Paul Kalanithi was thirty six years old when he was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. How ridiculously unfair that someone who had worked so hard to become a neurosurgeon and could have helped so many people was destined to die so young. But he doesn’t whine about it: instead he writes this beautiful, sparse book […]
Top Five Biography/Autobiography
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
How much of Anne’s diary resonates with you will probably depend on how old you were when you first read it. I was 13, the same age Anne is when she begins to write in her diary. It was the first time I had heard anything substantial about the Holocaust, and it cut deep. I’ve […]
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
Strayed’s memoir about a long hike undertaken after completely messing up her life following the death of her mother resonates with many of us, especially perhaps those of us who have lost mothers. It is partly about carrying a huge stinking bucket of grief around with you wherever you go, and not knowing quite how […]
A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold
We sometimes speak about the murder of a child as ‘every parent’s worst nightmare’, but how much worse would it be if your child was the murderer, and then killed himself? Sue Klebold knows. Her son Dylan was one of the perpetrators of the original high school shooting, Columbine, in 1999, and in this blazingly […]
Reckoning by Magda Szubanski
Reckoning actually deserves all the awards it has been given, but don’t go expecting many laughs. Magda explores her father’s past as a second world war assassin in Poland, and the way his drive and perfectionism affected her as a child. She writes rivetingly about her fatness and how she holds it around her like a security blanket: […]