Personal and Spiritual Memoirs

Wild

“Cheryl Strayed's memoir was selected in 2012 for the relaunched Book Club 2.0. Oprah has cited it as the book she recommended most personally that year — a story about rebuilding a self from wreckage that resonated with themes she'd explored across decades of broadcasting.”Oprah Winfrey

The Choice

“On the Collaborative Fund blog he calls it "maybe the best book I've read in years," a Holocaust survivor's account that became a study of trauma psychology.”Morgan Housel

“I have been deeply influenced by the existentialist and eminent psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who wrote the perennial best seller Man's Search for Meaning, one of the most influential books I've ever…”Frank Martin

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

“Dave Eggers' semi-autobiographical debut was selected early in the club's history for its formal ambition and its portrayal of sudden loss. Oprah singled out the book's voice — self-aware, grieving, funny — as unlike anything else she'd encountered.”Oprah Winfrey

Between the World and Me

“Coates wrote this as an open letter to his teenage son about what it means to inhabit a Black body in America. Obama, still in office when the book appeared in 2015, praised Coates's moral clarity and willingness to refuse comforting narratives about American progress.”Barack Obama

Born a Crime

“On Obama's 2017 year-end list. Noah's account of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa is as much structural history as personal memoir — the crime of the title is that his very existence was illegal under apartheid law.”Barack Obama

When Breath Becomes Air

“Kalanithi's memoir, written as he was dying of lung cancer at 36, is the kind of book Popova has long championed: a scientist reckoning with mortality through literature. She wrote about it as an act of grace under the most impossible of circumstances.”Maria Popova

Insomniac City

“It's a memoir about the sudden death of a partner and what ripples out from there. Made me want to move to New York ASAP. I pounded through it in a few days while I was on vacation, highly recommend.”Andrew Wilkinson

Can't Hurt Me

“David Goggins was a Tim Ferriss Show guest and this book became one of the most-cited recommendations in the show's later years. Ferriss has described Goggins as someone who stress-tested ideas about what's mentally possible in ways that most people never approach.”Tim Ferriss

Educated

“Featured in Obama's 2018 year-end list. Westover grew up in rural Idaho in an isolationist family that rejected medicine and formal schooling; this is the story of how she educated herself into Cambridge and Harvard. Obama noted it as one of the most extraordinary memoirs he had read.”Barack Obama

Reboot

“Jerry Colonna's book on leadership and psychological depth is one Feld has discussed specifically in the context of his own mental health work. Colonna, a former VC, addresses the way founders and investors bring unresolved personal material into their companies, and Feld has cited it as essential reading for anyone in a high-stakes leadership role.”Brad Feld

Spare

“It turns out it's ghost written by J.R. Moehringer, who has written some of my favourite biographies. Highly recommend.”Andrew Wilkinson