Books like Rust Belt Boy — picked by fans

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.

I was heavily influenced by the storytelling and humor in this memoir, as well as the comic and childish cover and illustrations. Although I had a very different upbringing, I wrote in a similar style. Roald Dahl's tales of his own childhood are completely fascinating and fiendishly funny, especially for adults. He tells of crazy conflicts in his English schools with headmasters and teachers, and I had similar experiences. He writes of a visit to a chocolate factory, whereas our town’s factories were not so innocent. The air was filled with the by-products of pesticide, herbicide, plastics, fertilizer, and steel castings production, as well as a slaughterhouse. Roald Dahl employed a professional illustrator to add humor, whereas I decided to learn how to draw, coming up with over 50 illustrations to amplify the humor.

I recommend this book because it takes the reader to a totally different world of a child growing up in the 1940s and 50s in Kenya, East Africa, during the war between the British colonials and Mau Mau freedom fighters. The author was born into a typical African compound ruled by a patriarch with four wives. He had many adventures in his attempts to escape the restrictions of his native culture. In Chapter 3 of my memoir, titled “First Dreams of Africa,” I describe how I saw shapes which looked like African animals on a hill, the other side of the chemical factory and town dump. That’s when I started to dream about going to a more verdant faraway land. Ngugi wa Thiong'o became a novelist and playwright and I became an international film and media producer, and much later a creative nonfiction writer. 

T.W. Neal grows up with parents who opt to live on a sparsely populated Hawaiian island, not wearing clothes, surfing, smoking Marijuana, and eating magic mushrooms. The family lives in a van or in housing with few modern amenities and the author attends school on the island only sporadically. Due to her mother’s mental illness and her father’s alcohol abuse, she at times, has to run the household. With difficulty she connects with relatives and a few teachers and begins to reach for a lifeline to break free from the life her parents chose. She wants to go to college and eventually is able to leave the island and pursue a mainstream life. It is astounding that a person growing up in such circumstances would have the desire and determination to forge a different life.

Of course, if you’re talking classic impulse-control-challenged YA heroes, you’re almost obligated to mention Holden Caulfield.

So, okay: Holden Caulfield. But now let’s talk about Earl, who is not the protagonist of Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl, but the protagonist’s incredibly foul-mouthed, incredibly short, incredibly angry, incredibly funny sidekick and creative partner, who will windmill-kick you in the head if you mention his height to him.

Nonetheless, when alerted to the fact that the Girl is indeed Dying, it’s Earl who insists that Greg (Me) step up and be her friend, and it’s Earl who has the moral compass to teach Greg that compassion is more important than dignity. Earl might be a chain-smoking high-school dropout, but he has standards. 

Annie Dillard, probably best known for her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, is masterful with words and brings all of her writing abilities to this memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh. For a city girl, she is especially entranced by nature as she gathers in her bedroom a rock collection that seems to foretell a career as a geologist that never happened. But it’s her tales of her father that are the most striking to me because as a child I didn’t know any fathers quite like him. He once set off alone on a long-planned river trip from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. Most wonderful of all, he had a role in the 1968 cult classic Night of the Living Dead. Finally, think of the title Dillard chose for her memoir: An American Childhood. In many ways, her childhood was no more unique than any other… show more.

She Gets the Girl was such a cute sapphic romance, the kind of romance I wished I had experienced when I was younger.

I enjoyed that it was set freshman year of college, rather than high school like most young adult books, and the very distinct personalities of both main characters. It was a really fun read and I honestly wish it didn’t have to end. I also can totally see this being made into a movie.

While a lot of attention has been paid to the industrial decline in cities, the loss of jobs in industries such as mining has caused distress in rural areas. Recently, we have seen rises in drug abuse, overdose deaths, and suicides in rural America. Jennifer Silva did fieldwork in a rural Pennsylvania area that has experienced these shocks to its system, and she shows us the difficulties its residents are having.

I found McBride’s novel a wild ride, full of humor, unexpected twists, and a dazzling array of quirky characters. Set in Chicken Hill, a neighborhood on the proverbial “other side of the tracks,” the residents––Blacks, Jews, Italians, the disabled, and other assorted folks––come to depend on each other. I admire how he treats all, except the bigots, with deep respect and love, notwithstanding their failings or moral flaws. After all, life is complicated.

McBride captures each of their individual dialects and rhythms of speech. So many characters! But every single one turns out to be necessary, because in the end it is the community they co-create that matters. Community, compassion, bonds across race, ethnicity, ability, and age: I believe this book carries an essential message for our time.

A direct inspiration on my book, this is a great espionage thriller set in Philadelphia about a disgraced Revolution-era spy who gets hired by Alexander Hamilton to help against his arch-enemy, Thomas Jefferson, and finds his path intersecting with a farmwife standing up against a frontier uprising.

Liss is a master of the historical form (and a friend, full disclosure!)