Here are 100 books that The Two Kinds of Decay fans have personally recommended if you like
The Two Kinds of Decay.
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After the loss of my first baby, I became obsessed with understanding the emotions I was feeling and how to find myself again. I began reading memoirs during this time as a way to connect and find myself. While each story carries its own merits and uniqueness, I found I could take away bits of wisdom from each. How does one figure out who they are when they have lost something so important to themselves? How does one reconcile relationships within their own family? And how does one deal with the mental health toll that inevitably life can take? These questions are my focus when I read and write.
I love this book because it took me on a surprise adventure through the life of a black boy (and young man) raised in the South. I met Laymon at a writing workshop a few months prior to this book’s release date, and I heard him read an excerpt from it.
I was immediately hooked on his storytelling ability. The language is so authentic to him and his experiences, and he holds nothing back. I love the vulnerability that saturates each page as I follow him through his addictions and struggles. While his life is so different from mine, the idea of finding one’s identity in society could not be more relatable.
*Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*
In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly).
In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Born to a Tibetan mother and an American father, I was raised in the U.S. As a girl, I wondered why things were always changing: the seasons, people, and places I loved. Growing older, I became fascinated with how to find happiness in a world where nothing lasts forever. After college, I lived in India with my Tibetan grandmother, learning about Buddhist “bardo” perspectives on life’s ephemerality. I realized that though we resist change, accepting impermanence allows us to live happier lives. I publish widely on impermanence and host a Tricycle interview series about bardo, with guests including David Sedaris, Elizabeth Gilbert, Malcolm Gladwell, Ann Patchett, and Dani Shapiro.
Some years ago, my father fell ill and I barely made it to his bedside in time to say goodbye.
Written after her husband’s sudden death, Didion’s book has not only helped me come to terms with losing my father, but has also shed light on our all-too-human response to endings. Didion is committed to analysis yet acknowledges our irrationality in the face of loss—like when she keeps her husband’s shoes, believing he’ll need them if he returns.
I can relate to this: when my father died, I kept one of his favorite shirts and his birding binoculars, thinking he might want them later. Didion doesn’t offer closure, just a portrait of the grieving mind and heart that I find consoling and, in the end, life-affirming.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were…
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
What if you got hit by lightning? What if the lightning came from inside your body? What if you are such an obsessive writer and researcher that you then had to trace the supply chain of the failed medical device that did that to you?
KS does body writing as a research quest, taking her battered heart back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of answers to the question of what, exactly, she’d been carrying around in it. The sense of vulnerability—medical, economic, and otherwise—that she creates within the narrative is so felt that I couldn’t shake it when I was done reading.
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That's the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
After building a career as a women’s magazine editor, I left my job in the midst of a complicated and life-altering experience with infertility. Throughout those years I longed for connection—to other women who knew this specific pain, but also back to the person I'd always known myself to be. Infertility had stolen me from myself. The books on this list are not about infertility; rather, they speak to what it means to be a human who is enduring. For anyone feeling lost or despairing on an agonizing road to parenthood, I believe these are the books to light the way back home.
This book is a collection of essays with an almost palpable heartbeat, which is exactly the sort of book I consider mandatory reading.
I found myself leveled by the depth and volume of insights on every page, about what it means to really see and care for one another, to withstand pain ourselves, and to witness it in the world.
I experienced so many moments of recognition, reading an articulation of a human truth I’d perhaps known or felt on a subconscious level but never formed into thought or heard expressed quite so beautifully. It’s as if Leslie Jamison lives at a different emotional frequency, paying attention to the world and distilling what’s important.
One piece of advice: don’t tackle this one intending to make notes in the margins because pretty much every sentence is worth coming back to.
From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
A Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014
Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another's pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade…
I love reading about life experiences, however raw or unflinching they get. Many of the books on this list inspired me to be just as honest in my own creative work. While writing Alligator Meat, which began as my English honors thesis and became my memoir, I kept coming back to these books for guidance.
This book not only inspired me to explore the world of memoirs but also pushed me to confront my own fear of honesty on the page.
It is easy to hide behind fiction, yet confronting the culture tied to your own trauma is another challenge entirely. This book left me shocked, tearful, joyous, and empowered, and I returned to it often during my writing process for its sheer bravery.
"My Body offers a lucid examination of the mirrors in which its author has seen herself, and her indoctrination into the cult of beauty as defined by powerful men. In its more transcendent passages . . . the author steps beyond the reach of any 'Pygmalion' and becomes a more dangerous kind of beautiful. She becomes a kind of god in her own right: an artist." ―Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review
A deeply honest investigation of what it means to be a woman and a commodity from Emily Ratajkowski, the archetypal, multi-hyphenate…
I have always been fascinated with bodies: the meaning we make of them; the suffering, joy, and indignities we receive through them; the outer limits of what we can do to and with them. I’ve worked in careers that have asked a lot of my own body, and I write about the brutalities humans inflict upon our own and other bodies. My work is obsessed with questions of how and why we endure suffering. Also, I’ve done a lot of dumb shit to and with my own body that has given me (in addition to a lifetime of medical problems) a highly specific perspective about intensity, hazard, and pain.
I honestly bought this book because the cover was so awesome and fun and design-y, but I stayed up reading it for the intricate research, complexity of thought, and highly engaging voice.
It was both a fun and challenging read, and I was particularly impressed with the way HR used her own lived experience as a lens while resisting making it the subject. I learned so much about many cultural products that I personally have enjoyed and engaged with, and it made me think anew about my relationship to my own body and the degree to which it is culturally dictated.
Anyone who has ever loved or hated a butt, or who has a butt, should read this book.
One of Esquire's 20 Best Books of Fall * One of Time's Most Anticipated Books of Fall
"A deeply thought, rigorously researched, and riveting history of human butts. Radke knows exactly when to approach her subject with levity and when with gravity. A pitch perfect debut." -Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and Body Work
Whether we love them or hate them, think they're sexy, think they're strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
After the loss of my first baby, I became obsessed with understanding the emotions I was feeling and how to find myself again. I began reading memoirs during this time as a way to connect and find myself. While each story carries its own merits and uniqueness, I found I could take away bits of wisdom from each. How does one figure out who they are when they have lost something so important to themselves? How does one reconcile relationships within their own family? And how does one deal with the mental health toll that inevitably life can take? These questions are my focus when I read and write.
I love learning about real-life things that are not as talked about in popular media, and Hernández’s book does just that. I fell in love with her through the memoir parts and how she tried so earnestly to learn about the disease that was killing her beloved aunt.
I was impressed by Hernández’s expert weaving of family stories and researched information. She allowed me to learn about Chagas Disease through her reportage, but she also pulled me into the emotional side of the disease and the devastation it causes.
National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection
Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction
A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year
Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award
As heard on Fresh Air
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of…
After the loss of my first baby, I became obsessed with understanding the emotions I was feeling and how to find myself again. I began reading memoirs during this time as a way to connect and find myself. While each story carries its own merits and uniqueness, I found I could take away bits of wisdom from each. How does one figure out who they are when they have lost something so important to themselves? How does one reconcile relationships within their own family? And how does one deal with the mental health toll that inevitably life can take? These questions are my focus when I read and write.
I went into this book wanting to see how to write about the loss of a child in a delicate and artistic way, and I was delighted to find that Comfort balanced those things beautifully. Through the loss of a five-year-old child from illness, Hood danced me right through the shock and then grief she felt.
I felt how overwhelming it was for her to carry on, and it normalized that for me, too, as a person who also had a related experience. The brevity of the book was perfect for me—a bite-sized way of glimpsing into this world, feeling this grief, and then finding a way out.
In 2002, Ann Hood's five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood-an accomplished novelist-was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter-"the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang 'Eight Days a Week.'" One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and…
I've been a researcher, educator, and practitioner of domestic violence services for over 15 years, and am extremely passionate about this topic. After having worked in the domestic violence field, I then pursued my PhD to study this problem, which I now continue to research and teach about as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Moravian University. In our ever-globalizing world, I believe it's especially important for us to consider domestic violence from a cross-cultural perspective, and having studied this issue in Latin America and among Latina women in the U.S., I hope to spread that knowledge even further. More than ever, it is important for everyone to gain knowledge on this worldwide problem.
For a global perspective on domestic violence, Parson provides a comprehensive look at issues around domestic violence in Chile. She specifically follows the stories of several women and how they navigate through services and systems, facing further violence through the relentless barriers they find themselves up against.
Parson and I both graduated from the Rutgers Anthropology doctoral program and worked under the same advisors—albeit many years apart—and I am grateful to have had her excellent scholarship as a reference for my own.
The end of the Pinochet regime in Chile saw the emergence of an organised feminist movement that influenced legal and social responses to gender-based violence, and with it new laws and avenues for reporting violence that never before existed. What emerged were grassroots women's rights organisations, challenging and engaging the government and NGOs to confront long-ignored problems in responding to marginalised victims.
In Traumatic States, anthropologist Nia Parson explores the development of methods of care and recovery from domestic violence. She interviews and contextualises the lives of numerous individuals who have confronted these acts, as victims, authorities, and activists. Ultimately,…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
I’m a Rutgers professor of psychology and a body image scientist. Growing up, I was a dancer and learned to be dissatisfied with my body at a young age. These concerns inhabited so much mental space during my adolescence that I ultimately began to study these issues in college as a way to better understand myself and others who had similar experiences. I’ve been doing research on body image and eating behaviors for over 25 years now and write books about these topics to help other kids and adults who may be struggling with these issues. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we all felt comfortable in our own skin?
I love that this book is written by a psychologist, registered dietitian, and physician. This combination of expertise provides the basis for a well-researched and multifaceted approach for any adult interested in helping kids develop positive body images.
I especially appreciate that this book takes a strong anti-diet stance while offering strategies for families to develop a peaceful relationship with food.
In a world fraught with diet-culture and weight stigma, many parents worry about their child's relationship with their body and food. This down-to-earth guide is an invaluable resource allowing parents to take proactive actions in promoting a friendship with food, and preventative actions to minimize the risk factors for the development of eating disorders, particularly when early signs of disordered eating, excessive exercise, or body dissatisfaction have been noticed. It provides clear strategies and tools with a practical focus to gently encourage parents and teens to have a healthy relationship with food and exercise by centralizing joy and health. Coming…
