A Year in First Person: The Best Memoirs I Read This Year

wherein some books set in Paris and on trains might appear

Dear Wanderers,

Today’s post is about reading, which is, after all, a kind of wandering.

Although I’ve read many novels this year, I have gravitated toward memoir. I think this is partially due to my extreme preference for the first person. Yes, I am a sucker for the “I”—which is perhaps why I enjoy reading Substack, the home of the “I,” of individual experience, of this-happened-to-me and a-day-in-the-life.

I often find third-person writing off-putting or dull. Of course, there are many exceptions, and obviously it is a matter of personal taste, not a statement about the inherent qualities of one type of point of view over another. But for me, third person (even the so-called “close third”) often feels so distant that I have a hard time getting into the story. Omniscient narration is the point of view I least enjoy reading, as it so often feels forced. Confession: in a bookstore, I rarely get past the first two pages of any novel written in third person, past tense. (Third person present doesn’t have the same sleep-inducing effect on my brain; what it lacks in intimacy, it can—in the right hands—make up for in immediacy).

Although I love memoirs, I don’t usually go for addiction memoirs, so you won’t find any of those on this list—with the exception of one memoir about a self-destructive addition to a not-very-interesting paramour that stuck in my mind, though not pleasantly.

My own reading peccadilloes aside, many of the memoirs that spoke to me this year are books I picked up in a physical store, with little to no prior knowledge. Some of the ones I remember best are books that caught my eye at Librarie Galignani in Paris in October and November. As my memory is patchy and I rarely write down the titles of the books I’ve read, this will be a France-centric list, the books I purchased in France being the most recently on my mind.

You can find all of these books on my Memoirs and Essays list at Bookshop.org.

A Paris-Behind-the-Facade Memoir

A Waiter in Paris: Adventures in the Dark Heart of the City by Edward Chisolm

This is the last book I read this year and one of my favorites. Arriving in Paris from the UK with an unmarketable college degree, no money, and big dreams, Chisolm hustles his way into a job at a Paris bistro, despite the fact that he doesn’t speak French. The memoir chronicles his endless days as a “runner,” one step below a waiter.

As Chisolm’s outsider status among the overworked staff gradually gives way to insider status, we witness the world of Parisian restaurants from the inside. While celebrities and tourists enjoy themselves on the terrace, a network of underpaid staff, many of them immigrants, work in impossible conditions in the back. Contrary to what many American tourists seem to believe, waiters in Paris regularly work 14-hour shifts without making enough to get by on. Anyone who thinks “waiters in Paris earn a living wage, so you don’t need to tip well,” should read this book. One interesting tidbit: Chisolm reveals that it is well-known among Parisian waiters that the best tippers are tourists from Brazil and Japan, with Americans coming in a distant third. The worst tippers are French.

Chisolm presents a fascinating cast of characters—their foibles, dreams, and humanity: the aspiring actor who realizes that he has been at the restaurant for a decade, the aging floor manager who strikes up serial relationships with the “untouchable” top waiters, the greedy manager who cheats waiters out of their rightful pay, the Tamil Tigers who run the kitchen.

After a year of hunger, exhaustion, poverty, and declining health, Chisolm eventually gets out. This entertaining, heartfelt, splendidly written memoir is an ode to the city and to the unseen waiters and kitchen staff who don’t.

A Writer’s Memoir Set in France

Yoga by Emmanuel Carrere

A book that begins on a 10-day meditation retreat in the French countryside, but takes an abrupt turn to Paris when the author receives startling news. Though the book is titled Yoga, it’s only tangentially about yoga. A quiet book, both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

A Memoir About Aging

Winter Journal, by Paul Auster

Is old age a place? Perhaps not. But given that we often think of old age as “yonder,” a thing in the distance, and given that it appears farther away the closer we get to it, perhaps it is a place as much as it is a relative time. When you are 25, you probably think of 60 as “old,” a kind of distant land, but by the time you reach 50, you probably think of 60 as “just around the corner.”

Auster, now in his seventies, wrote Winter Journal on the eve of his 63rd birthday. It is about his mother’s life and death, about aging, and about the sensations of the body through time, for childhood to the later years.

(I interviewed Paul Auster for City Arts and Lectures in 2009, after which he and my husband and I spent an evening wandering the streets of San Francisco in search of a restaurant (we ended up drinking Scotch at Fleur de Lys), and then wandering the streets in search of my car. He was one of the most interesting interviewees I’ve ever had the opportunity to talk with, absolutely as charming as you might imagine.)

A Memoir About Divorce, Motherhood, and Creativity

You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

Smith’s memoir about divorce is devastating and beautiful. It begins with a postcard Smith finds, a postcard her husband has written to a woman who lives “in the city he’d been visiting for work.” The postcard reveals a romantic walk Smith’s husband had taken with this woman, on which they picked up a pinecone, which will reappear throughout the memoir in various iterations of meaning.

Although the divorce begins with an affair, Smith ultimately acknowledges that the end of the marriage is not her husband’s fault alone. A nuanced story about the breakup of a marriage, the kind of work that is valued by the world at large, and the author’s attempt to maintain her creative space and sanity while raising two small children post-divorce.

A Novel That Feels Like a Memoir, Set on a Train

Break-Up: A Novel in Essays by Joanna Walsh

Even though this book is classified as a novel, I’m taking the liberty of including it on this memoir list because it feels so much like a memoir—which is perhaps a credit to the genre-bending nature of Walsh’s work.

A woman travels by train through Europe following the breakup of a relationship that happened mostly online. It’s a big hybrid narrative about technology, intimacy, and wandering. And yes, the narrator passes through the gritty outskirts of Paris.

If you like Deborah Levy and Sarah Manguso, you will probably enjoy reading Joanna Walsh, who happens to be on Substack at

Paris Stamp

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Two Memoirs That Stuck in My Mind

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

One of the memoirs I read and thought a lot about this year, though I can’t say I entirely enjoyed it, was Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux. I first wrote about Getting Lost here one year ago, when I hadn’t yet finished it.

The starting point—Ernaux’s affair with a Russian “diplomat” in Paris—was interesting, but ultimately I felt the memoir devolved so far into self-pity, obsession, and pettiness it was like watching a train wreck. Yet, I deeply enjoyed her thoughts on writing, quoted here. I have enjoyed some of Ernaux’s other books, including The Years, much more.

Smile by Sarah Ruhl

I love the playwright Sarah Ruhl’s essay collection, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write. If you haven’t read it, and if you like brief, sharp essays, you should read it. I read the book some time ago and continue to pick it up every couple of months to reread an essay or two. Most of the essays in the collection are only a couple of pages.

In 2022, Ruhl published the memoir Smile, which begins with her discovery, right after the birth of her daughter and right before she has a play open on Broadway, that one side of her face is completely paralyzed.

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Essay Collections (Discovered at the Booksmith on Haight Street)

Every time I visited the Booksmith on Haight Street in San Francisco this year, I went directly to the well-curated “Essays” section. I’ve found a number of terrific essay collections this way, including most recently Selected Cronicas by Clarice Lispector (translated by Giovonni Pontiero). I’ve never read Lispector before, but the collection looks promising. The young woman at checkout informed me, “We love Clarice Lispector here.”

At the beginning of the year at The Booksmith, I picked up John Green’s excellent The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human Centered Planet, in which the author rates a number of things—including the QWERTY keyboard, Dr. Pepper, Haley’s Comet, the Internet, and Viral Meningitis—on a scale of one to five. It was one of my top books of the year, one I’m still thinking about nine months after reading it. I also bought a copy for my son. It’s one of those rare books I’ll probably reread in 2024, along with Sarah Manguso’s enticingly brief Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, another Booksmith find (so short and excellent, I’ve already read it twice).

You’ll find all of these books in my Memoirs and Essays list on Bookshop.org.

Memoirs on my 2024 TBR

Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays by Megan Harlan

I Would Meet You Anywhere by Susan Kyo Ito

I’d love to know: what books stood out for you this year? What do you recommend?