Best New Nonfiction Books—and Memoirs!—You Need to Read

Current estimates suggest there are tens of thousands of unaccompanied homeless youth in the country, but Vicki Sokolik knows the number is much higher. Sokolik has devoted her life to advocating for this invisible population, kids who’ve left their families but are not in foster care, and are forced to survive without any institutional support. Interspersed with first-person accounts from unhoused kids themselves, this is the story of Sokolik’s own journey from a stay-at-home mom with a bootstrapper mentality to a fierce organizer for structural change. An inspiring and instructive read for anyone who wants to help but feels too powerless to start.

Growing up in the Four Corners region of New Mexico as a mixed heritage Quechan (Yuma) and Laguna Pueblo, Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to live with swagger. “Despondency hung over the reservation,” she writes, “and when toddlers and children acted rebellious, adults saw hope and verve.” It’s fitting, then, that her memoir crackles with energy. Memories of Jackson Taffa’s hardscrabble 1970s and ’80s childhood flow into waking dreams, the history of the Red Power movement, her father’s battles with state violence, and ultimately, the author’s struggle to reconcile fury and grace. A coming-of-age story that tackles nothing less than the birth of the nation.

At the turn of the 20th century, white physicians and lawmakers began to stoke panic over a perceived rise in insanity among Black citizens, blaming slavery’s end for a new kind of “aimless vagrant who needed to be concealed and incarcerated.” Enter Crownsville, Maryland’s Hospital for the Negro Insane, a segregated asylum forcibly built by the patients who’d reside there. As masterfully recounted by journalist Antonia Hylton, from 1911 to 2004 the hospital exemplified and exploited society’s anxieties around Blackness and mental illness. In a time when medical racism and the prison industrial complex continue to tear apart families, this impeccably researched accounting is a must-read.

What makes women break bad? In this rigorous collection of case studies and analysis, forensic psychotherapist Anna Motz argues that violent women are almost always also victims themselves, and moreover, deserving of rehabilitation. With a 30-year career providing talk therapy to incarcerated women, Motz is uniquely positioned to cut through the sensationalism of the crimes (arson, Munchausen syndrome by proxy, murder) to the real people behind them. To be fair, these stories are distressing, but in Motz’s worldview, no human is beyond hope. An empathetic and necessary corrective to the stereotypes peddled by so many sensational true crime shows.

When Leslie Jamison ended her marriage, she urged her students to embrace the “clarifying adrenaline” of revision. “In writing, these removals were a form of rigor,” she says. “But in life, they felt like cruelty.” Therein lies the conflict at the heart of her fifth book, where her divorce—a removal from her home and marriage—is mined to explore the violent necessity of self-transformation. With her new baby strapped in the sidecar, Jamison sets us off on a journey of heartbreak, self-determination, and diaper mishaps, determined to treat separation and motherhood “not as life paused, but as life happening.” A story that speaks directly to our times, a memoir for the ages.