AT THE BEGINNING OF A LIFE, reading about the whole arc of someone else's experiences can be beneficial. Teenagers struggle with those perennial questions: What will my life be about? What choices should I make? Often the autobiographies picked up by teenagers or selected for them show lives that were difficult or hard; books such as Augusten Burroughs's Running with Scissors may make an adolescent's own life seem easy in comparison.
Written for adults, Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life has long been the standard-bearer for an autobiography with great artistic quality that appeals to an adolescent audience; almost all of the memoirs read by teenagers, in fact, first appeared as books for adults. More recently Jack Gantos, a writer for young readers, has crafted in Hole in My Life an honest and unforgettable book written with an adolescent reader in mind. Both books help define what can be accomplished in this category.
These autobiographies show the ability of the human being to triumph over adversity. In many cases written by those who became professional writers, they are worth reading simply for their creators' ability to describe their experience and for their literary style. All of them provide answers to a young person searching for a roadmap for life.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
14–18 • Random House • 1969 • 281 pp.
Dancer, actress, cook, streetcar conductor, brothel madam, and writer, Maya Angelou created an autobiography that describes her slow and painful growth toward identity. In a chronological first-person narrative, told in dialect, she brings her characters and settings so vividly to life that readers feel as if they can touch them. They seem more real than the people one meets on the street.
Raised by her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas, Maya and her brother also lived with their mother in St. Louis, and in one particularly powerful scene she recounts how she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. In this memoir she focuses on segregated life in the South, social injustice, economic hardship, and racism. But ultimately the book chronicles the triumph of a young girl over all these obstacles to become her own person. The book, like its author, is sassy, vibrant, intelligent, and full of laughter and love.
Angelou originally turned down the offer of Robert D. Loomis, an editor at Random House, to write an autobiography. But several months later he posed the idea to her again, saying, "Autobiography as literature is the most difficult thing anyone can do." Angelou, always up for a challenge, produced this powerful piece of literature at the age of forty-one, taking her title from Sir Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem "Sympathy."
The resulting book has become part of the American literary canon, a story that lingers with readers for decades after they have encountered it.
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
Running with Scissors
14–18 • St. Martin's • 2002 • 304 pp.
In this memoir, Burroughs recounts the horrifying, grotesque story of his childhood in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the late 1970s. When his manic-depressive mother, a poet, and his cold, alcoholic father separated, his mother put him under the care of her lunatic psychiatrist. Hence at the age of twelve Burroughs landed in the home of Dr. Finch with a few of his other patients. Unnerved by their squalid household, the boy became friends with the Finches' daughters, joining them in substance abuse and wrecking the family's Victorian home. The doctor encouraged Burroughs to become involved sexually with an "adopted" son; then Finch helped Burroughs stage a suicide attempt in order to avoid school. Through all the insanity, the boy soldiers on with humor and unflagging optimism.
Although this story of one of the most dysfunctional families and childhoods ever recorded should not be read by the squeamish, it has attracted a wide audience of adolescents. Their own homes don't seem quite so awful after living in the Finch household for a few hundred pages.
ROALD DAHL
Boy: Tales of Childhood
12–14 • Farrar, Straus • 1984 • 160 pp.
Although Roald Dahl's fiction has always been embraced by his readers—children or young adults—adults have often been troubled by the elements of sadism inherent in many of his plots. In this autobiography, written a few years before he died, Dahl revealed why he wrote the kinds of books he did—because he experienced physical punishment, frequently and often, as a youth. From the age of nine to eighteen, he endured English boarding schools, in which adults wielded terrible power over the innocent students. The horror of these sadistic and ritual beatings by masters and prefects remained: "I couldn't get over it. I never have gotten over it."
More a collection of episodic and remembered incidents than an extensive autobiography, Boy still reveals an enormous amount about the author; he continued his story in Going Solo.
DAVE EGGERS
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story
14–18 • Simon & Schuster • 2000 • 375 pp.
Eggers, the editor of the literary journal McSweeney's, has created a powerful commentary on life and work at the start of the twenty-first century. After the death of both parents within weeks of each other, Eggers, then in his early twenties, and his eight-year-old brother, Toph (short for Christopher), "inherit each other." The two leave their suburban Chicago home to live closer to his only slightly older sister in California. His parents' deaths are described in painful detail, but the tone changes, as do the situations in which Eggers becomes involved and explores.
The form of this memoir-novel is extraordinary. Not only is it well paced, it is stylistically varied—making it difficult to separate fact from fiction, propagandizing from satire. Even the copyright page contains several jokes: "Published in the United States by Simon & Schuster, a division of a larger and more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled." Marked by brilliant storytelling, this work of fiction happens to be heartbreaking and hysterically funny at the same time.
PAULA FOX
Borrowed Finery: A Memoir
14–18 • Holt • 2001 • 213 pp.
Dropped off at an orphanage shortly after her birth, Paula Fox was rescued by a clergyman—to whom she paid tribute in One-Eyed Cat —and passed along to various relatives or her parents' drinking buddies. For brief periods she returned to her parents, but her alcoholic father could not really care for her, and her mother openly rejected her.
Now a brilliant novelist, Fox excels in the telling detail and striking images; in this account of her first twenty years she never engages in self-pity or whining. Ultimately she survives these years, transcends her past, and becomes both an adult writer of Desperate Characters and the Newbery Medal–winning author of The Slave Dancer. This compelling memoir reveals how she developed her extraordinary sensibility.
ANNE FRANK
The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
12–14 • Doubleday • 1995 • 335 pp.
Edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler; translated by Susan Massotty. Born into an upper-class Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne Frank moved with her family to Amsterdam in 1933. But in 1941, when the Nazis began rounding up Amsterdam's Jews, Otto Frank and his business partners prepared a secret hiding place in their office building on Prinsegracht Canal.
In June of 1942 Anne celebrated her thirteenth birthday and received a clothbound diary, in which she recorded her feelings and thoughts from June 12, 1942, to August 1, 1944. Through her words, we learn about life in the annex as a group of eight remained hidden and virtually imprisoned for two years. In August of 1944, the Nazis discovered their hiding place; the following March Anne died of typhoid fever in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Motivated by a strong desire to write, Frank named her diary Kitty and structured her entries as letters. This book serves as a candid self-portrait, a picture of domestic life, an account of people threatened with death, a depiction of the problems common to young adults, and an examination of moral issues. The writing also shows the triumph of the human spirit in terrible times.
Of the inhabitants of the annex, only Otto Frank survived. When he returned to Amsterdam, Anne's writings came into his hands. He typed a copy, which at first circulated among friends, then was published in Germany in 1947. Five years later, the English and American editions appeared.
Although critics at first were chary, afraid the book might be too difficult in its emotional content, by the end of the year young readers had convinced them of the diary's power. That 1952 edition did not include a great deal of material that Otto Frank considered inappropriate. After his death, the Anne Frank Foundation decided to make the entire diary available. With about 30 percent more material than in the original version, the definitive edition gives a better sense of Anne's growing sexual awareness and of her observations about people.
For over fifty years, The Diary of a Young Girl has described the horror of the war as seen through the eyes of a young woman. With more than fifteen million readers worldwide, in the end this book has fulfilled one of Anne Frank's greatest dreams: "I want to go on living even after my death!"
Hole in My Life
14–18 • Farrar, Straus • 2002 • 200 pp.
PRINTZ HONOR
A well-loved and respected author of children's and young adult books, Jack Gantos moves in this extraordinary book into territory not often explored by such writers. At twenty, he helped smuggle a ton of hashish from St. Croix to New York City. He takes readers along on the voyage—the insanity of his fellow smuggler Hamilton, the near misses with law enforcement officers, and the fear and paranoia of the drug dealer's life. But rather than telling a story of a youthful misdemeanor, Gantos relates how he paid for his crime—fifteen months in the Ashland, Kentucky, federal prison. There he experiences all the vulnerability of a young man in a horrible situation, frightened by everything around him. To keep his sanity, he gives up drugs and writes; although he can't obtain a journal, he scribbles between the lines of The Brothers Karamazov. By applying to college, he escapes prison for a writing program. In time he leaves Ashland to become what he always wanted to be—a writer.
Gantos always believed that his life story might be written but thought that it would be crafted with an adult audience in mind. After he read Walter Dean Myers's Monster, he felt that his own personal prison saga could, if presented in the right way, help teenagers explore what happens when an individual makes a bad choice. With the book's publication, Gantos began speaking in prisons and with those tough readers not necessarily attracted to other titles. One teen told him that Hole in My Life was the "only book I've ever finished."
In the spare, lean language of Raymond Carver, brutally honest, without a trace of self-pity or self-justification, the memoir keeps readers at the edge of their seats. At times the breathless pace brings to mind one of Gantos's own favorite titles, Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Gantos has said that not only does this book cover the details of his life, "it covers nearly every important theme in my life—my dedication to reading, my desire to write, my love of what is humanly artful and naturally beautiful, and my strong belief that life tumbles forward from violation to redemption."
Successfully used as an all-community-reads title, Hole in My Life shows how a bad beginning to a life does not always lead to a bad life story.
HOMER HICKAM
Rocket Boys/October Sky
14–18 • Delacorte • 1998 • 428 pp.
In 1957 the Russians launched Sputnik, and fourteen-year-old Homer Hickam of Coalwood, West Virginia, discovered his mission: to become a rocket scientist like Dr. Werner von Braun, work for NASA, and beat the Soviets. But since he was only a sophomore in high school, he resorted to building rockets in Coalwood, a company mining town that was slowly dying. With the help of some other boys in the community, Homer launched a series of homemade rockets. At first they went awry, sometimes causing damage to his home and the town, but Homer pressed on, unwilling to sacrifice his dream just because he lived in a small West Virginia town. Eventually almost everyone in the area pitched in with help, advice, books, equipment, and manufacturing parts—including the preacher and some rather remarkable teachers. In the end, Homer won a gold medal at the National Science Fair and became a NASA engineer.
The bare outline of this memoir only scratches the surface of the material included. The book explores the age-old conflict of father and son, younger and older brothers, and the pain of unrequited first love. But it also embraces communal and global issues—the plight of families in West Virginia, the life of coal miners, the space race, and the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy. For science enthusiasts, it provides specific details about how the rockets got built and launched.
For those who like to read about triumph over adversity, few books present that theme as magnificently; this stunning tour de force brings to life the concepts of passion, hope, confidence, self-realization, and following and living a dream. Not only superb for independent reading, it has been used quite successfully in classrooms—in English, math, and science—even providing strength and hope for students at Columbine High School.
JEANNE WAKATSUKI HOUSTON AND JAMES D. HOUSTON
Farewell to Manzanar
14–18 • Houghton Mifflin • 1973 • 188 pp.
On December 7, 1941, Jeanne Wakatsuki and her family learned of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Although her father burned his Japanese flag at that moment, all the family was arrested by the FBI and moved from one Japanese ghetto to another. Then President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, and the Wakatsuki family moved to Manzanar Relocation Center, 225 miles northeast of Los Angeles. With cramped living conditions, badly prepared food, swilling dust, and camp toilets with no privacy, the family began to disintegrate. Seven-year-old Jeanne had to deal with fear, confusion, and bewilderment, and her father, once a samurai warrior, became a violent drunk.
In 1944 the Supreme Court ruled such internment illegal, and the camps started closing. Young Jeanne adjusted to a more normal school life, but still encountered enormous prejudice against Japanese-Americans. Some thirty years later, she returned to Manzanar, realizing the tremendous impact the camp had had on her life and on the lives of other Japanese-Americans.
In the early 1970s, the writer James Houston interviewed his wife in a series of audiotapes about her experience during World War II. At first they believed the tapes would be shared only with family members, many born at the Manzanar camp, who knew little of the family history. However, they ultimately turned this personal history into one of the first, and most moving, books about the experience of Japanese-Americans during the war. Long a staple of school curriculums, this true and heartbreaking story has taken on even greater significance since the terrorist attacks in 2001; it forces readers to think about how Americans deal with "the enemy" in wartime.
FRANCISCO JIMÉNEZ
The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child
12–16 • University of New Mexico • 1997 • 116 pp.
A professor of modern language today, Francisco Jiménez grew up as the son of migrant farmworkers who came to the United States illegally when he was four. Although his own family was illiterate, Jiménez describes his own fascination with books and how he learned to read. At six he began working in the fields, moving from place to place. As he writes poignantly in the book, his education was interrupted again and again because the family had to move with the crops. His parents and their eight children lived in one-room shacks and tents; when Jiménez was in junior high, they all were caught by the INS and sent back to Mexico. However, in time they acquired visas and returned legally.
The Circuit, originally called "Harvest of Hope: Life of a Migrant Child," presents in a dozen stories a chronicle of the 1940s. It has often been compared to The Grapes of Wrath but has been told from the Mexican-American point of view. Jiménez read Steinbeck's work in college and felt it was the first book he could actually relate to: "For the first time, I realized the power of the written work, that an artist can write creatively and make a difference in people's lives."
In The Circuit, told powerfully in the first person, readers feel the pain and confusion of a young boy. They experience his excitement about learning to read. But they also see how the family stays together with a strong work ethic, perseverance, pride in their Mexican heritage, and strong religious faith. Jiménez continued his memoirs in a second book about high school, Breaking Through.
"I wanted readers to hear the child's voice, to see through his eyes, and to feel through his heart," Jiménez wrote. He accomplished this and more in this slim volume. For the right readers at the right moment, The Circuit can alter the way they view migrant workers. A perfect book to use with students studying English as a second language, it also appeals to those who like uplifting stories about Americans who work for their dreams and achieve a better life.
FRANK MCCOURT
Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
14–18 • Scribner • 1996 • 368 pp.
PULITZER PRIZE
"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela, Frank McCourt grew up in the slums of Limerick when they returned to Ireland. Since Frank's father remained chronically drunk and unemployed, the family had to live on the dole, charity, the Catholic Church, and the support of unsympathetic relatives. Were McCourt not such a gifted storyteller, the material would be too bleak even for Dickens. But in his hands, the sights, smells, and realities of this impoverished childhood have been rendered with black humor and grace. As child after child in the McCourt family dies from typhoid or consumption, Frank survives and lives to tell his story with exuberance and eloquence. As he tries out his wings as an adolescent post office delivery boy, every teen ever involved in a dead-end job will be able to identify with him. After many doors have been shut in his face, the young Frank finally earns his passage to America, intent on a better life.
A dazzling, literary recreation of McCourt's childhood and adolescent years, Angela's Ashes was followed by ' Tis: A Memoir and Teacher Man: A Memoir.
WILLIE MORRIS
My Dog Skip
12–14 • Random House • 1995 • 128 pp.
In 1943, nine-year-old Willie Morris fell in love with Skip, a smooth-haired fox terrier. "I was an only child, and he now was an only dog." Until Morris went to college, the two remained inseparable. Skip had tremendous talents. He could play football, drive a car (with a little help from his friend Willie), and run errands, wearing a small leather pouch. As the book tells stories about Skip, it also recounts Morris's boyhood in the sleepy town of Yazoo, Mississippi.
Morris once said, "Skip ... was not my dog. He was my brother and I still miss him." Morris admitted that the only time he ever cried while writing came when he wrote the first two pages, describing Skip as a puppy, and when he wrote the ending of the book. Many have cried with him over this ultimate dog book, savoring his description of a boy's love affair with his dog.
Bad Boy: A Memoir
12–14 • HarperCollins • 2001 • 214 pp.
Having grown up in Harlem in the 1940s, Walter Dean Myers shows in his autobiography how he slowly and painfully found his own identity, despite a quick and violent temper that kept him in constant trouble. Gifted as both an athlete and an intellect, Myers received help from teachers who recognized his talents. His high school English teacher, ultimately, gave him the best advice: "Whatever happens, don't stop writing."
In Bad Boy, Myers honestly examines the issues of being black in America, from his first exposure to the history of slavery to his realization that his best friend, who is white, has social opportunities that he himself does not. He also confronts gang violence and a serious speech impediment; as he struggles to speak, he finds that he can write what he can't say.
Ultimately, the book attests to the power of reading and writing, no matter what the cultural background of the individual. As in all his work, Myers exhibits honesty, humor, and hope for individuals to bring about their own salvation. Certainly, his multitude of fans have benefited from his transformation from a bad boy to a fine writer who can honestly examine his own past—in this book and in his poetry and fiction.
SYLVIA PLATH
The Bell Jar
14–18 • Harper • 1971 • 264 pp.
Although written as a work of fiction, The Bell Jar presents only a lightly disguised account of Sylvia Plath's first suicide attempt at the age of twenty. In the book Esther Greenwood, brilliant, beautiful, and talented, spends a month in New York as one of twelve interns working for a women's magazine. In the city, she can barely cope with her life, and when she returns home, everything starts to spiral out of control. A psychiatrist and shock treatments only worsen the problem; she keeps planning her suicide and almost succeeds. Finally, after spending time in an institution, Esther returns to college. The bell jar that has trapped her has been lifted, although she doesn't know if she'll be caught in it again.
With its treatment of depression and suicide when these topics were seldom discussed, the book first appeared in England under a pseudonym, Victoria Lucas, because Plath did not want to scandalize her American family. A serious poet, she felt that the book might be considered substandard, and it did receive lukewarm reviews in England. But a few weeks after its publication, Plath killed herself, and the book took on a life of its own. Fans of her poetry read it to find reasons for her suicide; but many, then and later, began to appreciate its accurate and precise description of an adolescent's descent into depression and mental illness.
Many bootleg copies of the book arrived in America before it finally appeared in 1971 and became an immediate bestseller. American critics thought it a much better book than Plath had herself, and the book established itself as a staple of high school and college reading lists. This serious exploration of a woman's attempt to deal with mental illness has spoken to millions of readers. Although the book clearly reflects the attitudes of the 1950s, adolescents still deal with its core issues—how to sort out a life and be true to yourself.
DAVID SEDARIS
Me Talk Pretty One Day
14–18 • Little, Brown • 2000 • 272 pp.
A zany satirist with heart, David Sedaris has a genius for turning autobiography into hilarious comedy. Material that might have been maudlin or sentimental in other hands emerges from his pen as amusing and absurd. Ranging from his troubled childhood in North Carolina to the years with his lover in France, the book's twenty-seven essays can be read independently as short stories. Sedaris thwarts his speech therapist by cleverly avoiding words with the s sound; he and his classmates in France try to explain the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim; his sister Amy wears a fat suit to upset their weight-conscious father.
Turning self-deprecation into an art form, Sedaris has a slightly twisted sense of humor that often appeals to adolescents, who admit to reading the book with frequent belly laughs.
Night
14–18 • Hill & Wang • 1960 • 128 pp.
In this powerful first-person account, Eliezer, a Jewish teenager, and his family begin their journey in Sighet, Transylvania, in 1941. Elie studies the Old Testament and Cabbala, but his instruction ends when the Germans deport his teacher. Eventually the German and Hungarian police set up ghettos for the Jews. Elie and his family arrive at Birkenau, where the boy finds himself separated from his mother and sister. Like other arrivals, he immediately begins to witness the horrors of the concentration camp, with open-pit fires that consume people and babies. Elie gets stripped, disinfected, and subjected to unimaginable cruelty. Treated as slave labor, beaten, and humiliated, he begins to lose his humanity and faith in God and those around him. Sent on to Auschwitz, Buna, Gleiwitz, and Buchenwald, Elie becomes one of only three members of his family to survive.
Often read as part of a Holocaust unit, Night was first published in Argentina in 1956. Some consider it a memoir; others, a novel based on the author's experience. In 1986 Elie Wiesel received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts as "author, teacher and storyteller to defend human rights and peace throughout the world." As someone who emerged from the kingdom of the night, he transformed those experiences into a story that continues to convey the horrors of the Holocaust to adolescent readers.
TOBIAS WOLFF
This Boy's Life
14–18 • Atlantic • 1989 • 288 pp.
For his fourth book, Tobias Wolff wrote an autobiography, a coming-of-age story told in the first person. In 1955, moving with his divorced mother to Utah, Toby changes his name to Jack, in honor of Jack London. Jack's father, living in Connecticut, has married a millionairess. But his much poorer mother keeps moving with Jack, usually to avoid violent men; in Seattle she meets and marries Dwight, who turns out to be quite cruel to them both. Because the writer never pities the boy, Wolff shows the people he encounters with amazing objectivity. Readers move from watching The Mickey Mouse Club with him to seeing him forge letters of praise for his applications to private boarding schools. Although Jack attempts to run away many times, all his plans are foiled.
Eventually his luck turns, and an alumnus of the prestigious Hill School recommends Jack to the school, serves as his mentor, and provides a new wardrobe to send him off. Wolff describes the years at this elite prep school in a subsequent volume, Old School. Unfortunately, Jack cannot totally reform. He gets expelled his senior year and goes to fight in Vietnam.
A remarkable account of a seemingly unremarkable life, This Boy's Life has set the standard for other writers' memoirs and has inspired titles such as Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shoutin and Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. At the time of its publication, many questioned whether anyone would want to read the story of a not-quite-famous author, but the success of the book surprised both Wolff and his publisher. Although it tells the particular saga of one young man, This Boy's Life also relates a universal story—of rebelling but still loving a mother, breaking away from a family, and hoping for a different, better life.