lifeofreilley.com

Daniel Tammet

This book is a memoir written by Daniel Tammet, a 27-year-old who has has Asperger’s syndrome. Tammet is a high-functioning savant, and is able to translate his thoughts and feelings into words. For example, he explains how he sees numbers (the number 9 is very tall), how he is able to multiply large numbers, and how he is able to memorize pi out to the 22,514th decimal place. Tammet does an incredible job of writing about his obsessive and compulsive need for routine and to brush each tooth individually and to splash his face with water exactly five times when washing it.

Ishmael Beah

A Long Way Gone is the story of a young boy growing up in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s while the country was ravaged by civil war. Ishmael Beah writes an extremely honest and moving tale about his years in the national army, being forced to carry an AK-47 at the age of 12, his dependence on cocaine and speed (which the army encouraged), and fighting the RUF. He writes of the ease he was able to kill other boys his own age, the migraines and nightmares that perpetually plagued him, and his rehabilitation with UNICEF. Like “Blood Diamond” and “Lord of War“, this book brings about a sad reality that we often are oblivious to here in the U.S.

Calvin Trillin

This moving memoir was written about the author’s late wife, Alice. Trillin, a staff writer for the New Yorker, says in his book that he “wrote everything for Alice” in a constant journey to impress her and to make her laugh. The two shared so much of their writing together and Trillin often relied on Alice to proofread his work. In addition to talking about their common interest in writing, Trillin talks about Alice’s battle with cancer and her unending optimism about life, right up to the day she died.

Jeanette Walls

This was a fantastic book. I would recommend it to anyone - male, female, young, or old. When my aunt recommended it to me, I put it off for several months. When I read the description, it didn’t seem to capture my attention. I was completely wrong. I loved this book, from the beginning to the end. For a memoir, it reads incredibly fast. Walls weaves the story of her childhood and early adult life into an inspirational novel of unconditional love, forgiveness, and believing in one’s self. Walls begins her novel in the western United States, where she and her nomadic, whimsical parents move from town to town, failing to hold down jobs, and barely scraping by. When the family moves to West Virginia, Walls faces a perverted grandmother and uncle, and the reality of being so poor that she has to survive for three days on only a stick of margarine. Walls, in the face of extreme poverty, continues to see the good in everything, and somehow finds a way to make it out of the coal mining slums of West Virginia to New York City, where she eventually attends college.

Joan Didion

In late December 2003, Joan Didion’s daughter goes into septic shock from pneumonia, and, barely alive, is in intensive care. Five days later, as Didion and her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, are having dinner, he slumps over, dead from cardiac arrest. Thus begins the Year of Magical Thinking. As a writer, Didion records her thoughts over the next year, and compiles them into this book. While this book could have easily been a self-pitying, depressive, and tear-jerking novel, it was exactly the opposite. It is an honest, simple, and up-lifting memoir about her memories of her husband, the experience of trying to protect her daughter from sickness and death, and the difference between mourning and grieving. Didions reflections about herself and her relationship with John can be extremely personal at times and distant at others, but she doesn’t hide the fact that she had fights and disagreements with John, nor does she hide the fact that they didn’t always see to eye to eye. What she always makes plain in her novel is the amount of love the two shared, how much she misses him, and how her life will never be the same.

Frank McCourt

This memoir picks up where Angela’s Ashes leaves off. Frank McCourt leaves Ireland to come back to America at 19. He’s naive and broke, but he’s also extremely optimistic and hopeful at the possibility of making himself a better life. I found this book to be just as entertaining as Angela’s Ashes. McCourt makes you laugh about his mistakes and his ideas of Americans all looking like tanned movie stars with perfect teeth. At other times, he has you near tears as he talks of being alone on Christmas and his embarrassment over his infected and pussing eyes.

Frank McCourt

This non-fiction memoir, while depressing at times, was completely engaging and enjoyable. Frank McCourt tells the story of his childhood in Limerick, Ireland, where he grows up in complete poverty. His father, Malachy, can’t find work and and drinks away any money he receives from the dole. His mother, Angela, has to beg for food, and the family survives on little besides bread and tea. While life is miserable and unbearable, Frank manages to survive Typhoid and “the worst case of Conjunctivitis” his doctor’s ever seen. In this memoir, Frank McCourt shows that, no matter how bad life is, it can always be worse, and he proves just how strong the human spirit can be.