Personal history meets a careful analysis of the cultural forces that inform it in these standout books.
Best of 2022
The best entertainment of the year, as chosen by Vultures critics.
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In 2022, we continued to expand our idea of what a memoir can be.
Here are some of the years best.
10.Solito,Javier Zamora
10.
His vulnerability, yearning, insecurities, and hope are vivid.
9.The Man Who Could Move Clouds,Ingrid Rojas Contreras
9.
Ingrid Rojas Contrerass memoir is as much about her grandfather as it is about herself.
8.Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School,Kendra James
8.
Taylor Harriss debut is as much about motherhood as it is about our broken health-care system.
Its an illuminating and empowering story, beautifully rendered.
6.Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York,Jeremiah Moss
6.
Jeremiah Moss arrived in the East Village in the early 1990s as a transgender man searching for his people.
When 2020 hits and the city goes into lockdown, something changes.
But these forces are being challenged by many of the groups Moss describes so lovingly.
His academic background comes through in his integration of psychoanalysis, sociopolitical theory, and queer theory.
5.Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change,Angela Garbes
5.
Garbes places the American treatment and devaluing of motherhood in context with the culture of motherhood around the world.
4.Im Glad My Mom Died,Jennette McCurdy
4.
3.Lost & Found,Kathryn Schulz
3.
2.Stay True,Hua Hsu
2.
Hua Hsus writing in his debut memoir flows gracefully, hypnotically, propulsively.
Decades later, Hsu shares those lessons with us.
We see the way his comfort zone expands as his worldview does, too.
1.Easy Beauty ,Chloe Cooper Jones
1.
Its heady but accessible.
