The Queer Memoirs That Live Rent-Free in Our Brains

The best memoirs make you feel less alone. These books go further than that. They reorganize the way you see certain things: your past, your family, your body, the stories you tell about yourself. All of them are essential.

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir about an abusive relationship with a woman is one of the most formally inventive books published in the last decade. Each chapter is told through a different genre convention: the haunted house, the choose-your-own-adventure, the fairy tale. It is doing this not as a gimmick but because the structure mirrors the way trauma fragments memory. It is also a direct argument for why queer domestic abuse needs to be documented, spoken about, and taken seriously. It is brilliant and hard and necessary. This is the book people mean when they say a memoir changed them.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon

Kiese Laymon’s memoir is addressed to his mother and deals with body, weight, violence, race, and the ways Black men are taught to carry things that were never theirs to carry. It is not explicitly a queer memoir, but Laymon writes about his body and desire with a candor that is rare and the queer resonances are present throughout. It is one of the most honest books about the relationship between a parent and a child that exists. It will make you want to call someone you love.

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey

Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s memoir about her mother, who was murdered by her stepfather when Trethewey was nineteen. The book is a reckoning with memory, grief, and the way daughters carry their mothers. It is heartbreaking and also extraordinarily beautiful, because Trethewey is a poet and every sentence earns its place. This is one of those books that you finish and then sit with for a long time.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe

Maia Kobabe’s graphic memoir about growing up nonbinary and asexual is one of the most challenged books in US libraries, which tells you exactly how necessary it is. It is also warm, specific, and drawn with great care. Kobabe writes about figuring out gender and sexuality in a way that doesn’t assume the reader already has the vocabulary, which makes it one of the most accessible introductions to nonbinary experience available. It is also, for many nonbinary readers, the first time they have felt completely represented on a page.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Maggie Nelson’s hybrid memoir and theory text follows her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge through pregnancy and his transition, while weaving in queer theory, philosophy, and her own thinking about bodies and identity. It is intellectually demanding in the best way. It is also a love story. It asks what it means to be a body, to love a body, to exist inside categories that keep shifting. If you have ever read queer theory and wished it felt more like living, this is the book.

One More: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy

Not traditionally categorized as a queer memoir, but McCurdy has since spoken publicly about her identity and the book, about abuse, eating disorders, and survival, resonates deeply in queer communities for its portrait of a person taking back their own story. It was also the bestselling memoir of 2022, for good reason. It is honest to the point of discomfort and ultimately a book about becoming free.

Read one. Then read another. These books deserve to be in conversation with each other.