Books like Autobiography of a Face — picked by fans

This book was my introduction to Kristin Hannah, and she has had me hooked ever since.

The novel follows two sisters in occupied France during World War II. They live separate lives, make impossible choices, but each finds a way to resist. Just when you think the story cannot demand more of these women, it does. I read with my heart in my throat.

The book feels achingly current. Authoritarianism, the fear it manufactures and the humanity it tries to grind down, is as recognizable now as it was in 1940s France.

I loved that the characters weren’t passive victims. They push back at great cost, and the book makes a quiet, powerful argument that will stay with me: resistance is always possible, and that love has a way of outlasting even the worst of what human beings do to each other.

For millennia, we’ve heard the stories in Greek mythology about gods who come down to earth to rape women (Zeus got around), women as seductive sirens who lure sailors to their doom, or goddesses and mortal women alike being exiled.

Because of that, I was intrigued to read this book, a retelling of the familiar narrative, but from the perspective of a woman. I found this book to be very empowering.

I identified with the main character, a woman named Circe (in actuality a goddess) who is exiled because of her powers of witchcraft. However, in her exile, she finds that leaning into her power without the judgment of others makes her stronger.

I loved reading classic Greek mythology, complete with all the familiar characters, told from a woman’s perspective.

Can there be anything more poignant than a story about a hero who doesn’t think he’s a hero? About a man who endured a boarding school full of abuse, lived through the horrors and injuries of WWII, returned to hate and racism, lost family, and yet confronted it all with resilience and forgiveness?

This memoir is from Chester Nez—one of the original Navajo code talkers. It contains wonderful photos and the actual Navajo code. This is an important piece of history as well as a genuinely insightful read and peek into Navajo culture.

The last line of the book, written when Mr. Nez was 86, reads “It’s been a good life—so far.” As an outsider I couldn’t disagree more. His life was tragic and profoundly difficult, but he endured with grace and strength. This simple last line says much about the heroes we should all admire. It has been a… show more.

This book was an integral resource when I began to write my book. It helped me shape the structure of my book.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter—as indissolubly as if they were conceived together.”

This, and other books I've read, did this. My favorite books of all time have inventive structures. And reading these helped me find mine.

No memoir has changed the way I think about identity quite like Educated.

I went into it expecting a story about education. What stayed with me was something much deeper—the emotional cost of questioning the beliefs, people, and world that shaped your entire life.

What I admired most about Tara Westover's story was that she didn't make things simple. There were no easy heroes or villains. Just people, complicated relationships, and the uncomfortable reality that sometimes growth means questioning everything you once accepted as truth.

I kept thinking about how difficult it can be to become yourself when doing so means letting go of parts of the person you were taught to be.

This is a book of essays about the act of looking, especially looking at photographs and paintings and animals and other people. Thus these are essays about history, memory, suffering, beauty, and the self. Berger had a generous spirit; he wrote often about the lives of peasants and spent the last forty years of his life in rural France. Berger gazed upon the world in all its forms with composure and curiosity. 

One of the few true geniuses in sociology, he lifted the field up into new and innovation dimensions. If there were a Nobel Prize in sociology, he would most likely get it, followed by the three people above (Merton, Mills, and Gouldner). I knew him well. He could walk into a room and an hour later tell you all the power plays, conflicts, and inside dope.

Some of his terms have entered our language: front-stage, back stage (meaning what goes on in front of an audience, meaning your social interactions) are different from what goes on backstage, behind the scenes, kind of like a play. His book, Stigma, is used in many fascinating ways; not just someone blind or disfigured but also a Black person, a gay person, or a hippy; but mostly he shows in terrifying ways, how people hide or cope with their “stigma”—the subtitle tells it all… show more.

The relentless and erudite work of Arendt never ceases to challenge me. In the books included here—Thinking and Willing—she explores what it means that the self knows itself to be a self, and how that knowledge refracts and splits upon encountering others, and then changes when returning to solitude again. I read her knowing that she has not just considered but felt her ideas. “To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display. . . .Up to a point we can choose how to appear to others.”

A short, powerful investigation of how we construct and succumb to the lies of gender. Chu explores our fears of desire and how we allow politics to corrupt identity, believing gender to be so constructed that it can only be given and not created. Female is a quality we all carry, whatever label we use. Chu forces the reader to look in the mirror with a question instead of a statement, always uncertain about who that person really is. 

I’ll never quite wrap my head around what Machado has done in this memoir about an abusive relationship. It’s written in the second person, which imbues it with a chilling immediacy. The setting is a home the two women share: a cabin in Indiana, the Dream House of the title.

The Dream House is also the concept of an idealized queer relationship and family life that are not available to the narrator, try as she might, in the context of this relationship. Machado takes fever-dream diversions to places where the narrator is gaslit by a charismatic, emotionally vampiric partner. The Dream House is many-chambered; each holds a vision of the narrator denying her very being, and she has to fight to recover it.