Books like Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Audre Lorde's account of growing up in Harlem as the daughter of Grenadian immigrants, and of the women she loved in 1950s New York, in a book she called a biomythography.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Before Night Falls
Reinaldo Arenas's memoir, written as he was dying in New York, of growing up poor in rural Cuba, his years as a gay writer persecuted by Castro's regime, and his escape.
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.
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.
Just Kids
Patti Smith remembers her years with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York, from the Chelsea Hotel to their first successes, two young artists holding each other up through hunger and ambition.
How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Four sisters from a well-off Dominican family, forced to flee to New York in 1960, grow up American, told backwards from adulthood to their island childhood.
Patsy
Patsy, a young woman in Kingston, leaves her five-year-old daughter, Tru, with the girl's father and goes to New York on a tourist visa, hoping to find Cicely, the friend she has loved since childhood.
Lucy
Lucy, nineteen, leaves Antigua to work as an au pair for a wealthy white family in New York, and is in no mood to be grateful.
Heavy
Kiese Laymon writes a memoir to his mother about growing up Black in Mississippi, about weight, gambling, abuse and love, and the lies they told to survive.
The Price of Salt
Therese Belivet, a young set designer working the toy counter of a Manhattan department store at Christmas, falls for an elegant customer named Carol, a wife in the middle of a bitter divorce.
Fun Home
Bechdel diagrams her closeted-gay funeral-director father's life and her own coming-out against his in panels that feel like rooms of a house she can't quite leave.
Stone Butch Blues
Jess Goldberg, a working-class Jewish child in 1950s Buffalo who doesn't fit as a girl, comes of age as a butch in the gay bars and factories of the 1960s, through police raids and union fights.
Roaming
Three college friends meet up for a spring-break week in New York and watch the triangle of their attention bend, crack, and set in a new shape.