Book description
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.
To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them…
Why read it?
1 author picked Necessary Trouble as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Born in 1947, the author is four years younger than me. Although she grew up as a girl in the US, not as a boy in the UK like me, I was spellbound by the chapters about her participation as a young student trying to desegregate the South, starting in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964.
I bought the book on the strength of a single sentence quoted in a review. She described how, as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, she watched on TV as the police brutally dispersed the first march in Selma: “From that moment, I knew I had…
If you love Necessary Trouble...
December on 5C4
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
Want books like Necessary Trouble?
Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Necessary Trouble.
Share your top 3 reads of 2025!
And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.
1,298
readers submitted
so far, will you?
📚 If you like Necessary Trouble, you might also like...
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
Dark Fae Outcast
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
But while scoring his last…
