Best Memoirs of 2022

Eighteen months before Schultz’s father died after a long battle with cancer, she met the love of her life. It’s this painful dichotomy that sets the foundation for Lost & Found, a poignant memoir about how love and loss often coexist. Braiding her personal experiences together with psychological, philosophical and scientific insight, Schultz weaves a taxonomy of our losses, which can “encompass both the trivial as well as the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.” But so too does she celebrate the act of discovery, from finding what we’ve mislaid to lucking into lasting love. Penetrating and profound, Lost & Found captures the extraordinary joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

The American South is often cast as a backwater cousin out of step with American ideals. In this vital cultural history, Perry argues otherwise, insisting the South is, in fact, the foundational heartland of America, an undeniable fulcrum around which our wealth and politics have always turned. Fusing memoir, reportage, and travelogue, Perry imparts Southern history alongside high-spirited interviews with modern-day Southerners from all walks of life. At once a love letter to “a land of big dreams and bigger lies” and a clarion call for change, South to America will change how you understand America’s past, present, and future.

When James enrolled at Connecticut’s prestigious Taft School at fifteen years old, she had no idea that, as the predominantly white boarding school’s first “Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891,” she would become its involuntary poster child for diversity. James’ hopes for a positive high school experience were dashed by “a swamp of microaggressions,” ranging from a student who accused her of stealing $20 to an article in the student newspaper blaming students of color for the segregation of campus. Determined that students after her wouldn’t suffer the same fate, she became an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment, but soon felt that she was “selling a lie for a living.” Frank and devastating in its candor, as well as incisive in its critique of elite academia, Admissions is a poignant coming-of-age memoir.

Who are our ancestors to us, and what can they tell us about ourselves? In this riveting memoir, Newton goes in search of the answers to these questions, spelunking exhaustively through her frustrating and fascinating family tree. From an accused witch to a thirteen times-married man, her family tree abounds with stories that absorb and appall, but taxonomizing her family history doesn’t satisfy Newton’s hunger for meaning. Just what do the facts of a life tell us about who we are or where we come from, and what can our personal histories tell us about our national past? Carefully blending memoir and cultural criticism, Newton explores the cultural, scientific, and spiritual dimensions of ancestry, arguing for the transformational power of grappling with our inheritances.