Books like Before They Were Authors — picked by fans

This book offers delightful details about Judy Blume, from her time growing up in New Jersey to the purchase of her first electric typewriter.

With the publication of Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret in 1970, Judy made history with a unique book about a 12-year-old girl exploring religion and friendship.

I appreciate how Kathleen Krull takes us on the rollercoaster of Judy’s life, showing us her heartbreak when facing rejection letters, her steadfast determination to keep writing, and her joy when she finally achieved her goals. Judy Blume never gave up!

Capturing the spirit of Maya Angelou’s work, Renee Watson expertly chronicles Maya’s life with evocative poems. This book is a rhythmic tribute to the first Black person and the first woman to recite a poem at a presidential inauguration. Bryan Collier’s collage art perfectly complements each poem.

I especially love the poem called “Brother Jimmy, Brother Martin,” which highlights Maya’s deep love for James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr.

My favorite lines: “Jimmy was light in the darkest of rooms. Martin was water in a parched desert.”   

With charming illustrations, this picture book biography tells the story of E.B. White with exquisite language.

I love how Barbara Herkert provides details about his interest in animals from a young age, such as how he collected pigeons, snakes, polliwogs, caterpillars, chameleons, and more.

In a fitting ending, the book shows how E.B. White gets the idea for one of my favorite books, Charlotte’s Web. I love these lines from A Boy, a Mouse, and a Spider: “One cold October evening, Andy watched a spider spin. He climbed a ladder for a closer look. He’d found the hero of his story…” 

I love how this book describes what Ida B. Wells was like as a young child, as well as her parents. Ida learned about standing up for what’s right from them. Dinah Johnson effectively weaves this theme throughout the whole book.

I think kids can learn so much from this story of courage. Page by page, kids will see how Ida wasn’t afraid to write newspaper articles about Black people being lynched so that she could bring attention to racism and injustice. Kids will also see how she wasn’t afraid to step forward in the Women’s March of 1913.

I was especially drawn to the back matter of this book, which includes rare pictures of Ida with her family from the 1900s and a comprehensive timeline of her life.

Rummer Godden’s autobiography A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep offers the stories, context, and sense of place for many of her novels. I so enjoyed her ability to write like a bright child thinks about the world, as well as how she is feeling. It is laugh-out-loud funny in spots, despite describing the dislocation of war.

Danielewski is as much an artist as he is a storyteller. The Fifty Year Sword is a work of literal—and literary—art. The story is brief, haunting, and beautifully told. The book is a labor of love beyond words on the page. The art accents the story, propelling it forward and assisting the tension that grows as the unread pages dwindle. It is neither grotesque, nor leave-the-lights-on scary, but it is fantastically memorable and shocking, making it a wonderful introduction to the fun-filled intensity the genre offers. For all its simplicity, it’s an unforgettable read, worth picking up for repeat visits to admire the way story and art meld into this single binding. It’s an every-October treat for me that sets the mood for Spooky Season.

William and his wife lost their baby in its last term and had to endure the torment of an induced stillbirth.

The same thing happened to a dear friend years ago so when I heard William as embarking on this brave endeavour to write about it, I was intrigued. The publisher, Little Toller Books, decided to create a space for William’s male voice in a publishing genre that is dominated by women’s.

The result is a heart-wrenching tale of grief as William clamours to contextualise the world he has been thrown into. William’s skill as a writer lies in his depiction of the indescribable. I’m sure there were months of soul searching and pen holding before he finally hit upon a way of converting his pain into the stunning prose. I am so grateful he did. And you will be too.

Telling the story of the girl who became an international icon when the Associated Press published a photograph of her running from napalm bombing in her village in 1972, Denise Chong’s The Girl in the Picture offers insight into the day-to-day lives of South Vietnamese villagers who simply wanted to survive. Caught between the U.S.-supported South Vietnamese military and the National Liberation Front, villagers often had family members fighting on both sides of the war, not because of divergent ideological beliefs, but because repressive recruitment efforts left young men no choice but to enlist. Through the eyes of Kim Phuc, Denise Chong’s book humanizes life on the ground in a war zone and describes what happened when U.S. troops left the country.

In this book, we visit seven families each living on a different continent. It’s eye-opening to step into the kitchens, backyards, and schoolrooms of children from Japan to Italy to Uganda. My kids love seeing alternative approaches to familiar daily activities: what a child eats for breakfast in Peru or what kids wear to school in Iran.

This book is as fascinating for me as it is for my children. The families depicted in the book are all real people who shared their stories and photos with the author, so this is as much a work of journalism as a work of art. 

Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life was the first true narrative nonfiction book I ever read, and it’s the one that made me fall in love with confessional, voice-driven writing. I’ve always loved reading other people’s diaries, and that’s what it feels like reading this book. 

The themes of this biography, written thirty years ago, don’t overlap with technology or the efficiency pressures of today, but the emotional experience is timeless. It has radical honesty, vulnerability, and the kind of immersive storytelling that makes you feel like you’re living inside someone else’s skin. In a modern age defined by speed, tech, and algorithms, that kind of authenticity is its own form of rebellion.

This Boy’s Life reminds us why human storytelling matters and why empathy is perhaps the most important practice of all. It captures a sort of self-reflective and philosophical humanness every book on this list carries, and exactly what… show more.