Books like Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson's childhood in the 1960s and 1970s, between her grandparents' home in South Carolina and her mother's in Brooklyn, told in short poems about family, faith, the civil rights movement and finding her way to words.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Brown Girl Dreaming
The Secret Life of Bees
In 1964 South Carolina a fourteen-year-old white girl runs off with her black housekeeper to a pink house kept by three beekeeping sisters who know the secret of her dead mother.
One Writer's Beginnings
Welty's Harvard lectures on growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, on her parents and her reading, and on the habits of listening and watching that made her a writer.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
March: Book One
Congressman John Lewis's graphic memoir of the civil rights movement, from his Alabama childhood to the march on Selma.
The Color of Water
A Black writer tells his own story alongside that of his white Jewish mother, who raised twelve children and refused to discuss her past.
An Angel at My Table
Janet Frame's autobiography, from a poor childhood in Oamaru through eight years in mental hospitals to her escape into writing and to Europe.
Chronicles: Volume One
Dylan's memoir, which skips from his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961 to the making of New Morning and Oh Mercy, and back to his Minnesota boyhood.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou's Stamps, Arkansas childhood under Jim Crow, the pastor-grandmother's store, the trauma that silenced her, and the teacher who taught her back into language.
Living to Tell the Tale
The first volume of García Márquez's memoirs, from his childhood in his grandparents' house in Aracataca to his years as a young journalist in Cartagena and Barranquilla, up to 1955.
M Train
Patti Smith writes from her Greenwich Village café over black coffee, mapping what she has lost and loved: her late husband Fred, pilgrimages to writers' graves and the Continental Drift Club she belongs to.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
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.