My Favorite Non-Fiction Books (Part 1)
Memoirs and essays that I've loved over the years.
One thing about me, I’m gonna devour a memoir or essay collection written by a woman. Ever since I can remember, I’ve really loved non-fiction, especially memoirs by celebrities or other people that I admired.
Honestly, one of my favorite books when I was a teenager was Kristin Chenoweth’s autobiography, because I was obsessed with Wicked, and obsessed with the idea of being a Broadway actor (can’t stress enough how much I cannot sing or dance!!!).
Anyways, I’ve titled this Part 1 because I have a TON of non-fiction books on my to-be-read pile that I just know I’ll love but haven’t gotten around to reading yet (cough, Joan Didion, Even Babitz, Patti Smith, the classics…)
Cultish by Amanda Montell
I think about this book on a weekly basis. It examines the concept of cults – both traditional, like the Mansons and the Moonies, and more modern-day “cults” like Crossfit and MLMs – from a linguistic lens. Montell explores all the different ways that cults and cult-like organizations use language to create a sense of us vs. them, to bring people into the fold, and to ultimately lead people to sometimes do unspeakable things.
Tacky by Rax King
“Life is short. It’s important to attach oneself to the pieces that stick, regardless of whether somebody else believes the stuff is any good.”
I wrote about this book in one of my first newsletters on here, but essentially it’s a love letter to all things tacky – reality television, mall stores, Bath and Body Works (honest to god her essay about Warm Vanilla Sugar body spray made me cry), Creed, etc. I’ve always been a strong proponent of loving what you love without shame (guilty pleasure? never heard of her) so this was right up my alley, and I can’t wait to read her upcoming book Sloppy that releases at the end of this month.
I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
“I take a longer look at the words on her headstone. Brave, kind, loyal, sweet, loving, graceful, strong, thoughtful, funny, genuine, hopeful, playful, insightful, and on and on… Was she, though? Was she any of those things? The words make me angry. I can’t look at them any longer. Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?”
God, what a book. I LOVED iCarly growing up, so I was already excited to read anything from Jennette, but this book is so heartbreaking and shocking and bizarrely hilarious. Jennette’s writing style and voice is incredible, I really hope she continues writing because I would read anything she publishes. This memoir is an unflinching look at her childhood and the pressure her narcissistic mother put on her to support her family at such a young age, and about the inevitable fallout from that upbringing.
Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
“When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.”
I was expecting a dating manifesto when I picked this up, and certainly there are plenty of anecdotes about her romantic pursuits, but overall it was such a tender and sweet love letter to female friendships and the magnetic, dizzying magic that is your early twenties.
Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe
“Sometimes women’s attraction to true crime is dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it is unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argue that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This is the most flattering theory—and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts are drained of their menace. True crime wasn’t something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us.”
A fascinating look at the true crime industry and women’s relationship to it from four different points of view – the victim, the detective, the killer, and the attorney. As someone who has always devoured true crime content (literally, I have vivid memories of watching 20/20 and Dateline in my grandparents’ bedroom at like age 7) this was a fascinating, and at times uncomfortable, read.
Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
“I’m stuck here in a cycle and I am getting older but I am not growing up and my heart is getting soft dark spots on it like a fruit that has gone bad or is soft because too many hands have squeezed it but then put it back down not because I am not ready but because they were not ready for my type of fruity flesh. I felt so ripe and sweet—what was off? The truth is, I was forcing myself into people’s mouths. I jumped out of their hands and into their mouths and I yelled EAT ME way before they even had a chance to get hungry and notice me and lift me up.”
I remember reading this book late one night in the last waning months before the pandemic would change everything forever. It started out pretty amusing and odd, like Jenny Slate herself, and by the end of it I was full-on ugly sobbing. Such a beautiful manifesto on love, and loss and self-identity, and everything else in between.
I Might Regret This by Abbi Jacobson
“All this is to say, I'm somewhere in between. Everyone is. It's all acceptable and it's all bullshit and it's all powerfully important.”
Just a really lovely memoir about a solo cross-country road trip following a devastating breakup. I honestly think I’ve read this book like three times now. Something about it is just so relatable and raw and ultimately hopeful.
I Feel Bad About My Neck by Nora Ephron
“I can make a case that I regret nothing. After all, most of my mistakes turned out to be things I survived, or turned into funny stories, or, on occasion, even made money from.”
I remember buying this at a Goodwill in college, not really having any clue how iconic or classic of a book it was, just knowing that Nora Ephron was responsible for two of my favorite movies. Unsurprisingly, she’s hilarious, witty, and somehow infinitely relatable despite being several decades my senior.
Yes Please by Amy Poehler
“I have realized that mystery is what keeps people away, and I’ve grown tired of smoke and mirrors. I yearn for the clean, well-lighted place. So let’s peek behind the curtain and hail the others like us. The open-faced sandwiches who take risks and live big and smile with all of their teeth. These are the people I want to be around. This is the honest way I want to live and love and write.”
I’ll be honest, I just really love a celebrity memoir. I always have, even when I was like a pre-teen. It doesn’t even matter that much if I know a ton of stuff about them or not (I didn’t add it because I didn’t want this list to be purely celeb memoirs but Busy Phillips’ book is also phenomenal and I’ve only seen like one thing with her in it). I just like reading about people’s lives!
Anyways, of course I love Amy Poehler. She’s small and weird and hilarious and Leslie Knope was upsettingly formative to me so yes, OBVIOUSLY this made the list. Is it earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting literature? No. Does it have to be? No! It’s sweet and it’s charming and it’s interesting. That’s all!
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Yes, my consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording—all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...”
The summer I was thirteen, I selected The Bell Jar as my summer book report assignment for my advanced English class, and I’ve been enamored with Sylvia ever since. I’m a millennial white woman with depression who preferred reading books to playing outside as a child, so this should not come as a surprise to anyone. I mean, my god, she wrote like that in her JOURNAL. In PRIVATE. She was such a gifted writer, and such a tragic figure.
Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher
“Anyway, George comes up to me the first day of filming and he takes one look at the dress and says, 'You can't wear a bra under that dress.' So, I say, 'Okay, I'll bite. Why?' And he says, 'Because... there's no underwear in space.' I promise you this is true, and he says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn't see any bras or panties or briefs anywhere. Now, George came to my show when it was in Berkeley. He came backstage and explained why you can't wear your brassiere in other galaxies, and I have a sense you will be going to outer space very soon, so here's why you cannot wear your brassiere, per George. So, what happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn't- so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make a fantastic obit- so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
I’m honestly not exaggerating when I say I miss Carrie Fisher every day. God damn, she was funny. I’m realizing now that I never circled back to the rest of her books, and now I must fix that immediately. But I really loved this one, and its sharp and often hilarious musings on mental health alongside larger than life stories of her career and relationships.
Not That Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham
“There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.”
Look, I’ll say it. I’m kind of pleased that public sentiment seems to be slowly turning back in favor of Lena Dunham. I never thought she was ALL THAT BAD and this book was lowkey foundational for me during the worst year of my life (ages 20-21, enough said). Is it a bit self-indulgent and narcissistic? Of course – just like I was at twenty-one.