
by Lillian Hellman | 
Slipstream
by Elizabeth Jane Howard |
Elsewhere
by Richard Russo | 
The Writing Life
by Annie Dillard | 
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
by Annie Dillard | 
When Breath Becomes Air
by Paul Kalanithi | 
Tuesdays with Morrie
by Mitch Albom | 
Born a Crime
by Trevor Noah |
Annie Dillard remembers. She remembers the exhilaration of whipping a snowball at a car and having it hit straight on. She remembers playing with the skin on her mother's knuckles, which "didn't snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge." She remembers the compulsion to spend a whole afternoon (or many whole afternoons) endlessly pitching a ball at a target. In this intoxicating account of her childhood, Dillard climbs back inside her 5-, 10-, and 15-year-old selves with apparent effortlessness. The voracious young Dillard embraces headlong one fascination after another--from drawing to rocks and bugs to the French symbolists. "Everywhere, things snagged me," she writes. "The visible world turned me curious to books; the books propelled me reeling back to the world." From her parents she inherited a love of language--her mother's speech was "an endlessly interesting, swerving path"--and the understanding that "you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself," not for anyone else's approval or desire. And one would be mistaken to call the energy Dillard exhibits in An American Childhood merely youthful; "still I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day," she writes, "as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive."