The books I remember most vividly from my first reading of them tend to be memoirs: books such as André Aciman’s Out of Egypt, Michael J. Arlen’s Exiles, Russell Baker’s Growing Up, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, Moss Hart’s Act One, John Houseman’s Run-Through, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door, Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings, Leonard Woolf’s Growing.
