If You Only Read Five (non-fiction) Books in 2024...
An annual list of recommended books based on what I read last year — Part 2
Reading time: About 16 minutes
Welcome to part two of my recommended read for 2024 based on what I read in 2023! Part one lists author discoveries, general fiction, YA fiction, and a graphic novel. This post is for memoir and non-fiction.
Let’s dive right in, shall we?
Memoir
Memoir is definitely one of my favourite genres. It has a reputation for being hard to define, but I don’t think it’s challenging to explain at all. Memoir is a form of creative non-fiction whereby the author shares a personal story and connects it with something broadly experienced. It falls under the umbrella of autobiography, but it is not an autobiography. I think of autobiography as more about dates and events and an over-all life story, while memoir is about a particular experience or relationship or life event and an emotional journey. Autobiography is more general and document external events and life achievements while memoir is more specific and usually about internal journeys and personal growth.1
The power of memoir is how it gives voice to a lot of things we are discouraged from talking about—grief, death, family conflict, mental illness. It’s also great for finding a sense of connection and feeling less alone in our experiences.
For each of the recommendations I make, I am clear about the connection to be found in them.2 For those who don’t see a connection, the great thing about memoir is the insight it can give you into the humanity of another. They can be a profound way to connect across differences and find some understanding of an experience you might never have yourself. Think of these as suggestion for cultivating deep empathy and compassion.
I’m Glad my Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy
I’m Glad My Mom Died has been on all the lists and gotten so much coverage for good reason. McCurdy knows how to write memoir! She takes her pretty niche lived experience as a child actor and universalizes it so anyone who has a narcissist in the family will feel reflected on the page. This is a powerful piece of writing and I am so glad McCurdy finally gets to do what she loves. I hope for many more books from her in the future.
A great read for anyone who has a narcissistic family member, particularly if you’ve been through the weirdness of their death.
Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.
Lamya H. Has written a memoir I found simultaneously relatable and educational. Relatable because of the unique experiences of queerness as a kid when you don’t have language for it and then, as a teenager and adult, when you finally do. Educational for the way Lamya weaves stories and teachings from the Quran through their growing queer identity, highlighting how queer some of the narratives are and the way faith can support us in our “otherness” as easily as it can be used to attack us for it.
Hijab Butch Blues is a true gift for queer Muslims and queer non-Muslims in equal measure. This is some *Sparkling Queer Content* you won’t want to miss!
The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel
Wow wow wow. What a look at the intergenerational trauma caused by cishetero cultural pressure and rape culture. Things I appreciated about The Family Outing:
1. Hempel respects her brother and is explicit about that respect and how she came to it.
2. How much I related to her experience of being a queer kid without the language for queerness.3
3. The way she holds people accountable for harm they caused while also understanding why they weren’t equipped to do better until later.
I recommend this one for queer and trans folk coming out later in life, for anyone with a family member who recently came out, and as a general addition to my *Sparkling Queer Content* recommendations.
Unbound by Tarana Burke
I have been appreciative of Burke’s work in the world for years and pre-ordered this memoir as soon as the publication date was announced. There was so much about this memoir I found relatable as a community organiser who got their start young. Burke does not shy away from highlighting the way not-for-profit work is as bound up with Capitalism as any other sector.
She also captures the general cultural vibe of our refusal to recognise that while Stranger Danger does exist, it’s almost always going to be someone known and in the community who commits sexual assault.
The scene with her child at the end of the chapter ‘end of the road’ wrecked me. What a model of how to genuinely create the circumstances for a child to feel safe disclosing abuse, and how hard it truly is to break such a cycle.
Honestly, this is one of my five star everyone-ought-to-read this books. It’s powerful and important. #MeToo has changed so much, but we still have far to go and much more to learn to truly shift our culture.
Crash Override by Zoe Quinn
Crash Override is a brilliant book in that it is both memoir and a guide for how to protect oneself from Internet abuse. Quinn is unflinching in naming GamerGate as a crowdsourced abuse campaign orchestrated by their abuser and that the Internet IS Real Life. It’s not something we can opt out of, and as long as there are no meaningful regulations to deplatform Nazis and hold people accountable for the intentional damage of doxxing and online stalking, we have to figure out ways to protect ourselves and the people we love in online spaces.
Something that stood out to me was the section about Terms and Agreements and safety protocols implemented by big tech companies. They rarely consider what it’s like to be anything but a cishet white dude and default to protecting speech over protecting most human being’s right to exist without being harrassed. It’s a real “Tell me you have never experienced harassment or threats because of your identity without telling me” kind of situation far too many of us are familiar with.
I also really appreciate that Quinn names the American-centricness of defending free speech over and above deplatforming people for hate speech. As a Canadian and someone who lived in the UK, the wildly fast and loose US-centric ideas about data protection and what people are allowed to say boggles my mind. There IS a line, you can find it.4
I highly recommend this for anyone who wants an accurate and informed understanding of the GamerGate harassment campaign against Quinn and others, and as a resource for steps you can take to ensure your privacy is protected in online spaces. You should also take a look at the website designed by Quinn and their community to help folks go through their online presence and security measures.
Being Heumann by Judith Heumann
After watching the documentary Crip Camp, I remarked that I would love a play-by-play of the 1977 Section 504 sit-in from someone who was there. What a joy to find out that such a play-by-play exists in the form of a memoir by disability rights activist Judy Heumann! She DELIVERS! Being Heumann is an amazing story of the build up to and success of the sit-in that set in motion the radical changes we are still seeing today around disability rights and justice.
Heumann never once pretends this was anything but a collaborative effort across organizations, generations, and different movements. It’s a real “Liberation is a collective project” story and an amazing gift from an ancestor. I am giddy to know that this book has been optioned to be a film. I would love to learn more about Brad Lomax and the other Black Panthers who worked in solidarity with the protestors, and to see this story of solidarity shared with as wide an audience as possible. Many thanks to Alice Wong for sharing this book in her newsletter, as I might not have encountered it otherwise.
I recommend this for disabled folks, organizers, and anyone cultivating a disability justice practice or working to uproot ableist beliefs.
Sipping Dom Pérignon Through A Straw by Eddie Ndopu
Sipping Dom Pérignon is another book I found thanks to Alice Wong’s regular newsletter and book giveaways!
I had never heard of Ndopu despite his incredible CV of global social activism and connection to other activists I follow, like Alok Menon. With this memoir, he illuminates that it’s not disability one must “overcome”, but ableism and discriminatory policies grown out of the idea that disability is an individual medical issue rather than a community and social issue.
This one is an easy read. It’s got nice simple language and it’s pretty short too. I recommend it for anyone struggling to focus or who finds longer books overwhelming. I also recommend this for anyone cultivating a disability justice practice.
Nobody Needs to Know by Pidgeon Pagonis
I started following Pagonis’ activist work when they had just started a public campaign against the hospital that violated their bodily autonomy as an infant and young child. I’ve been giddy for them to write a book about their work and pre-ordered Nobody Needs to Know the day Pagonis’ announced it.5
They have given the world a powerful story about the violence and damage done in the name of a false idea of gender and sex as binaries. This is a memoir about the sacredness of bodily autonomy and the possibility of creating a world that honours that neither gender nor sex have ever been binary.
I recommend this for community organizers and activists, queer and trans folk, and cishet folks who want to educate themselves on why all us queers find gender roles absurd and are baffled by society’s obsession with genitals.
A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung
I thoroughly enjoyed Chung’s first memoir and was thrilled to see her put out another. I loosely heard that A Living Remedy was about grief, but I was unprepared for the specific journey she takes the reader on in telling about the loss of both her parents within just a few years of each other. It’s not just the way she conveys how hard it is to live with compounding grief, but that her mother’s illness and death occurred during the lock-down period of the early days of Covid, when it was unsafe to travel, especially to see an immuno-compromised relative or friend. As someone who has a lot of experience with grief from an early age, I can tell you that none of it prepared me for grieving at a great distance.
Chung’s writing is a reminder that I was not isolated at all in the particulars of navigating grief when you can’t go through the cultural rituals around death in-person with family.
I recommend this to anyone who lost someone during the lock-down and travel restriction time of the pandemic, whether from Covid or not.
The Bright Hour by Nina Riggs
I don’t know that I can find the words to express the emotional experience of reading The Bright Hour. The narrative never lets you forget for one second that you are reading something written by someone who has died and was writing this in anticipation of that inevitability. While Riggs doesn’t present her story with particular spiritual framework or as a guide, I think it is a powerful tool for meditation on death and the dying process.
I recommend this to anyone seeking to find a sense of ease with the inevitability of death, anyone who enjoys contemplative memoirs, and anyone wanting to get better at talking about and relating to death and dying.
The Talk by Darrin Bell
I was not familiar with Bell’s work in the world and genuinely cannot remember how I came across this graphic memoir, but holy heck, is it a powerful piece of work. Bell shares a level of vulnerability by showing his personal growth around internalised anti-blackness. He also literally illustrates the harm and violence of white supremacy, from cops racially profiling Black children to academic gatekeeping—things I wouldn’t say are U.S. Specific, despite Bell being an American.
The Talk provides a solid narrative around why it’s so important to have the difficult conversations about racism and systemic oppression—we cannot change what we are unwilling to talk about.
Highly recommend for basically anyone but especially folks committed to anti-racism.6
General Non-fiction
Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey
I’ve been following the Nap Ministry for years now, so I was thrilled when Tricia Hersey got a book deal to help spread her important message: To rest under capitalist white supremacy is to resist capitalist white supremacy.
I read this book while on holiday in the Rocky Mountains, on a break where I chose to totally disengage from all social media, email, and even texting. Rest is Resistance was a gift to have to hand on this break.
Hersey iterates that rest is truly a radical act when our lives are lived under systems that require our exhaustion in order for them to go unchallenged and unchanged. We need to rest and resting is not counter to activism and social change, but part of it. We need healers and we need artists and we need naps and snacks and sleeping longer in the winter and falling asleep with the sun on our face in the summer.
And we don’t need any of it to serve capitalism or to make ends meet or to have enough extra energy to hustle harder. We DO need it because it is our birthright.
You are a precious child of the universe.
Tuck yourself in.
Take a nap, my kin.
Rest.
It’s revolutionary.
I recommend this book for community organizers, activists, folks in non-profit, folks working minimum wage jobs and making poverty wages, folks who never take lunch breaks, folks who say they hate napping, folks who feel guilt or shame about sleeping in, folks who have chronic fatigue or are disabled, folks with chronic illness, folks in corporate settings, folks who believe they have to earn rest, folks who believe resting is the same as being lazy, and folks who think rest needs to be justified.
Basically everyone would benefit from reading this book.
“You just need to lose weight” and 19 other myths about fat people by Aubrey Gordon
Get ready for another brilliant book by Aubrey Gordon! For fans of Maintenance Phase, the chapters of this book are effectively compiled and edited show notes without the buffer of Hobbes reacting to them. Which is to say, it’s a lot of information and citations and can get a bit intense with the on-the-ground reality of anti-fatness in our culture.
The final myth in the book, where Gordon points out that anti-fatness is not the last acceptable form of discrimination, is so important for folks to connect with. She points out that this kind of thinking illuminates ignorance of the ongoing impact of all the other ‘isms’ way too many people keep upholding. This book is a call to an interconnected approach to movement work and reminder that educating ourselves is a meaningful contribution to a better world.
I recommend this book to anyone who wants to uproot anti-fatness and ableism from their psyche, who is in community organizing, or who is working to raise kiddos to be comfortable in their bodies and less at risk of developing eating disorders, depression, and increased anxiety.
Butts: A Back Story by Heather Radke
Brilliantly titled, wonderfully written and fascinating to read, Butts was gifted to me by a friend on a whim and I am so grateful for that! Reading this book was a revelation on the power of butts in our culture, and how one body part can tell us a lot about attitudes towards race, class, and gender. Bonus, Radke was a guest on You’re Wrong About, so if you don’t fancy reading the entire book, you can get a taste of one chapter by listening to the episode “The Most Normal Girl in Cleveland” wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a great read if you want something interesting but not academic.
Unmasking Autism: The power of embracing our hidden neurodiversity by Devon Price
Price has written an incredible resource for Autistic folks everywhere, and for anyone with an Autistic loved one they want to support to feel comfortable and safe unmasking. From explaining the shifting understanding of Autism to navigating the complex web of Autistic experiences, Unmasking Autism is one of the first resources by and for Autistic people. It centres Autistic folks as fully functioning humans rather than inconvenient or alarming subhumans. I bought a copy so I can reread it and take notes, it’s so good.
This book is for any Autistic person, but especially if you were late-diagnosed or are self-diagnosed. And as I said before, it’s great if you want to be the type of person your Autistic family or friends can unmask around safely and comfortably.
The Tragedy of Heterosexuality by Jane Ward
With this book, Jane Ward gives language to so many things I’ve observed about straight culture as a queer person. I first read The Tragedy of Heterosexuality as a library book, but it is so good I had to buy a copy so I can re-read it and take notes.
Ward says all the quiet parts loud.
The opening sets the scene for how we tend to have a narrative that to be straight is normal and normality is better…and yet, queer people would never choose to be straight. The very idea is appalling to us, because straight culture, and therefore straight relationships, seem so very dysfunctional and weird.
She points out that heterosexuality doesn’t merely suffer from patriarchy, but from the toxic combination of patriarchy and rigid gender roles based on a made-up, fake version of biology. It’s hard to have a loving, equitable relationship with your partner if you see them as a threat (for women of men) or inferior (for men of women) AND you believe that your gender is something inherent and unchangeable. But Ward doesn’t just analyze the red flag contradictions that makes it so painful to be straight, she points out how it is valid and possible for people to choose queerness when faced with such diminishing possibilities of a healthy long-term straight relationship! This book is SPICY and I LOVE it.
I recommend this book to all the queers as validation that even though we also definitely have issues in our relationships, we are still in a better position to have healthy ones than the cishets would like us to believe. I also recommend this for the cishet folks who genuinely want to change straight culture for the better, to cut through the stereotypes and restrictive ideas of dating and romance. This goes especially for the straight folks who do have really healthy relationships not bound by patriarchy and notions of a gender-binary, as I think this book would give ya’ll language for bringing other straight people in to a more expansive, and therefore liberated, worldview.
You can see my full 2023 reading list on GoodReads.
Let me know in the comments what books you enjoyed in 2023!
Read Part One…
I basically don’t read autobiographies. I’ve read a few, but I am not that interested in celebrity and I think that’s a large part of why I don’t read them.
I read 22 memoirs in 2023 and I’m recommending ten of them—and honestly, I could recommend more. It might make more sense just to tell you which ones I don’t think you should read.
Her reflection on how baffled she was by the way other girls started getting crushes on boys was like a mirror to my own childhood.
Looking at YOU Substack, what with the weird commitment to “free speech” where the co-founders are unwilling to admit that there is absolutely a line that can be drawn on the sort of content folks post online, and therefore the sort of audience they cultivate. Which is to say, Substack makes money off of Nazi bloggers and that’s gross and I hate that the Internet is full of monopolies like this where opting out of using a platform isn’t really a meaningful option.
You may notice I mention pre-ordering books a lot. This is because pre-orders really help the authors, the usually small-presses printing their books, and the small bookstores I order them from. Truly, pre-ordering a book is a form of activism and community care you can do!
Who I always want to be everyone but alas…