Hardcore Memoirs: Recommendations from NPR

I am a self confessed book nerd. I've had my head in a book from the moment I was able to read. My tastes in literature have always been strongly rooted in fiction. Now that I am 27 I feel like I should be branching a out a little bit from my normal fare. Which is why this article from NPR writer Marion Winik caught my attention. I've tried to get through some nonfiction before, but never really caught my attention. But his suggestions for personal memoirs seem like a good place to start.

The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir

A Memoir

by Stephen Elliott
Paperback, 208 pages

In The Adderall Diaries, Stephen Elliot mingles the coverage of a San Francisco murder trial to which he was marginally connected with an unpacking of his own troubled past: an abusive dad who may have killed a man himself, a mother he cared for as she died of multiple sclerosis, a series of group homes. With friends overdosing and committing suicide all around him, he found refuge in drugs and violent sex, working as a stripper, a professor, and a writer. The matter-of-fact, present-tense narration moves from Eliot's daily life to the unfolding courtroom drama to ruminations on the writing process. Restless and riveting, Elliot is a rising star — he has optioned the film rights to this book, and he also runs The Rumpus, one of the coolest literary sites on the web.

-MARION WINIK

The Chronology Of Water

by Lidia Yuknavitch
Paperback, 310 pages

In A Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch carries on the transgressions of 80's feminism, gleefully breaking rules about storytelling as she looks for a way to write a book that is not an incest narrative or a recovery memoir or even the autobiography of an Olympic swimming hopeful, but that is faithful to a life that has contained those elements. From her druggy college days in Lubbock, Texas, through a doomed early marriage and a stillbirth, through promiscuity of many flavors, an apprenticeship with Ken Kesey and a very bad DUI, the author hangs on and is rewarded with an amazingly normal happy ending. Yuknavitch is a recklessly inventive writer whose work is a jolt of energy for those trying to find their voices on the page and their place in the world.
-MARION WINIK

501 Minutes To Christ: Personal Essays

by Poe Ballantine
Paperback, 173 pages

501 Minutes to Christ by Poe Ballantine proves that there's still a member of the Beat Generation wandering among us. A ridiculously gifted writer who could tell a good story about nothing, Ballantine has made sure he doesn't have to by spending most of his adult life as an itinerant writer, cook, day laborer, drinker, gambler, and moral philosopher. In this collection, he hangs out with the homeless in New Orleans and the speed freaks in San Diego, devises a plan to punch John Irving, loses a book contract with a New York publisher, and settles down to raise a family in Nebraska. Ballantine is unflappable, hilarious, and so observant of his fellow men and women that his half-cocked hobo lifestyle cannot be mistaken for anything but a spiritual path.
-MARION WINIK