These Memoirs Will Inspire the Shit Out of You

Is there anything better than reading a searing account of someone else’s life and gleaning all of their hard-earned lesson for yourself?

Is there anything better than reading a searing account of someone else’s life and gleaning all of their hard-earned lesson for yourself? We thought not. These memoirs will inspire the shit out of you, or, at the very least, will make you say, “Damn, I don’t have it that bad.”

In Full Color Finding My Place in a Black and White World by Rachel Dolezal

CALM DOWN WE ARE ONLY JOKING. 

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

We know, we know, this is probably the one memoir that everyone has read. But this isn’t a list of underread memoirs, is it? Fuck no. It’s a list of inspiring memoirs. 

Buckle up as Jeanette Walls recounts her fucked up (and we mean fucked up) childhood as the daughter of radical nonconformists parents, living nomadically across the Southwest before settling in a bleak mining town in West Virginia. Walls and her four siblings fend for themselves and plot their escape from their parents, both brilliant people plagued by addiction and mental illness.

While there are plenty of memoirs about shitty parents, Walls writes about hers with gentle honesty and, at times, beguiling empathy that will leave you both rooting for them and afraid for their children at the same time. She gives equal measure to the joyful moments engineered by her father’s recklessness (hopping a barrier at the city zoo) and the horrifying ones (a garbage burn pit that nearly kills one of the children). 

The titular castle, a massive solar-powered home her dad fantasizes about building someday but whose addiction inevitably pulls him farther away from, is a masterful allegory the dream of a life ever hindered by a bleak reality. 

Favorite Passages

I never believed in Santa Claus. None of us kids did. Mom and Dad refused to let us. They couldn’t afford expensive presents and they didn’t want us to think we weren’t as good as other kids who, on Christmas morning, found all sorts of fancy toys under the tree that were supposedly left by Santa Claus.

Dad had lost his job at the gypsum, and when Christmas came that year, we had no money at all. On Christmas Eve, Dad took each one of us kids out into the desert night one by one.

“Pick out your favorite star”, Dad said.

“I like that one!” I said.

Dad grinned, “that’s Venus”, he said. He explained to me that planets glowed because reflected light was constant, and stars twinkled because their light pulsed.

“I like it anyway,” I said.

“What the hell,” Dad said. “It’s Christmas. You can have a planet if you want.”

And he gave me Venus.

“Mom always said people worried too much about their children. Suffering when you’re young is good for you, she said. It immunized your body and your soul, and that was why she ignored us kids when we cried. Fussing over children who cry only encouraged them, she told us. That’s positive reinforcement for negative behavior.

“I hate Erma,” I told Mom...

“You have to show compassion for her...” She added that you should never hate anyone, even your worst enemies. “Everyone has something good about them,” she said. “You have to find the redeeming quality and love the person for that.”

“Oh yeah?” I said. “How about Hitler? What was his redeeming quality?”

“Hitler loved dogs,” Mom said without hesitation.”

Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting.

“Isn’t that a sin?” I asked Mom.

Not exactly,” Mom said. “God doesn’t mind you bending the rules a little if you have a good reason. It’s sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.”

One time, I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. “You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. “It’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.”

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt

Holy shit, goddamn, is Angela’s Ashes a freight train or WHAT!?  In the game of memoirs, Frank McCourt is one of the best to ever do it. Angelas Ashes has all of the hallmarks of a great memoir: alcoholism, typhoid fever and Ireland. 

McCourt recounts his childhood in the 1930s when his family moved from Brooklyn back to Limerick, Ireland, following a tragedy that left his mother nearly comatose from depression. They hope by leaving America’s Great Depression, their prospects will improve, but Ireland’s economy is fuuuuucked. The family is plagued by death, moving from house to house and sliding further into despair. Frank drops out of school at age 13 to earn money for his family as he contemplates a future in America. Somehow, McCourt writes with joyful humor, documenting his family’s crushing poverty and all the darkness that is born from it with a sharp wit that can only be cut from surviving such circumstances. 

Favorite Passages

When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

I say, “Billy, what’s the use in playing croquet when you’re doomed?”

He says, “Frankie, what’s the use of not playing croquet when you’re doomed?”

It’s lovely to know that the world can’t interfere with the inside of your head.

He says, “You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else, but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.”

The master says it’s a glorious thing to die for the Faith and Dad says it’s a glorious thing to die for Ireland and I wonder if there’s anyone in the world who would like us to live.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi

A coming-of-age story set during the Islamic Revolution, Persepolis absolutely fucking shines in the graphic novel medium. Satrapi’s minimal and masterful black-and-white drawings create a cartoonishly exaggerated and sobering lens to access her point of view as a victim of war and a rebellious teenage girl. 

Satrapi’s childhood began in Tehran during the 1970s when the capital of Tehran was an ultramodern city brimming with culture. The Islamic Revolution shrouds the city in a suffocating, fundamentalist regime. She dreams about her and her parents becoming heroes as she becomes immersed in tales of protestors and revolutionaries, finding internal freedom in the fantasy of being a rebel. She forms a close bond with her Uncle Anoosh, a rebel who was imprisoned for nine years whose tragic end she is profoundly impacted by. When she was 14, as borders tightened and it became more and more difficult to flee Iran, her parents sent her alone to Vienna to study. 

The second graphic novel opens with Satrapi learning she is not staying in Vienna with her mother’s friend, as previously arranged, but instead at a boarding house run by strict Catholic nuns. Her life in Vienna is different from Tehran in every way; she’s kicked out of the boarding house and embraced by a group of young bohemians who idolize her as a refugee who has experienced war. She adopts Western youth culture and fears that her Iranian identity is slipping away from her. 

Favorite Passages

In life, you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

Nothing’s worse than saying goodbye. It’s a little like dying.

I wanted to be JUSTICE, LOVE, and the WRATH OF GOD all in one.

My father was not a hero, my mother wanted to kill people…. so I went out to play in the street.

The revolution is like a bicycle, when the wheels don’t turn, it falls.

In life, you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than bitterness and vengeance... Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself.

Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: one must educate oneself.

I had learned that you should always shout louder than your aggressor.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl was married for just nine months when he was detained by Nazi fuck heads and sent to the Theresienstadt Ghetto in modern-day Czech Republic, where 33,000 people would eventually die. He was later sent to Auschwitz and was in three concentration camps in four years. His parents, brother and wife would die. Frankl’s details of life in the concentration camps are wrenching: seeing a fellow prisoner smoke their own cigarettes instead of trading them for food meant the will to live was gone; the overwhelming horror when a guard glanced at the tattooed numbers on prisoners’ arms to summon them. 

Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning in just nine days. Part memoir and part psychology text, the book explores how he found meaning in the most abject suffering; or, as philosopher daddy Nietzsche put it succinctly,  “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He provides guidance on building one’s inner life and one’s spirit, free of the influence of outside sources. 

Favorite Passages

Everything can be taken from a man, but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer.

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.

So live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.

For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.

Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston

Queen of the Harlem Renaissance and absolute fucking genius Zora Neale Hurston published her memoir in 1942, five years after her smash hit, Their Eyes Where Watching God.

Dust Tracks on a Road swells with Hurton’s signature whip-smart humor and masterful allegories, a vehicle for the vulnerability in which her life stories are told.

The early chapters detail her childhood in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida.

When Hurston’s mother died when she was 13, her father remarried a mega-bitch who didn’t like her and her seven siblings. She was sent away to a boarding school, and her father asked the school to adopt her. So fucked up. The ensuing years see Hurston essentially become an orphan and drop out of school so she can work odd jobs to survive, including working as a maid for a traveling performing troupe. She experiences the cruelty of the Jim Crow South and fights through poverty to make her way into Howard University, Barnard College, becoming a literal scholar of African American and Caribean folklore. 

Favorite Passages

I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.

Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at the sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground. 

Grown people know that they do not always know the way of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof.

I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.

I don’t know any more about the future than you do. I hope that it will be full of work, because I have come to know by experience that work is the nearest thing to happiness that I can find. . . I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death.

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.