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Personal & Family Memoir

Memoirs about families: the ones we are born into and the ones we try to understand. In Educated, Tara Westover grows up in a survivalist family in Idaho and teaches herself her way to Cambridge. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls looks back on a brilliant, chaotic and often hungry childhood with unforgettable parents. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal follows a collection of Japanese netsuke through his family's history, from Paris and Vienna to Tokyo. Moving, sometimes difficult reads, and favourites with book clubs.

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The Glass Castle

A Memoir

By Jeannette Walls

In The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls recounts a childhood shaped by poverty, frequent moves, parental neglect, and fierce family loyalty. Her father, Rex, is intelligent, charismatic, and full of magnificent plans, but his alcoholism repeatedly turns promise into instability. Her mother, Rose Mary, prizes artistic freedom and self-reliance while resisting the ordinary responsibilities of parenthood. Their children consequently learn to find food, manage danger, protect one another, and imagine lives beyond the family’s worsening circumstances. The memoir moves from the American Southwest to Welch, West Virginia, and eventually to New York City, where Jeannette builds an independent adult life. Rather than offering a simple story of villainous parents and heroic escape, Walls examines how love can coexist with anger, shame, admiration, and betrayal. The result is both a family narrative and an inquiry into resilience, memory, poverty, and the difficult work of defining home.

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The Hare with Amber Eyes

A Hidden Inheritance

By Edmund de Waal

Edmund de Waal traces the history of the Ephrussis, a prosperous European Jewish banking family, by following an inherited collection of 264 Japanese netsuke—small carvings originally used as toggles with traditional clothing. The collection passes from the art-filled world of Charles Ephrussi in late nineteenth-century Paris to the family palace in Vienna, survives Nazi seizure after the 1938 Anschluss, and eventually travels with Ignace “Iggie” Ephrussi to postwar Tokyo. De Waal combines family memoir, cultural history, art history, travel, and archival investigation to ask what objects can preserve when wealth, homes, status, and lives are violently dispersed. The carvings do not provide a simple recovery of the past; instead, their survival exposes both the durability and the limitations of material memory. Through their changing settings and owners, the book turns one inheritance into a closely observed account of collecting, antisemitism, dispossession, migration, and remembranc…

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Educated

A Memoir

By Tara Westover

Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho and gradually building a life beyond the boundaries of her childhood. Without conventional schooling, she works in her father’s junkyard, absorbs a worldview shaped by religious certainty and distrust of public institutions, and initially lacks basic knowledge that her future classmates take for granted. Self-directed study eventually brings her to Brigham Young University and, later, to Cambridge and Harvard. Yet education does not function as a simple escape route. As Westover acquires language for history, power, violence, and personal autonomy, she must reconsider memories and loyalties that formed her identity. The memoir’s central conflict is therefore not ignorance versus knowledge alone, but belonging versus self-definition. It examines what happens when intellectual growth makes a former understanding of home impossible to sustain—and when telling one’s own story carries the risk…

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Persepolis

The Story of a Childhood

By Marjane Satrapi , Mattias Ripa , Blake Ferris

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood is the first English-language volume of Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir about growing up in Tehran. Told in stark black-and-white panels, it follows Marji from age six to fourteen while the Shah's monarchy collapses, the Islamic Republic tightens its grip, and war with Iraq changes daily life. Because Satrapi grew up in a secular, politically engaged family, history arrives as kitchen-table argument, family loss and a child's shifting questions about God, class and justice. Comedy and grief share the same page, and the child's viewpoint keeps vast political events personal. For anyone collecting memoirs to read about revolution, repression and coming of age, it is a compact, approachable starting point.

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