There is something infinitely compelling about reading memoirs regarding long held secrets. Whether they be deep in the family history, a secret child, a life of espionage, or a deep shame for past exploits, they make for fascinating reads. We’ve selected some here that you may like to explore.
For a girl / MacColl, Mary-Rose
“Emerging from an unconventional, boisterously happy childhood, Mary-Rose MacColl was a rebellious teenager. And when, at the age of fifteen, her high-school teacher and her husband started inviting Mary-Rose to spend time with them, her parents were pleased that she now had the guidance she needed to take her safely into young adulthood. It wasn’t too long, though, before the teacher and her husband changed the nature of that relationship with overwhelming consequences for Mary-Rose. Consequences that kept her silent and ashamed through much of her adult life. In this poignant and brave true story, Mary-Rose brings these secrets to the surface and, in doing so, is finally able to watch them float away.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
On Chapel Sands : my mother and other missing persons / Cumming, Laura
“In the autumn of 1929, a small child was kidnapped from a Lincolnshire beach. Five agonising days went by before she was found in a nearby village. The child remembered nothing of these events and nobody ever spoke of them at home. On Chapel Sands is a book of mystery and memoir. Two narratives run through it: the mother’s childhood tale; and Cumming’s own pursuit of the truth. …Cumming discovers how to look more closely at the family album – with its curious gaps and missing persons – finding crucial answers, captured in plain sight at the click of a shutter.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Two trees make a forest : on memory, migration and Taiwan / Lee, Jessica J.
“After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather’s life, written on the cusp of his total memory loss, Jessica J Lee hunts his story, in parallel with exploring Taiwan, hoping to understand the quakes that brought her family from China, to Taiwan and Canada, and the ways in which our human stories are interlaced with geographical forces. Part-nature writing, part-biography, Two Trees Make a Forest traces the natural and human stories that shaped an island and a family.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Hons and rebels / Mitford, Jessica
“Jessica Mitford, the great muckraking journalist, was part of a legendary English aristocratic family. “Hons and Rebels is the tale of Mitford’s upbringing. Mitford found her family’s world as smothering as it was singular and, determined to escape it, she eloped with Esmond Romilly, Churchill’s nephew, to go fight in the Spanish Civil War. The ensuing scandal, in which a British destroyer was dispatched to recover the two truants, inspires some of Mitford’s funniest, and most pointed, pages.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
The yellow house / Broom, Sarah M
“Sarah M. Broom’s memoir The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house’s entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina.” (Catalogue)
The hare with amber eyes / De Waal, Edmund
“264 wood and ivory netsuke, none of them larger than a matchbox: in a stunningly original memoir Edmund de Waal describes the journey taken by this exquisite collection – and the family who treasured it – across continents, and centuries, in a gripping tale of war and peace, passion and loss. Apprentice potter Edmund de Waal was entranced by the collection when he first encountered it in the Tokyo apartment of his Great Uncle Iggie. And later, when Edmund inherited the ‘netsuke’, they unlocked a story far larger than he could ever have imagined.” (Catalogue)
In the days of rain : a daughter, a father, a cult / Stott, Rebecca
“Rebecca Stott both adored and feared her father, Roger Stott, a high-ranking minister in the Brighton, England, branch of the Exclusive Brethren, a separatist fundamentalist Christian sect. Years later, when the Stotts broke with the Brethren after a scandal involving the cult’s leader, Roger became an actor and compulsive gambler who left the family penniless and ended up in jail… In the Days of Rain is Rebecca Stott’s attempt to make sense of her childhood in the Exclusive Brethren, to understand her father’s role in the cult and in the breaking apart of her family, and to come to be at peace with her relationship with a larger-than-life figure whose faults were matched by a passion for life, a thirst for knowledge, and a love of literature and beauty.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
All you can ever know : a memoir / Chung, Nicole
“Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee. But as Nicole grew up–facing prejudice her adoptive family couldn’t see, finding her identity as an Asian American and as a writer, becoming ever more curious about where she came from–she wondered if the story she’d been told was the whole truth.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Long live the tribe of fatherless girls : a memoir / Madden, T Kira
“As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance–from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoes, she had plenty to envy. But beneath the surface, life in “the rat’s mouth” of Boca Raton was dangerous. Left to her own devices as both parents battled drug addiction, Kira navigated the perils of coming of age too quickly, and without guidance–oblivious parents and misguided babysitters at home, tormentors at school, sexual predators at the mall, and the confused, often destructive, desperately loving friendship of fatherless girls.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
A world erased : a grandson’s search for his family’s Holocaust secrets / Lederman, Noah
“This moving memoir by the grandson of Holocaust survivors transports readers from Noah’s grandmother’s home in Brooklyn to World War II Poland. Together, they explore the memories-of Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and the displaced persons camps-that his family had long buried. Their shared journey illuminates the power of never forgetting.” (Catalogue)
Epilogue : a memoir / Boast, Will
“Having already lost his mother and only brother, twenty-four-year-old Will Boast finds himself absolutely alone when his father dies of alcoholism. Numbly settling the matters of his father’s estate, Boast is deep inside his grief when he stumbles upon documents revealing a secret his father had intended to keep: He’d had another family before Will’s–a wife and two sons in England. This revelation leads to a flood of new questions. Heartbreaking and luminous, Epilogue is the stunning account of a young man’s struggle to understand all that he has lost and found, and to forge a new life for himself along the way.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
The Syrian jewelry box : a daughter’s journey for truth / Burns, Carina Sue
“Young American Carina Rourke grew up in blissful innocence in the Middle East until at age fifteen she succumbed to her obsessive desire to search inside her mother’s forbidden jewelry box. In so doing, she discovered a shocking family secret. On the heels of her discovery, she and her family pursued her father’s dream of an exotic drive through the Middle East and Europe. This journey serves as a metaphor for the woman Carina became–a silent nomad searching for identity.” (Catalogue)
