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.