"Actually, a great book is Billy Idol's book (Dancing With Myself). I don't consider it a rock memoir, though. That guy is such a deep figure. It's a deep, self-searching book about his life, his motorcycle accident and just all the crap he went through. I knew that he wrote it himself without help and that really impressed me. I know Billy a little bit. I really look up to him. I was hoping that it was going to be good. It was. Right away, in the foreword, it seemed he found his writing voice."

"This memoir recounts the time Karen Blixen (a Danish author) spent in Kenya from 1914. When I saw the 1985 movie version with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, it just killed me and inspired me to read the book. Both make me sob so much I can hardly breathe. Later, my assistant gave me a beautiful old copy, which makes me treasure the story more. I even stayed in the Karen Blixen suite at the Hotel D’Angleterre in her native Copenhagen. The relationship between Blixten and the Safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton broke my heart. It’s a book about finding and losing love"

"The nonfictional account of Mary McCarthy's idyllic childhood, cut short by the death of her parents. McCarthy was orphaned by the influenza epidemic that followed WWI; both of her parents died in a flash. She was then raised by her grandparents in Seattle. The wonderful thing she does in the book is to tell what happened, and then to write about what might have happened. It takes 'memoir' to a whole other level. It gives you a shot of adrenaline; it makes you ask yourself, 'What was the transformational moment in my life when my story really begins?'"