Remember Wondercade issue No. 130? If not, grab that second folio from the right off that marble mantel over there; while Wondercade is a digital medium, I print off each issue and catalog them for my own records. Look here: it was the edition when I asked notable writers to recommend what they are reading. It was such a rousing success that I thought, why not do it again? This time around, I’m delighted to introduce Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jonathan Eig; NPR music critic and author Ann Powers, herself a memoirist and biographer; and Sean Wilsey, a memoirist and filmmaker: they were all gracious enough to share some of their favorite titles in this department of nonfiction.
Jonathan Eig, author of King: A Life — 2024 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography — on his favorite biographies
The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon by Heath Hardage Lee: “Think being the First Lady is a thankless job? How about being First Lady to Richard Nixon? Pat Nixon is a fascinating, frustrating and influential character, worthy of this excellent historical account.”
Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O’Brien: “As a kid, I loved Pete Rose. Loved that dirty uniform, that five-buck-not-quite-Beatles haircut, that burning desire to win. But I never understood him until I read this great American tragedy of a baseball book.”
Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo: “An enslaved couple escapes from Georgia, the wife disguised as a white man, the husband pretending to be her servant. It’s crazy, it’s true and it’s beautifully told. An unforgettable story.”
Ann Powers, author of Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, on her favorite biographies and memoirs
Rage to Survive by Etta James and David Ritz: “A founding mother of rock and roll, Etta James lived a hard life as a Black woman often oppressed within the music business and her personal life; her defiant spirit got her through a lot. This unsparing tale of her private and artistic struggles is an absolute page-turner; not for the faint of heart, but full of great storytelling and insistent joy.”
A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa: “This book unlocked so much for me. A poet and translator, Ní Ghríofa sets out on a wild chase after a lost woman: Eibhlín Dubh, who wrote a poem of mourning for her murdered husband that all Irish schoolchildren read. Part memoir of her own life as a mother, part mystery, part soul’s confession, Ní Ghríofa’s unclassifiable narrative is the bravest I’ve ever read.”
Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix by Charles R. Cross: “The best conventional biographies reveal layers of a hero’s story that change the way you view them. Charles R. Cross’s exhaustively researched account of the great guitarist’s life — especially the intense poverty he endured as a child in Seattle — transform him from a psychedelic legend to a deeply human, tender man who triumphed artistically against all odds.”
Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje: “I’m throwing this in as a bonus! It’s a slim novelization of a crucial time in the life of Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans clarinetist whom many credit for inventing jazz. Ondaatje’s brilliant blend of poetry, history and fiction is so tangible you can smell the humidity and the sweat on Bolden’s brow. This book showed me I could try anything in prose.”
Sean Wilsey — author of Oh the Glory of It All and More Curious, collaborator on Molly Shannon’s memoir Hello, Molly!, and director of the forthcoming documentary IX XI — on his favorite memoirs
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor: “As Jan Morris points out in her introduction to this polymath’s sojourn through 1930s Europe (on foot), it is impossible to be jealous of a stylist who ‘has no rivals, and so stands beyond envy.’ Every paragraph is full of sentences that head in directions I defy any reader to predict. Here he is on one of his many boarding schools: ‘It was run by a grey-haired, wild-eyed man called Major Truthful and when I spotted two beards — then very rare — among the mixed and eccentric-looking staff, and the heavy bangles and the amber and the tassels and the homespun, and met my fellow-alumni — about thirty boys and girls from four-year-olds to nearly twenty, all in brown jerkins and sandals: the musical near-genius with occasional fits, the millionaire’s nephew who chased motor-cars along country lanes with a stick, the admiral’s pretty and slightly kleptomaniac daughter, the pursuivant’s son with nightmares and an infectious inherited passion for heraldry, the backward, the somnambulists and the mythomaniacs (by which I mean those with an inventive output more pronounced than the rest, which, as no one believed us, did no harm), and, finally, the small bad hats like me who were merely very naughty — I knew I was going to like it.’ Reading Fermor is like sliding across the paperwork for a 2022 Hampton Gray Hyundai Sonata at the Hertz rental counter and being handed back the keys to a Silver Birch 1963 Aston Martin DB5.”
Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog: “This is a ceaselessly eventful and entertaining book, chronicling a life of complete liberation from the ordinary, in such beautiful prose that it’s a shock to realize it was written in German. Everything seems so right in English. Bravo Michael Hofmann for a flawless act of translation ventriloquism.”
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde. “Here are descriptions of factory work — in Connecticut! — that rival Orwell’s raucous accounts of being a dishwasher in Paris. And when she’s off work she spends her time in rapturous lovemaking, graphically described in these pages — a pleasure both prior recommendations sadly lack. Strange fact: all three of these writers either came from or were drawn to Germany.”
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