Here are 100 books that Dancing at the Pity Party fans have personally recommended if you like
Dancing at the Pity Party.
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As a child, I was always drawn to stories told through both words and illustrations. Why should that have to end in adulthood? Spoiler: it doesn’t, because there are SO many incredible graphic memoirs and novels written with adult audiences in mind. As a graphic memoirist myself, I love to see how other artists explore the form. I share recommendations in this genre every month in my newsletter, Haley Wrote This.
This is one of those books I am just WAITING to give my niece and nephews when they’re old enough to read it. It is such a great guide for how to have conversations born out of curiosity rather than fear.
I also think the formatting of the story and illustrations is inventive, fun, and informative. I consider this graphic memoir a must-read for anyone interested in dipping a toe in the genre.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, TIME, BUZZFEED, ESQUIRE, LIBRARY JOURNAL AND KIRKUS REVIEWS
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/OPEN BOOK AWARD
'Hilarious and heart-rending' Celeste Ng
'Heartbreaking, but also infused with levity and humour. What stands out most is the fierce compassion with which she parses the complexities of family and love' Time
How brown is too brown?
Can Indians be racist?
What does real love between really different people look like?
Like many six-year-olds, Mira Jacob's half-Jewish, half-Indian son, Z, has questions about everything - and as tensions from the…
Jera Fowler is hardly excited about having to keep a journal for ninth-grade English class. “What can happen in a day?” she grumps as she chronicles the 1984-85 school year. She doesn’t realize that a single day can be the dividing line between life and death. Forty years later, while…
As a child, I was always drawn to stories told through both words and illustrations. Why should that have to end in adulthood? Spoiler: it doesn’t, because there are SO many incredible graphic memoirs and novels written with adult audiences in mind. As a graphic memoirist myself, I love to see how other artists explore the form. I share recommendations in this genre every month in my newsletter, Haley Wrote This.
I grew up as a competitive swimmer and struggled to put words to some of the feelings I had around being a female athlete, especially given how disconnected I felt from the history of women’s sports. This book hits both of those topics as the author shares her experience as a soccer player—to the point that I had to put down the book every once in a while and just sigh with relief.
Plus, the historical look at Title Nine was so informative and, quite frankly, shocking.
"[R]eaders will certainly want to linger on the beautiful depictions of birds, people and scenes from her life. She weaves in historical context in graceful and necessary ways."
A beautifully illustrated coming-of-age graphic memoir chronicling how sports shaped one young girl’s life and changed women’s history forever.
Growing up playing on a top national soccer team in the 1980s, Kelcey Ervick and her teammates didn’t understand the change they represented. Title IX was enacted in 1972 with little fanfare, but to seismic effect; between then and now, girls’ participation in organized sports has…
As a child, I was always drawn to stories told through both words and illustrations. Why should that have to end in adulthood? Spoiler: it doesn’t, because there are SO many incredible graphic memoirs and novels written with adult audiences in mind. As a graphic memoirist myself, I love to see how other artists explore the form. I share recommendations in this genre every month in my newsletter, Haley Wrote This.
Oh, this book. I wept! Williams' candid storytelling mirrored my own experiences with feeling objectified and unraveling shame.
This book made me feel ready to be more vulnerable about how I was feeling (which is something I’ve struggled with for most of my life). I also appreciate how the illustrations—mostly black and white with splashes of yellow—help set the tone.
An intimate, clever, and ultimately gut-wrenching graphic
memoir about the daily decision women must make between being sexualized
or being invisible
In Commute, we follow
author and illustrator Erin Williams on her daily commute to and from
work, punctuated by recollections of sexual encounters as well as
memories of her battle with alcoholism, addiction, and recovery. As she
moves through the world navigating banal, familiar, and sometimes
uncomfortable interactions with the familiar-faced strangers she sees
daily, Williams weaves together a riveting collection of flashbacks. Her
recollections highlight the indefinable moments when lines are crossed
and a woman must ask herself…
Jera Fowler is hardly excited about having to keep a journal for ninth-grade English class. “What can happen in a day?” she grumps as she chronicles the 1984-85 school year. She doesn’t realize that a single day can be the dividing line between life and death. Forty years later, while…
As a child, I was always drawn to stories told through both words and illustrations. Why should that have to end in adulthood? Spoiler: it doesn’t, because there are SO many incredible graphic memoirs and novels written with adult audiences in mind. As a graphic memoirist myself, I love to see how other artists explore the form. I share recommendations in this genre every month in my newsletter, Haley Wrote This.
If ever a book made me want to give myself a massive hug after reading it, this one is it. As someone who has suffered with body image, this book spoke right to my soul, making even the most deeply seeded insecurities feel like parts of me worth loving.
The illustrations are silly and beautiful and moving, which brings to life so much of the messaging! I keep this on my shelf for an instant confidence boost. A total antidote to body shame!
A Beat Most Anticipated Graphic Novel of Fall 2020
The funny, exuberant, inspiring antidote to body shame--a full-color graphic memoir celebrating the imperfections of the author's female body in all its glory.
Too tall. Too short. Too fat. Too thin. The message is everywhere--we need to pluck, wax, shrink, and hide ourselves, to not take up space, emotionally or literally; women are never “just right.” Well, Ariella Elovic, feminist and illustrator extraordinaire, has had enough. In her full-color graphic memoir Cheeky, she takes an inspiring and exuberant head-to-toe look at her own body self-consciousness, and body part by body part,…
I am a novelist, a journalist, a humanist celebrant, and coauthor with my husband of the best-selling Nicci French thrillers. Witnessing my father’s dementia and his slow-motion dying radically transformed the way I think about what it is to be human. In 2014, I founded John’s Campaign which seeks to make the care of those who are vulnerable and powerless more compassionate, and which is now a national movement in the UK. In 2016, I won the Orwell Prize for Journalism for ‘exposing Britain’s social evils' in the pieces I wrote exploring the nature of dementia.
This stunning memoir is the author’s recollection of the time between her husband’s diagnosis of a brain tumour that robbed him of language, and his death aged fifty-three. Time runs out for them very quickly. Sometimes the experience of tending to him is stupendously painful and hard (she is a mother of a small child as well as a wife to a dying man). Sometimes it is oddly peaceful. Every so often there are moments of euphoria. Always there is thought, imagination, empathy, care, and love. Above all, love.
In 2008 the art critic Tom Lubbock was diagnosed with a brain tumour. The tumour was located in the area controlling speech and language, and would eventually rob him of the ability to speak. He died early in 2011. Marion Coutts was his wife.
In short bursts of beautiful, textured prose, Coutts describes the eighteen months leading up to her partner's death. This book is an account of a family unit, man, woman, young child, under assault, and how the three of them fought to keep it intact.
Written with extraordinary narrative force and power, The Iceberg is almost shocking…
My favorite books are funny/sad. In my own writing, I aspire for balance between satire and sympathy, going to dark places and shining a light of hilarity on them. I’m compelled by the psychological complexities of desire, particularly in female characters—flawed, average women, struggling for empowerment. For me, desire is inextricably bound with loss. I’m inspired by loss both superficial and profound, from misplaced keys to dying fathers. Many voices clamor in my head, vying for my attention. I’m interested in ambitious misfits, enraged neurotics, pagans, shamans, healers, dealers, grifters, and spiritual seekers who are forced to adapt, construct, reinvent and contort themselves as reality shifts around them.
I started this book because I liked the drawing style. Within the first 3 pages, I couldn’t put the book down. It’s not just Jennifer Hayden’s illustration skills or the freshness of her lines and patterns and mark-making and the way each panel is a masterpiece in itself, it’s the story that pulled me in. This is a book about life and love and family, told with humor, insight, and intelligence. In Jennifer Hayden’s words, the book is “a dramatic comedy sewn together from real events and real emotions,” but that doesn’t begin to convey the richness and depth of this narrative journey and the quirky sarcastic honest way it tells it like it is. The story still resonates long after I finished reading it.
When Jennifer Hayden was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 43, she realized that her tits told a story. Across a lifetime, they'd held so many meanings: hope and fear, pride and embarrassment, life and death. And then they were gone. Now, their story has become a way of understanding her story. Growing up flat-chested and highly aware of her inadequacies... heading off to college, where she "bloomed" in more ways than one... navigating adulthood between her mother's mastectomy, her father's mistress, and her musician boyfriend's problems of his ownnot to mention his sprawling family. Then the kids…
I’ve been passionate about animals, the environment, and social justice since I was a child. As an adult I have been frustrated—even enraged—that so many products and practices are considered safe and “normal” even though they harm wildlife, pets, and people. I think it's bizarre that people imagine themselves as separate from the chemicals they spray in their homes and their yards, even as they breathe in the toxins. I hope that the concept of “transcorporeality,” which urges us to see our own bodies as literally part of the environment, will convince people that environmentalism isn’t optional but is a vital part of human health and social justice.
The title says it all: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer! This massive study demonstrates how political and economic forces have restricted, diminished, and warped our understanding of the causes of cancer. Not a conspiracy theory, this meticulously researched study carefully demonstrates how science is shaped by economic forces in ways that leave us without the information we need to lead healthier lives. This is no accident, since, as Proctor explains, ignorance doesn’t just happen, it is constructed: “Controversy can be engineered, ignorance and uncertainty can be manufactured, maintained, and disseminated.” In our rapidly transforming world, we need approaches to science that neither dismiss it nor assume that it is capturing everything it should, since it is shaped by politics and economics.
This brilliantly argued and researched book tells the story of how government regulatory agencies, scientists, trade associations, and environmentalists, have managed to obscure the issues and prevent concerted action. Explains why we still dont have straight answers to questions such as: Why do rates from some cancers appear to have risen and others fallen? and suggests how we might actually win the war on cancer.
I am a professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I work on ethics and related questions about human agency and human knowledge. My interest in adversity is both personal and philosophical: it comes from my own experience with chronic pain and from a desire to revive the tradition of moral philosophy as a medium of self-help. My last book was Midlife: A Philosophical Guide, and I have also written about baseball and philosophy, stand-up comedy, and the American author H. P. Lovecraft.
One of the most profound attempts to capture grief in prose is due to the British experimental novelist B. S. Johnson. Published in 1969, The Unfortunatesis a book in a box: twenty-seven booklets to be read in any order, except for “First” and “Last.”Its narrator is a journalist returning to a city he last knew seven years ago, visiting an old friend, Tony, who later died of metastatic cancer. The visit triggers memories that arrive in random order, scattered through the day’s events as chance dictates. Grief has no narrative order, the book in a box seems to warn; and any closure is temporary. Grief can be opened and reshuffled again and again.
B.S. Johnson's lost classic has been showered with praise: New York Magazine named The Unfortunates one of their Ten Best Books of 2008, listed in The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2008, and The Los Angeles Times declared it to be "his most daring work."
A legendary 1960s experiment in form, The Unfortunates is B. S. Johnson's famous "book in a box," in which the chapters are presented unbound, to be read in any order the reader chooses. A sportswriter, sent to a Midlands town on a weekly assignment, finds himself confronted by ghosts from the past when…
There are things expressed only in writing, never spoken aloud in our culture. We can find them in books, in the honesty and insights of those willing to take the time and make the effort to say what they feel and think. Another reason to read is for the sheer joy of a story well told, one that can open both the mind and the heart. I have published 7 novels and a collection of short stories, have just retired from teaching creative writing at the university level. My life has been spent among books. Simply, I am in awe of the ones recommended here.
McGahern, an Irish writer, arguably should have won the Nobel prize for his body of work (I’ve read everything I could get my hands on). He died in 2006 of cancer. This was published posthumously in 2007, the year I first read it... Have read it 3 times since. McGahern opens up and lets us in, with beautiful prose. Hypnotic, haunting, wise, and honest.
This is the story of John McGahern's childhood, his mother's death, his father's anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began.
At the heart of Memoir is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life.
A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move…
Unleash Your God-Given Healing is the book I never wanted to write. As an educator and trained researcher, I uncovered some of the reasons I got a cancer I had no risk factors or genetics for. I also discovered what I could do to help my doctors to beat my cancer and prevent a recurrence. After surgeries and then chemo and immunotherapy for a year, my cancer was gone. My doctors called me their “Rock Star” cancer patient and attributed my lifestyle changes as to why I fared well and returned quickly to vibrant health. I realized that what I learned could help many people. The treasures I learned are in this book.
This book is for children. Susan uses Biblical references and colorful pictures to teach children the importance of making healthy eating a priority. It is written by a certified health and wellness coach who inspires children to appreciate the foods God has made for us to eat that promote healing. Every parent needs this book to teach their children at a young age the health benefits of eating God’s Foods.
Kids have strong opinions about food. Some foods they love and others they don’t. Instead of letting their taste buds rule over your family’s food choices, teach them early to love the right kinds of food. Healthy food can be fun!
Every good thing we need to grow strong and healthy, God created for us to eat. A body needs different foods to grow and work well. Eat God’s Food teaches kids what foods are healthy and unhealthy, preparing them for a lifetime of eating and living the way God intended.
In Eat God’s Food, you’ll find healthy activities and…
