5 Memoirs To Read This Summer
Offering the chance to live someone else’s story – at least for a little while – memoirs can evoke a whole array of emotions and experiences. If you’re looking for a good laugh, a cathartic cry or a heartwarming story to delve into this summer, we’ve rounded up the latest memoirs not to be missed.
More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth
The revolutionary editor Elaine Welteroth has climbed the ranks of media and fashion, shattering ceilings along the way. In this riveting and timely memoir, the groundbreaking editor unpacks lessons on race, identity, and success through her own journey, from navigating her way as the unstoppable child of a unlikely interracial marriage in small-town California to finding herself on the frontlines of a modern movement for the next generation of change makers.
The Diary of A Drag Queen by Crystal Rasmussen
In The Diary of A Drag Queen, Crystal writes candidly about her search for ‘the one’; sleeping with a VIP in an attempt to become a world famous journalist; getting hired and fired by a well-known fashion magazine and her need for constant sexual satisfaction – as well as where it takes her. Charting her day-to-day adventures over the course of a year, we encounter tucks, twists and sucks, heinous overspending and endless nights spent sprinting from problem to problem in a full face of make-up. This is a place where the previously unspeakable becomes the commendable.
Naturally Tan a memoir by Tan France
Growing up gay in a traditional South Asian family in South Yorkshire, Tan France could never have imagined he’d become part of a worldwide phenomenon. As a minority at his school, he experienced racist bullies, found solace at his grandad’s denim factory and eventually discovered his true calling at fashion college. Told with his trademark humour, for the first time Tan reveals the experiences that have made him the witty, compassionate man he is today.
Lost Dog: A Love Story by Kate Spicer
Kate is a middle aged woman trying to steer some order into a life that is going off the rails. When she adopts a lurcher called Wolfy, the shabby rescue dog saves her from herself. But when the dog disappears, it is up to Kate to hit the streets of London and find him. Will she save him, as he has saved her – or will she lose everything? Trying to find her dog tests Kate’s relationship and her sanity, to its limits – and gets her thinking about her life, and why things have turned out as they have for her.
A brilliant, life-affirming memoir, Lost Dog is a book like no other about both about the myth of modern womanhood, and the enduring mystery of the relationship between human and canine.
Lowborn by Kerry Hudson
Kerry Hudson is proudly working class but she was never proudly poor. Twenty years on, her life is unrecognisable from her childhood, now that she’s a prizewinning novelist who has travelled the world. She finds herself looking over her shoulder, caught between two worlds. This is a powerful personal agenda-changing exploration of poverty in today’s Britain.
