memoir

For Leslie Jamison, who started out writing fiction and published a novel eight years ago, nonfiction offers a method of exploring the richness of life in all its complexities, as illustrated in her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath. 

It took Joyce Maynard twenty-five years of reflection, distance, and understanding before she was able to write her first memoir. But when tragedy struck later in life, her second memoir came much more quickly. 

A look at some of the year’s best debut literary nonfiction by Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Venegas, Mike Scalise, Jeannie Vanasco, Durga Chew-Bose, and Thomas Mira y Lopez.