The beauty of memoirs lies in how they push the writer to delve deeply into personal experiences, unearthing facts they might not have found otherwise and allowing the reader to experience the author’s reality with the author. Don’t miss these 10 genuinely extraordinary memoirs coming to retailers in 2023 if you enjoy learning about true stories from the people who lived them.
Love, Pamela
Pamela Anderson
PAMELA ANDERSON’s blond bombshell image was ubiquitous in the 1990s. Discovered in the stands during a Canadian football game, she was quickly launched into superstardom, becoming Playboy’s favorite cover girl and an emblem of Hollywood glamour and sex appeal. Yet the Pamela Anderson we think we know was created through happenstance rather than careful cultivation.
Love, Pamela brings forth her true story: that of a small-town girl getting tangled up in her own dream. Growing up on Vancouver Island, the daughter of young, wild, and unwittingly stylish parents.
Release Date: January 31, 2023
Hijab Butch Blues
Lamya H
When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: when Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her. Could Maryam, uninterested in men, be . . . like Lamya?
Release Date: February 7, 2023
My What If Year
Alisha Fernandez Miranda
THE PERFECT BOOK FOR THIS MOMENT OF RETHINKING: A record number of 38 million people left the workforce during the Great Resignation. The pandemic inspired many people to rethink their professional and lifestyle decisions, and resulted in 1 in 4 women leaving their careers.
EXPLORES THE UNIVERSAL “WHAT IFs”: For everyone who’s ever felt stuck, dreamed of a second chance, or imagined what their lives would be like if they had taken a different path, My What If Year is one woman’s riotous journey that will encourage readers at any stage of their lives to take the first step to redefining their future.
Release Date: February 7, 2023
The Urgent Life
Bozoma Saint John
When Bozoma Saint John’s husband, Peter, died of cancer, she made one big decision: to live life urgently. Bozoma was no stranger to adversity, having lost her college boyfriend to suicide, navigated an interracial marriage, grieved a child born prematurely–a process that led to her and Peter’s separation–and coparented the daughter who she and Peter shared. When Peter knew his cancer was terminal, he gave Bozoma a short list of things to do: cancel the divorce, and fix the wrongs immediately. In The Urgent Life, Bozoma takes readers through the dizzying, numbing days of multiple griefs, and the courage which these sparked in her to live life.
Release Date: February 21, 2023
A Living Remedy
Nicole Chung
Nicole Chung couldn’t hightail it out of her overwhelmingly white Oregon hometown fast enough. As a scholarship student at a private university on the East Coast, no longer the only Korean she knew, she found community and a path to the life she’d long wanted.
But the middle class world she begins to raise a family in – where there are big homes, college funds, nice vacations – looks very different from the middle class world she thought she grew up in, where paychecks have to stretch to the end of the week, health insurance is often lacking, and there are no safety nets.
Release Date: April 4, 2023
The Big Reveal
Sasha Velour
This book is a quilt, piecing together memoir, history, and theory into a living portrait of an artist and an art. Within these pages, illustrated throughout with photos and original artwork, Sasha Velour illuminates drag as a unique form of expression with a rich history and a revolutionary spirit.
Each chapter strips off a new layer, removing one tantalizing glove and then another, to reveal all the twists and turns in the life of a queen.
Release Date: April 4, 2023
Chita
Chita Rivera
She was born Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero—until the entertainment world renamed her. But Dolores—the irreverent side of the sensual, dark and ferocious Chita—was always present center stage, and was influential in creating some of Broadway most iconic and acclaimed roles, including Anita in West Side Story‚ the part that made her a star—Rosie in Bye Bye, Birdie, Velma in Chicago, and Aurora in Kiss of the Spider Woman.
Written in gratitude to her longstanding fans and with the hope that new generations may learn from her extraordinary experience.
Release Date: April 25, 2023
Boyslut
Zachary Zane
As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. He sometimes imagined other people naked, too, and without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.
Boyslut is a memoir-manifesto in which Zane articulates that, even today, we live in a world that shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit.
Release Date: May 9, 2023
Pageboy
Elliot Page
“Can I kiss you?” It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. A previously unfathomable experience. Here he was on the precipice of discovering himself as a queer person, as a trans person. Getting closer to his desires, his dreams, himself, without the repression he’d carried for so long. But for Elliot, two steps forward had always come with one step back. With Juno’s massive success, Elliot became one of the world’s most beloved actors. His dreams were coming true, but the pressure to perform suffocated him.
Release Date: June 6, 2023
Owner of a Lonely Heart
Beth Nguyen
At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her father, sister, grandmother, and uncles fled Saigon for America. Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together.
Owner of a Lonely Heart is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother. Framed by a handful of visits over the course of many years—sometimes brief.
Release Date: July 4, 2023