Books like Gorilla and the bird by Zack McDermott

Jeannette Walls' memoir chronicles her turbulent childhood in a dysfunctional, itinerant family, detailing poverty, alcoholism, and homelessness across the United States as she seeks stability and personal growth.

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

Dave Eggers' 2000 memoir chronicles his struggles and resilience after the cancer-related deaths of his parents, as he assumes responsibility for his younger brother and confronts the challenges of growing up alone.

Justice lawyer Bryan Stevenson recounts his battle against wrongful convictions, life‑sentence juvenile cases, and systemic bias while seeking reform of America’s criminal justice system.

A memoir of a woman who overcomes a strict survivalist Mormon upbringing in rural Idaho to pursue higher education, ultimately earning a PhD in history at Cambridge.

Richard Rothstein’s *The Color of Law* uncovers how federal, state, and local policies deliberately created and maintained racial segregation in U.S. cities.

Kiese Laymon’s memoir confronts how violence, grief, and addiction shape his life, exploring eating disorders, compulsive gambling, and a fraught mother‑child bond while exposing systemic abuse of Black bodies.

A twelve‑year‑old girl in Iowa seeks answers about her brother’s death while grappling with family silence and supernatural warnings from her Jamaican grandfather, all amid the challenges of grief and a new friendship in a racially mixed community.

Terri Cheney offers a candid personal narrative about women living with bipolar disorder in the United States.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

Jaime Lowe’s memoir chronicles two decades of living with bipolar disorder, while tracing the science, history, and debate surrounding lithium as a life‑saving treatment.

Terri Cheney’s memoir chronicles her awakening to and lived experience of bipolar disorder, offering an eloquent, candid account of mental illness and its impact on her life.

In Bird, a young African American boy uses his art to navigate his brother’s drug addiction and untimely death, assisted by a supportive family friend.

Two boys named Wes Moore, raised in Baltimore’s same streets, choose starkly different paths—one a Rhodes Scholar and business leader, the other a life‑sentenced murderer. The memoir chronicles their coincidental lives, letters, and profound reflections on choice and destiny.