100 Books Like Heaven's Coast

Tracing the thread of mystery and meaning through our lives can be so hard! Here’s a trick of the memoir trade: The world has a tendency to give us the metaphors we most need.

When I first read Terry Tempest Williams’ book, I was amazed by the parallels she drew between threats to her beloved Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, her family history of breast cancer, and her soul’s experiences in the Mormon church. Now, I know the perfect images to illustrate our inner world are always in plain sight. This is beautiful and enduring.

I didn’t know if I could recommend a play here, but reading this one is how I first experienced it because it premiered in London. I hadn’t seen it yet, so I read its two monumental parts, “Millennium Approaches” and “Perestroika,” on a typewritten marked-up rehearsal script someone had lent me.

Quite simply, Tony Kushner wrote THE play for my generation, a generation that lost probably half of itself to an awful plague most people, especially the government, ignored until it was too late. When my lover Jeffrey died, I went to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park and wept because Tony had given it to me in his play, a monument for the AIDS generation.

Finally seeing it on Broadway, with Jeffrey, as he was dying, was like having my DNA scratched and resurfaced into something other than who I was before it. It was shape-shifting, soul-stirring, and salve… show more.

Marie’s poems are separated into three sections: childhood (which included an alcoholic and abusive father), the illness and death of her brother Johnny from AIDS, and life beyond his death, including her relationship with James Shannon, a tree surgeon and a fisherman. They were like lifelines to me after Jeffrey died.

I memorized the title poem and said it repeatedly in my head like a litany. These poems are clearly spoken; life boiled down to a stock with the healing power of fresh air and cool water. No other book of poems has ever helped me so much through a catastrophic time, and I ended up setting many of these poems to music.

Those who set out to write their memoirs often have a hard time acknowledging their inner life as an active player in our stories. Enter Black Elk, whose narrative shows the life-long ramifications of a single vision.

Often, the impact of spiritual experiences is far more significant than the experiences themselves. Black Elk’s profound trust in his dream and commitment to live it out are inspiring. I also love how Black Elk occasionally disregards his audience to directly address the Grandfathers. Isn’t it lovely that memoirs can become a form of prayer?!

One morning, Christopher’s fiancé, Brigid, kissed him goodbye and went into the snowy morning of Montpellier, Vermont, to drive to work. She was sidewinded by a speeding car and killed.

Christopher wrote a devastating memoir of shock and coming to terms with such a sudden loss. Brigid was also a beautiful writer, and part of his healing and writing this book involved folding her highly evocative journals into his book. It felt like a resurrection.

Ironically, Christopher and Brigid lived in a house that Mark Doty either rented or sold. As I read this astonishing book, I felt like I was living there with them, roiling in shock and pain.

Writers often ask, “What if I don’t know what really happened?” Memory is so slippery that many writers trip up with self-doubt. Here’s when I turn to Maxine Hong Kingston. Unable to hunt down the facts, Kingston instead revels in speculation: Maybe this is what happened, or maybe this. She might not know why her pregnant aunt drowned herself in the family well, but she sure as heck knows the impact of her aunt’s story on her family dynamics.

This is an exceptionally smart rendering of emotional truth regardless of facts, and as such, signs a permission slip for memoir writers. We can let our DNA speak. We can speculate on the page without having to pin down the facts. Speculation can become part of the story.

So much is possible in a memoir! When I first read this, my sense of what can happen in a book exploded open. Norris constructs this book like a good soup, throwing in longer, interlocking essays, short reflections, and even shorter “weather reports.”  But this is not a collection of random pieces.

They build, they resonate, and they form a bigger narrative. Wow. For those who wonder if the fragments they’re writing will ever add up, read this to see what’s possible—with the added benefit of an immersion in the plains’ unique beauty.

Peter Piot was a young microbiologist at a lab in Belgium, in 1976, when he was assigned to analyze specimens in a thermos bottle shipped up from Zaire, where villagers were dying of a horrific and unknown disease. The thermos contained a virus that came to be known as Ebola. This was the event, as his book vividly recounts, that led Piot to a long and distinguished career in infectious viral diseases, from Ebola to AIDS and beyond.

A few years ago, I had the chance to write about Allan Gurganus for Harper’s magazine. That gave me a reason to read his entire oeuvre. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but Plays Well With Others is my favorite. Published in 1997, it was the eagerly awaited follow-up to Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Gurganus’s smash hit debut, which had come out in 1989. That book sold several million copies and was adapted into a TV miniseries as well as a Broadway show.

Unfortunately, Plays Well could not escape the long shadow cast by Widow. But I am here to tell you that this story of a queer friend-group weathering the worst of the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York City is a sui generis work of genius: a sexually graphic, laugh-out-loud funny, emotionally devastating tour-de-force, as beautiful and bonkers as it is… show more.

Emily Martin’s work was some of the first things I read when I wanted to understand how we understand medicine.

There’s such a gap between the health information we’re given and what we actually believe and Martin really covers how Americans have understood the concept of immunity and how we’re influenced by popular culture and the media.

This book is absolutely crucial for understanding both how we look at immunity and understanding how doctors are not free of bias.