8 Best Memoirs & Nonfiction Books of Summer 2023

In Vitro

Isabel Zapata

Medical interventions become an exercise in patience, desire, and delirium in this intimate account of bodily transformation and disruption. In candid, graceful prose, Isabel Zapata gives voice to the strangeness and complexities of conception and motherhood that are rarely discussed publicly. Zapata frankly addresses the misogyny she experienced during fertility treatments, explores the force of grief in imagining possible futures, and confronts the societal expectations around maternity. In the tradition of Rivka Galchen’s Little Labors and Sarah Manguso’s Ongoingness, In Vitro draws from diary and essay forms to create a new kind of literary companion.

Release Date: May 9, 2023

The Male Gazed

Manuel Betancourt

Manuel Betancourt has long lustfully coveted masculinity—in part because he so lacked it. As a child in Bogotá, Colombia, he grew up with the social pressure to appear strong, manly, and, ultimately, straight. And yet in the films and television he avidly watched, Betancourt saw glimmers of different possibilities. From the stars of telenovelas and the princes of Disney films to pop sensation Ricky Martin and teen heartthrobs in shows like Saved By the Bell, he continually found himself asking: Do I want him or do I want to be him? The Male Gazed grapples with the thrall of masculinity, examining its frailty and its attendant anxieties even as it focuses.

Release Date: May 30, 2023

Head Above Water

Shahd Alshammari

Shahd Alshammari is just eighteen when she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and told by her neurologist that she would not make it past age thirty. Despite what she is told, by thirty, she has become a professor of literature, and has managed to navigate education systems in both Kuwait and the United Kingdom and inspire generations of students.

Head above Water is the intimate, philosophical memoir of Shahd Alshammari’s life of triumph and resistance, as a woman marked “ill” by society and as a lifelong reader, student, and teacher. Charting her journey with raw honesty, Alshammari explores disability, displacement, and belonging.

Release Date: July 18, 2023

Laid and Confused

Maria Yagoda

Far more alarming than the millennial “sex recession”—the phenomenon of young people having less sex than previous generations—is that we’re in the middle of a bad sex epidemic that all generations are suffering from. Despite major advances in sex education, positivity, and technology, we haven’t moved the needle on better.

We’re still quietly enduring unsatisfying sex, whether that’s resigning ourselves to the same three positions we secretly hate, or lying when our Bumble date asks if we’re “close” after fifteen seconds of oral. We’ve been trained to optimize everything, except our own pleasure.

Release Date: May 30, 2023