Books like

Books like Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage

12 books with a reading profile close to Hourglass: Time, Memory, Marriage by Dani Shapiro. Inward-looking and contemplative; an easy read.

1

Girl, Interrupted

by Susanna Kaysen

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Susanna Kaysen recounts her eighteen-month stay at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility, after a suicide attempt and a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder in 1967.
2

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

by Kay Redfield Jamison

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Kay Redfield Jamison provides a clinical and personal account of living with manic-depressive illness while maintaining a career as a professor of psychiatry.
3

The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Joan Didion documents the first twelve moon cycles following the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne.
4

The Liars' Club

by Mary Karr

Also inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Published in 1995, Mary Karr’s memoir recreates her volatile childhood in the 1960s within a gritty East Texas oil town.
5

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

by Alison Bechdel

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Alison Bechdel reconstructs her childhood lived inside a meticulously restored Victorian mansion that doubled as the family-run funeral home.
6

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love

by Dani Shapiro

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In 2016, Dani Shapiro submitted a DNA kit for analysis, expecting to confirm her Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
7

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir returns to her upbringing in a strict Pentecostal household in Northern England, expanding on the lived reality behind her debut novel.
8

The Dutch House

by Ann Patchett

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, psychology

Danny Conroy narrates his life through the lens of the Dutch House, an architectural marvel in Pennsylvania purchased by his father.
9

Goodbye, Vitamin

by Rachel Khong

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, psychology

Ruth, thirty years old, has lost her fiancé and her job, and she goes home to California to help care for her father Howard, a retired history professor with Alzheimer's.
10

Happening

by Annie Ernaux

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

In 1963, when abortion remained illegal in France, Annie Ernaux, then a university student, discovered she was pregnant.
11

Paula

by Isabel Allende

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Isabel Allende began writing this chronicle in 1991 while sitting bedside in a Spanish hospital where her daughter, Paula, lay in a porphyria-induced coma.
12

White Oleander

by Janet Fitch

Also inward-looking · narrative, psychology

Astrid Magnussen is a young teenager living in Los Angeles whose life fractures when her mother, the poet Ingrid, murders a former lover with the poison of white oleander flowers.

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