In a wide open field, true-grit memoirs stand out for their brittle tenacity, the ability to survive the harsh terrain. A reader might wince or recoil at times, but these stories offer a kind of bleak hope about human resilience.
The subgenre includes its share of variants. There are brutal personal loss stories, harrowing abuse memoirs, and addiction tales. The reader is given a promise, a barter for engaging with them: if you enter the darkest territory, you will emerge into sunlight at the end. No memoir ends with the writer jumping off a bridge. This is meant to be comforting, somehow.
I read this subgenre sparingly, simply because I don’t always enjoy the bargain. Here are three that were worth it.
1.
In the tradition of Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors, this harrowing childhood memoir depicts a set of parents you can hardly believe exist. The author’s father is a trust-fund Bohemian who disappears to Europe, leaving his kid in the care of a mother who forgets to feed him, is hospitalized for psychosis, and loses him to child welfare. When Io is finally in his father’s care, it’s only marginally better. He has been harboring a secret for years: he’s a heroin addict.
From this scrapheap, Tillet Wright crafts a gripping and beautifully written memoir of the East Village in the ’80s and of the grit required to survive severe neglect. It is not pretty.
2.
This was an accidental true-grit read. Hoping to kill a Sunday with some ’80s nostalgia, I jumped in, not realizing its depths. The author, famous for creating the original mean girl Nellie Oleson, comes from a show biz family with dark edges. All four of them worked in the industry: her mother was a voice-over artist, her father a business manager, and she and her brother were child actors.
Hard to know where to begin with the brother. Imagine Greg Brady as a sociopath and you’ve got the idea. The story of her abuse at his hands, and the family denial of it, was bone-chilling.
This is not just an abuse memoir, but it is hard to classify it more gently. She has been through a lot.
3.
There is no memoir harder to read than that of a bereaved parent. The author and his wife lost their two-year-old in a freak accident when she was out of their care. In addition to the profound loss, they must grapple with the person who was present when it happened.
I knew this would be a brutal read and it was. I cried through the entire thing. There was a catharsis, though: the tears at the end were different from the ones at the beginning. The author takes the reader through the stages of grief.
Books Smitten 