Books like A Woman's Story
Written after her mother's death, Ernaux's portrait of her mother, a factory girl who became a shopkeeper and wanted her daughter to rise.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Woman's Story
A Man's Place
Ernaux writes about her father, a labourer who became the owner of a café-grocery in Normandy, and the distance her education put between them.
Shame
Ernaux begins from a Sunday in June 1952 when her father tried to kill her mother, and reconstructs the world of the twelve-year-old girl she was.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
Blue Nights
In the aftermath of her daughter Quintana's death, Didion turns the pale light of late summer on her own motherhood, her own failing body, and what it means to be the last one left.
Abandoning a Cat
A short memoir of Murakami's father, a teacher drafted into the war in China, that starts from a childhood afternoon when the two of them left a cat at the beach and found it waiting at home.
Boyhood
Coetzee's account, written in the third person, of a boy growing up in Worcester, a provincial town in the Cape, in the late 1940s and early 50s.
The Words
Sartre's account of his childhood to the age of eleven in his grandfather's Paris apartment, among books, and how he decided to become a writer.
The Copenhagen Trilogy
Tove Ditlevsen's memoirs of growing up poor in Copenhagen's working-class Vesterbro in the 1920s, wanting to be a poet, and the marriages and dependencies that followed.
Down and Out in Paris and London
Orwell's account of being broke in the late 1920s, washing dishes in the steaming basement of a Paris hotel and tramping between London's casual wards with the homeless men of England.
The Immoralist
Michel, a young scholar who married without love, nearly dies of tuberculosis on his honeymoon in North Africa, and recovers with a fierce new hunger for life and for the boys around him.
The Dark Child
Camara Laye remembers growing up in Kouroussa in French Guinea, the son of a goldsmith with magical gifts, until he leaves for school in Conakry and then for Paris.