You're listening to all the backlists, a weekly show about books that are not new.

I'm your host Kelly Jensen and this is the January 5th, 2024 edition.

It's the first week of the new year and I had a very intention of highlighting some self-help

books to support the fact we're still all playing like we're on our best behavior

with the new year but honestly I realize I haven't read in any a while, even though I am a big fan of like self-help

self-development types of books, I've kind of realized since becoming a parent that my interest

in these has shifted a lot,

since so few seem to address the fact that parenting or similar caretaking

can take up a significant portion of many of our lives.

And so I might have the same number of hours

in the day as anybody else,

but many of them are spent

ensuring the survival of another human.

And that just means I'm not in a season

of being my best self or being able to put myself first and it's simply about instead getting through the day alive and maybe even feeling happy at the end of it

Which is all to say like my plan for self-help to talk about that kind of thing,

is it going to happen today?

Instead, I want to talk about a genre and a style of non-fiction that I've really come to appreciate in the last few years,

which is memoir that takes a unique or compelling direction.

In one sense, they don't feel like memoirs because they're written as interesting deep dives on a specific topic, but they are memoirs because these deep dives, well factual, are parallels to the experiences of the authors who are writing about them. Both of these books are

ones that I listen to on audio and were performed by the writer and I'd recommend the

format if that's your jam for either or both of these reads.

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