May 2023 Book Vote
This month's genre: Memoir
Welcome to May's book vote. Our founder, Erin is a huge lover of Memoir so she's so excited this genre has come back around.
Take a look at the synopses below and vote for the one that appeals to you most as a Gloss Book Club selection.
Each month we spend a considerable amount of time researching books to include in our vote, we consider a wide range of factors such as global availability, price per market, author diversity, book length, and reader review ratings. It's not a quick process, but it's an important one. We hope you'll enjoy our selections.
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Just As I Am
by Cicely Tyson and Michelle Burford
Pages:453
Synopsis
Just as I Am is my truth. It is me, plain and unvarnished, with the glitter and garland set aside. Here, I am indeed Cicely, the actress who has been blessed to grace the stage and screen for six decades. Yet I am also the church girl who once rarely spoke a word. I am the teenager who sought solace in the verses of the old hymn for which this book is named. I am a daughter and mother, a sister, and a friend. I am an observer of human nature and the dreamer of audacious dreams. I am a woman who has hurt as immeasurably as I have loved, a child of God divinely guided by His hand. And here in my ninth decade, I am a woman who, at long last, has something meaningful to say.
How We Love: Notes on a Life
by Clementine Ford
Pages: 320
Synopsis
A deeply personal exploration of love in all its forms from a feminist icon and bestselling author of Fight Like a Girl and Boys Will Be Boys.
There is love in this place, just like there is love everywhere we care to look for it. There is beauty and there is hope and there is a boy and there is a mother and there is the past and there is the future but most importantly there is the now, and everything that exists between them that has got them from one moment to the next. The now is where we find the golden glow where, for the briefest of moments, the sky rips open and we see what it is we are made of. Tell me a story, he asked me. And so I began.
Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and the multiple ways it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery.
This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms through Clementine's own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love. She writes movingly about the transcendent and transformative journey to motherhood and the similarly monumental path to self-love. 'We love as children, as friends, as parents and, yes, sometimes as sexual beings, and none of it is more important than the other because all of it shows us who we are.'
Crying in H Mart
by Michelle Zauner
Pages: 242
Synopsis
A memoir about growing up Korean American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.
Michelle Zauner tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.
As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Lost and Found: A Memoir
by Kathryn Schulz
Pages:256
Synopsis
Eighteen months before Kathryn Schulz's father died, she met the woman she would marry. In Lost & Found, she weaves the story of those relationships into a brilliant exploration of the role that loss and discovery play in all of our lives. The resulting book is part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that is simultaneously full of wonder and joy and wretchedness and suffering--a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief. A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Schulz writes with curiosity, tenderness, erudition, and wit about our finite yet infinitely complicated lives. Lost & Found is an enduring account of love in all its many forms from one of the great writers of our time.
21 Comments
Lost & Found is my vote
The synopsis for How we Love looks like it belongs to another book?
How we love has my vote
Lost and found!
Crying In sounds like a great read
Lost and Found is my vote.
I’ve read Just as I Am and it’s a wonderful book about an amazing woman
Just as I am is my vote. 97 years…..she would have stories to tell! Hope this is chosen.
Lost and found for me
How we Love for me ! I
Lost and Found.
Lost and Found
Lost and found
How we love is my vote!
Lost and Found!
Just As I Am
Lost and Found for me
this was the hardest vote for me yet but I went with lost and found
Just As I Am is my vote.
Lost and Found
Crying in H Mart