Normally when I write about books it’s because I have read them and am recommending them for some specific reason (such as these books to help you with your life writing). Today, however, I am offering up a list of books that are forthcoming this year and that are on my radar. I thought you might like to check them out, too, and pre-order any that pique your interest.

Life writing, craft, and memory-keeping books

Who knows if the list for this first theme of books—about writing memoir and preserving legacies—will grow as the year goes on. For now, these are the three nonfiction titles I am anticipating in 2022. If you’re in the market for more books on how to write your stories, writing and memory prompts, and more craft-themed books, check out my reviews of current titles here.

Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page

By Cathy Rentzenbrink (Pan Macmillan; January 2022)

From the publisher: “Why do we want to write and what stops us? How do we fight the worry that no-one will care what we have to say? What can we do to overcome the obstacles in our way? … Intertwined with reflections and exercises, Write It All Down is at once an intimate conversation and an invitation to share your story.”

Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff

By Matt Paxton (Portfolio; February 8)

From the publisher: “America’s top cleaning expert and star of the hit series Legacy List with Matt Paxton distills his fail-proof approach to decluttering and downsizing. Your boxes of photos, family’s china, and even the kids’ height charts aren’t just stuff; they’re attached to a lifetime of memories—and letting them go can be scary. With empathy, expertise, and humor, Keep the Memories, Lose the Stuff helps you sift through years of clutter, let go of what no longer serves you, and identify the items worth keeping so that you can focus on living in the present.”

This is a topic near and dear to my heart (see my free guide “After a Death: How to Make the Process of Going through Your Parents’ Photos Easier”), and I look forward to seeing how Paxton shares his wisdom. A favorite bit of personal historian advice with respect to sorting through your stuff: Take high-quality photographs of items that hold meaning but perhaps take up too much space or no longer feel relevant to your life; this way you can write about why these heirlooms mattered to you (and your family), where and when they originated, etc.—then, after preserving their history, you can give them away without unnecessary guilt.

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

By Melissa Febos (Catapult; March 15, 2022)

“If I could do cartwheels, I would have cartwheeled across the room when I learned that the brilliant Melissa Febos is gifting us with a memoir craft book,” writes one reviewer on LitHub.

From the publisher: “How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as ‘navel-gazing’—or else hailed as ‘so brave, so raw’? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong? … Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence.”

How to Tell a Story: The Essential Guide to Memorable Storytelling from The Moth

By The Moth, Meg Bowles, Catherine Burns, Jenifer Hixson, Sarah Austin Jenness (April 26, 2022)

I’ve never been drawn to going up onstage to share my stories at a mic, but I am a frequent guest at story slams and Moth main stage performances (migrating to their storytelling podcast during the pandemic)—and I have always marveled at how well the coaching works. Seriously, introverted writers and self-declared non-performers shine when they’re telling their stories for The Moth, and often that can be attributed to having workshopped their material with a team of educators who help develop and shape their stories. Goals? “To hook us in. Make us care about you… [and] conclude as a different person.”

So of course I’m invested in reading their new book that promises to share “secrets of their time-honed process and [use] examples from notable and beloved storytellers,...[and to help you] mine your memories for your best stories.” Everyone has a story to share, so why not share it well?

Biography & Memoir

I firmly believe that reading memoir—good memoir, truthful and well-structured memoir—is a bridge to writing memoir. So beyond the mere sensory pleasure of reading any of the below suggestions, if you are someone who regularly writes about your life or has aspirations to pen your own memoir, take notes when you come across something especially compelling. Does the author employ dialogue to great effect? How do they weave the past and the present? How to they convey universal meaning from singular personal experiences?

My regular readers will know I have an affinity for memoirs told in shorter snippets—often referred to as vignettes—and I am especially eager to read the following from the list below, all examples of the memoir-in-essays form: Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives by Mary Laura Philpott (April); The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays by CJ Hauser (July); and Crying in the Bathroom by Erika L. Sánchez (July).

Lost & Found: A Memoir

By Kathryn Schulz (Random House; January 11, 2022)

Named one of the most anticipated books of the year by The New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, and others, Lost & Found is undoubtedly one of the most awaited books of 2022.

Eighteen months before the author’s father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, according to the publisher, “she weaves the stories of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of how all our lives are shaped by loss and discovery—from the maddening disappearance of everyday objects to the sweeping devastations of war, pandemic, and natural disaster; from finding new planets to falling in love.”

“Three very different American families form the heart of Lost & Found: the one that made Schulz’s father, a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee; the one that made her partner, an equally brilliant farmer’s daughter and devout Christian; and the one she herself makes through marriage.”

Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom

By Carl Bernstein (Henry Holt; January 11, 2022)

According to the publisher, in this book “Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of All the President’s Men and pioneer of investigative journalism, recalls his beginnings as an audacious teenage newspaper reporter in the nation’s capital—a winning tale of scrapes, gumshoeing, and American bedlam.” As a huge fan of the Alan Pakula–directed film and a former magazine editor myself, I am so on board for this account from one of journalism’s most iconic personalities.

Here’s Bernstein on first entering the newsroom of the Washington Evening Star as a high schooler: “The door by which I had entered was at the end of a dim, quiet corridor of the sort you would find in any ordinary place of business. The door through which Rudy Kauffmann now led me opened into another universe. People were shouting. Typewriters clattered and chinged. Beneath my feet, I could feel the rumble of the presses…. In my whole life I had never heard such glorious chaos or seen such purposeful commotion as I now beheld in that newsroom. By the time I had walked from one end to the other, I knew that I wanted to be a newspaperman.” Read an excerpt from Chasing History here.

I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home

By Jami Attenberg (Ecco; January 11, 2022)

In her first memoir, acclaimed author “Jami Attenberg—described as a ‘master of modern fiction’ (Entertainment Weekly) and the ‘poet laureate of difficult families’ (Kirkus Reviews)—reveals the defining moments that pushed her to create a life, and voice, she could claim for herself,” shares the publisher. “What does it take to devote oneself to art? What does it mean to own one’s ideas? What does the world look like for a woman moving solo through it?”

In a review for Vogue, Jessie Heyman opines, “Her newest is an episodic collection of Attenberg’s life—her cross-country travels, debilitating injuries, bad plane rides, bad boyfriends—which are all told through her signature intimate and humorous style. But it’s her writing on her own work I found particularly revealing. ‘I became a fiction writer in the first place because stories are a beautiful place to hide,’ she writes.”

Aurelia, Aurélia

By Kathryn Davis (Graywolf; March 1, 2022)

From the publisher: “Kathryn Davis’s hypnotic new book is a meditation on the way imagination shapes life, and how life, as it moves forward, shapes imagination. At its center is the death of her husband, Eric. The book unfolds as a study of their marriage, its deep joys and stinging frustrations; it is also a book about time, the inexorable events that determine beginnings and endings.”

“She writes about being a teenager, trying on identities like clothes, and about being in late middle age, resolutely someone, and yet still wondering, still trying on the other clothes, even while liking her own,” notes a LitHub review.

Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory

By Sarah Polley (Penguin Press; March 1, 2022)

“These are the most dangerous stories of my life,” Sarah Polley writes in her new memoir. “The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way than they did in childhood, they became lighter and easier to carry.”

Polley, an Oscar nominated screenwriter, director, and actor, shares six essays, “each one [capturing] a piece of [her] life as she remembers it, while at the same time examining the fallibility of memory, the mutability of reality in the mind, and the possibility of experiencing the past anew, as the person she is now but was not then,” describes the publisher.

If you haven’t seen Polley’s 2012 film Stories We Tell, it too explores the vagaries of truth and the intersection of the past and present, and I highly recommend it (read my review here), perhaps as a prelude to her memoir.

In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss

By Amy Bloom (Random House; March 8, 2022)

From one of my all-time favorite writers, Amy Bloom (I still recall discovering her book of stories Come to Me the year after I graduated college and knowing I would buy anything she wrote thereafter), this new memoir explores the period of time she accompanied her husband, Brian, through the final days of his life. After a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s, the pair begin a heartrending journey of finding a way that Brian can end his life with dignity.

“Most poignant are the intimate moments they share as they make the most of their last days together,” reads the starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. “As [Bloom] writes, ‘I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn’t as afraid.’ The result is a stunning portrayal of how love can reveal itself in life’s most difficult moments.”

Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation

By Maud Newton (Random House; March 29, 2022)

“I never expected to become interested in genealogy,” Maud Newton writes in this 2014 Harper’s cover story that led to her book deal. “When I did, slowly at first and then in great gusts of extreme obsession, I thought I owed the fascination to my mom, a natural storyteller descended from a collection of idiosyncratic Texans. One of her granddads was a strident Dallas socialist; the other killed a man with a hay hook. Her father, Robert Bruce, is said to have been married thirteen times to twelve women.”

According to the publisher, “Maud researched her genealogy…and sought family secrets through her DNA. But immersed in census archives and cousin matches, she yearned for deeper truths…. Searching, moving, and inspiring, Ancestor Trouble is one writer’s attempt to use genealogy—a once-niche hobby that has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry—to expose the secrets and contradictions of her own ancestors, and to argue for the transformational possibilities that reckoning with our ancestors offers all of us.”

The Unwritten Book: An Investigation

By Samantha Hunt (FSG; April 5, 2022)

More reviews than I can count recommend this book to me. A few, to entice:

“Like a trunk in the attic, The Unwritten Book offers up the most extraordinary, eclectic, and heart-wrenching insights, historical facts, stories, and advice on how to live closer to the dead…. I feel more alive and wiser for having read it,” declares author Cathy Park Hong.

From Rumaan Alam: “The Unwritten Book is a disobedient work—not quite memoir (even as the author interrogates her own life); not quite philosophy (though with much to say on art, faith, ethics, and more); not quite classifiable.”

And from LitHub: ”Fueled by the discovery of her father’s unfinished manuscript, Samantha Hunt is on the hunt (sorry) for clues about all that is left unsaid. Part literary criticism, part memoir, part family history, this new book explores the things that have a hold on us. I, for one, am ready to be haunted by Samantha Hunt once again.”

“Each chapter gathers subjects that haunt: dead people, the forest, the towering library of all those books we’ll never have time to read or write,” notes the publisher. “Through literary criticism, family history, history, and memoir…Hunt explores questions of motherhood, hoarding, legacies of addiction, grief, how we insulate ourselves from the past, how we misinterpret the world.”

Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life: A Memoir

By Delia Ephron (Little Brown; April 12, 2022)

Time magazine calls Left on Tenth “a heart-wrenching tale of second chances at life and love” for author and screenwriter Delia Ephron, who chronicles her (often hilarious, always vulnerable) journey of falling in love again after the death of her husband. “But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia.”

Bomb Shelter: Love, Time, and Other Explosives: A Memoir in Essays

By Mary Laura Philpott (Atria Books; April 12, 2022)

In this memoir in essays, Philpott sets out to “illuminate what it means to move through life with a soul made of equal parts anxiety and optimism (and while she’s at it, to ponder the mysteries of backyard turtles and the challenges of spatchcocking a turkey),” according to the publisher. “Philpott returns in her distinctive voice to explore our protective instincts, the ways we continue to grow up long after we’re grown, and the limits—both tragic and hilarious—of the human body and mind.”

One Off the Shelf reviewer highlighted this memorable line from Philpott’s book, which makes me even more eager to read it: “I keep trying to make sense of my life by stacking stories upon stories upon stories.” Indeed, don’t we all.

The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays

By CJ Hauser (Doubleday; July 12, 2022)

“I think I was afraid that if I called off my wedding I was going to ruin myself. That doing it would disfigure the story of my life in some irredeemable way, CJ Hauser wrote in The Paris Review essay, also called “The Crane Wife.”

“What I understood on the other side of my decision,” she wrote, “on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs.”

From the publisher: In The Crane Wife, CJ Hauser “writes about friends and lovers, blood family and chosen family, and asks what more expansive definitions of love might offer us all. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, [this] is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.”

Crying in the Bathroom: A Memoir

By Erika L. Sánchez (Viking; July 12, 2022)

From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter comes an utterly original memoir-in-essays that promises to be as deeply moving as it is hilarious.

From the publisher’s page: “In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best—a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.” I’m in.

As yet untitled MEMOIR of Paul Newman

(Knopf; Autumn 2022)

With the hope of debunking the numerous unsolicited biographies about Paul Newman over the years, the actor and philanthropist began recording his life story through oral history interviews with friend Stewart Stern in 1986 (“I should probably at least make some truthful self-examination so the unsolicited biographies wouldn’t be considered as gospel,” he reportedly told Stern).

According to the publisher, the “result is a portrait of the actor in full, from his early days to his years in the Navy, from his start in Hollywood to his rise to stardom, and with an intimate glimpse of his family life.

I met Newman when I volunteered to help set up his first camp, the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp in Ashford, Connecticut, when I was a senior in high school, and was in awe of his selfless nature (and wonderfully mischievous sense of humor), so I especially look forward to hearing stories from his life in his own words.

Diaries & journals

Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker, 1965-2000

Edited by Valerie Boyd (Simon & Schuster; April 12, 2022)

From the publisher: “In an unvarnished and singular voice, [Alice Walker] explores an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr.; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, defying laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the Women’s Movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ancestral visits that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, sometimes in equal measure, for her work and her activism; and burying her mother. A powerful blend of Walker’s personal life with political events, this revealing collection offers rare insight into a literary legend.”

The Diaries of Franz Kafka

Translated by Ross Benjamin (Schocken; December 6, 2022)

This new translation of Kafka’s handwritten diaries dating from 1909 to 1923, according to the publisher, contains “accounts of daily events, reflections, observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, accounts of dreams, as well as finished stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of the diary entries and provides substantial new content, including details, names, literary works, and passages of a sexual nature that were omitted from previous publications. By faithfully reproducing the diaries' distinctive—and often surprisingly unpolished—writing in Kafka's notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author's use of the diaries for literary experimentation and private self-expression, but also their value as a work of art in themselves.”

Other memoir & biography titles to look out for in 2022

• The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found by Frank Bruni (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; March 1, 2022)

• I Was Better Last Night by Harvey Fierstein (Knopf; March 1, 2022)

• Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones (Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster; April 5, 2022)

• Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (Little, Brown and Company; May 31, 2022)

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