Five Powerful Memoirs To Add To Your Reading List
Motivating, moving, evocative and eloquent, here are five remarkable memoirs you should make room for on your bedside table.
Five Powerful Memoirs to read

What Have I Done? Motherhood, Mental Illness & Me by Laura Dockrill
Postpartum psychosis affects approximately one in 1,000 new mothers, but is still rarely talked about; perhaps, as Laura Dockrill suggests in her memoir, because of the guilt and shame that attach to women who feel they have failed their babies. This is a raw and visceral story, filled with heartbreak and courage, of what it’s like to be on the front line of postnatal mental illness.

 

Girl Decoded: A Scientist’s Quest to Reclaim Our Humanity by Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Technology by Rana el Kaliouby with Carol Colman
Rana el Kaliouby is a rarity in both the tech world and her native Middle East: a Muslim leader and CEO, a woman in charge in a field that is still mostly white and male. She grew up in Egypt and Kuwait, raised by her mother – one of the Middle East’s first female computer programmers – and her very strict father. Having moved to America with a mission to humanise technology, el Kaliouby recalls how she broke down barriers in her field and decoded her own humanity in the process. Both a candid memoir and a confession, this book is about strength, perseverance and naked willpower.

 

There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century by Fiona Hill
There aren’t many people in the world who could provide a better testimony of what it really felt like to work closely with Donald Trump than Fiona Hill, who served as senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council in the Trump White House from 2017 to 2019. Her memoir, which mixes the personal and the political, is a valuable and riveting historic document that is well worth a read.

 

The Dragons, The Giant, The Women by Wayétu Moore
Covering issues as vital now as ever, Wayétu Moore’s exhilarating memoir charts her harrowing journey as a child fleeing war-torn Liberia, before landing in Texas in the US, where she must live as a Black woman and immigrant, and her eventual return to Liberia. This memoir adds another voice to the genre of migrant literature, challenging the false popular idea that migration is optional and always results in a better life.

 

Fairest by Meredith Talusan

Award-winning author and journalist Meredith Talusan shares this coming-of-age journey, from growing up with albinism as a boy in a rural village in the Philippines, to immigrating to the US, receiving a scholarship to study at Harvard and undergoing gender transition. This powerful memoir navigates the complexities surrounding race, disability and gender.

 

Like what you’ve read and want more? May we recommend Six Unmissable Podcasts To Inspire And Entertain? It’s rather good. You can read it HERE.

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