10 Memoirs by Black Women That Are Worth Your Time
A good memoir does something a novel cannot. It puts you in the room with a woman who lived it and is still deciding how she feels about it. These ten are by Black women writing about their own lives, and none of them tie it up neatly at the end.
Some are famous. Some you may never have been handed. They cover a childhood in New Orleans East, a Mississippi town that kept burying its young men, a career that lasted seven decades, and a life spent in exile. Start with whichever one you cannot stop thinking about after the first paragraph.
Becoming
The South Side girl who kept a list of everything she was supposed to be, and the years she spent deciding which parts to keep. Obama is best here on the ordinary stuff: a small apartment, a piano teacher, a marriage she had to renegotiate out loud.
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Men We Reaped
Ward lost five young Black men from her Mississippi hometown in four years, including her brother. She tells their deaths in reverse and her own life forward, so the two lines meet in the middle. Devastating and worth it.
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Hunger
Gay subtitles this one a memoir of her body and means it literally. She writes about weight, appetite, and the assault that reshaped how she moved through the world, without offering the redemption arc readers keep asking her for.
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The Yellow House
A hundred years of one family and one shotgun house in New Orleans East, a part of the city the tourist map leaves off. Then Katrina takes the house. Won the National Book Award and earned it.
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Somebody's Daughter
Ford grew up in Indiana writing letters to a father in prison, without knowing what he had done. The book is about that answer and everything her body and her mother carried in the meantime.
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Negroland
Jefferson grew up in the Black upper class of mid-century Chicago, a world with its own rules about hair, diction, and who you were permitted to marry. A sharp look at privilege that never once protected anyone from racism.
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Just as I Am
Seven decades of work, told at ninety-six, published two days before she died. Tyson turned down the roles that would have paid her and waited for the ones that would not embarrass her, and explains exactly what that cost.
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Thick
Eight essays on beauty, money, competence, and being the most educated woman in a room that still will not hear you. Cottom writes like a sociologist and a woman who has been underestimated in person.
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Assata
Shakur's account of her childhood, her politics, the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, the trial, and the escape that took her to Cuba. Read it as her version, told in her voice, which is the point of an autobiography.
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Ordinary Light
Before she was poet laureate, Smith was the youngest of five in a California house full of faith and quiet expectation. The book circles her mother's death and what it does to a daughter's belief. The prose reads like her poems.
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