"I had the very good fortune of happening upon A Moveable Feast when I was visiting Paris, the backdrop of Hemingway’s most biographical book. May we all live at least one day as Ernest did! In this memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, he romanticizes a period in his life when he had very little by celebrating good books, good wine, and good friends."

"An extraordinary memoir by an extraordinary woman. Each chapter is composed to the men (real and imagined) in her life who feel at once brilliantly mythical, and painfully earthbound. There are letters to former lovers, briefly encountered heroes, fictional paramours, and family members, and like with Lena Dunham’s book, I’ll shuffle through and reread to laugh and weep as if it were at first time."

"Read this memoir for a glimpse of a vanished country (ours, circa 1940s/1950s/1960s) that had an entirely different notion of education and the arts, i.e., a country that valued them and honored them and supported them with money and muscular institutions, which institutions, in turn, produced courageous and original national artists like Glass – who is also, turns out, a wonderfully gifted, honest, and amiable writer."

"A shatteringly beautiful memoir about Hinton’s life on death row for 28 years for a crime he did not commit. It’s a real downer to read about something as dark and unfortunate as wrongful incarceration, but Mr. Hinton expresses himself with a heart incomprehensibly swollen with love and gives meaningful insight into his alienating experience. And he does so with a disarming sense of humor."

"I remember reading this memoir some twenty years ago and thinking I had found a long lost childhood friend. With the language of a poet—both incandescent and glaringly fluorescent—Karr recounts sexual abuse, the charm and unreliability of her alcoholic father, and the emotional chaos of her brilliant, beautiful, and mentally ill mother. What emerges in memory is a meditation on truth found in love and self-knowledge."

"This book is a landmark in terms of sex-positive feminism, and it’s one of the funniest, most honest books I’ve ever read. It’s a memoir by Xaviera Hollander that tells the story of her sexual life, from her first sexual experiences, to becoming one of New York's highest paid prostitutes, to being the madam of one of the city’s most infamous brothels. She’s one of my heroes, lol."

"Another music pick, this time from James who is the accordion player in The Pogues. I read his memoir, Here Comes Everybody, about half way through writing my own, and it made me go back and change some things as it was just so good. It made me really think about my own writing and how I could improve it. Even if you’re not a huge Pogues fan it’s well worth a read."

"This still feels like one of the most radical books I’ve ever read. It’s considered to be the first existential novel. It’s the memoir of a nameless retired civil servant in Saint Petersburg who’s staging a protest against rational thought and says things like “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over the other organisms. It's by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth! I talk nonsense, therefore I'm human.”"