Each winter the ICPL staff vote on TOP PICKS comprising our favorite books published during the current year. Our ten categories for TOP PICKS include Fiction; Young Adult, Picture Books; Middle Grade and Children’s; Mystery, Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy; Biographies and Memoirs; Nonfiction; and Graphic Novels.
Do our TOP PICKS for BIOGRAPHIES and MEMOIRS match your favorite reading experiences from 2020? We want to hear about your favorites too!
Stay tuned for the BEST OF THE BEST list for the year which will be awarded from each TOP PICKS category. The title with the most staff nominations will be awarded the honor of ICPL BEST BOOK of 2020. We'll announce the BEST OF THE BEST for 2020 and our pick for BEST BOOK of 2020 on December 31.
We hope you enjoy our favorite BIOGRAPHIES and MEMOIRS books of 2020 and would love to connect you with any titles that you find interesting!
The fire never goes out : a memoir in pictures
Noelle Stevenson
BIOGRAPHY Stevenson, Noelle
"In a collection of personal comics that span eight years of her young adult life, author-illustrator Noelle Stevenson charts the highs and lows of being a creative human in the world."--Provided by publisher.
Home baked : my mom, marijuana, and the stoning of San Francisco
Alia Volz
BIOGRAPHY Volz, Alia
"During the 70s in San Francisco, Alia's mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia's future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life. Each was devoted to the occult, and they regularly consulted the oracles for information on the police. Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town -- and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple -- in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia's stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers' distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS. Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, HOME BAKED celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home"--
Me & Patsy, kickin' up dust : my friendship with Patsy Cline
Loretta Lynn
781.642092 /Lynn
"Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust shares the 'important and inspiring' (Miranda Lambert) never-before-told complete story of the remarkable relationship between country music icons Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn. Loretta Lynn and the late Patsy Cline are legends--country icons and sisters of the heart. For the first time ever Loretta tells their story: a celebration of their music and their relationship up until Patsy's tragic and untimely death. Full of laughter and tears, this eye-opening, heartwarming memoir paints a picture of two stubborn, spirited country gals who'd be damned if they'd let men or convention tell them how to be. Set in the heady streets of the 1960s South, this nostalgia ride shows how Nashville blossomed into the city of music it is today. Tender and fierce, Me & Patsy Kickin' Up Dust is an up-close-and-personal portrait of a friendship that defined a generation and changed country music indelibly--and a meditation on love, loss and legacy"--Amazon.com.
Open book
Jessica Simpson
BIOGRAPHY Simpson, Jessica
Five years ago Simpson was approached to write a motivational guide to living your best life. She walked away from the offer because she believed she couldn't be authentic with her readers if she wasn't fully honest with herself first. Now she examines her life: blessed with the compassion to help others but also burdened with an almost crippling need to please. First celebrated for her voice, she became famous for music and fashion, her relationship struggles-- and as a walking blonde joke. Here she shares the wisdom and inspirations she has learned, and shows the real woman behind all the pop-culture clichés. -- adapted from jacket
Smacked : a story of white-collar ambition, addiction, and tragedy
Eilene Zimmerman
BIOGRAPHY Zimmerman, Eilene
"Eilene Zimmerman's ex-husband, Peter, had it all: He was a partner at a prestigious law firm, lived in a $2 million house by the beach, and had two great kids. Maintaining a friendly relationship, Eilene and Peter talked and saw each other frequently. But a few years after their divorce she started noticing erratic behavior: absenteeism, weight loss, constant exhaustion and sickness. Peter explained it away as stress from the pressures of his job, but Eilene couldn't shake the feeling that something else was wrong. Months later, when she finds him dead, she goes on a journey to investigate how a man she thought she knew had become a drug addict. Zimmerman also takes a wider look at other cases of white-collar drug use and the devastation it leaves behind, showing that addiction can strike anyone. The result is a moving, intimate, and revealing look at both Peter's downward spiral and the drug epidemic among high-powered professionals, its impact on his family, and how a woman reconceives her life in the wake of loss"--
Uncanny valley : a memoir
Anna Wiener
338.761004 /Wiener
"In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener -- stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial -- left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress. Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building. Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener's memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry's shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment. Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand."--
Wow, no thank you : essays
Samantha Irby
814.6 /Irby
"Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a veterinary clinic, has published successful books and has been friendzoned by Hollywood, left Chicago, and moved into a house with a garden that requires repairs and know-how with her wife in a Blue town in the middle of a Red state where she now hosts book clubs and makes mason jar salads. This is the bourgeois life of a Hallmark Channel dream. She goes on bad dates with new friends, spends weeks in Los Angeles taking meetings with "tv executives slash amateur astrologers" while being a "cheese fry-eating slightly damp Midwest person," "with neck pain and no cartilage in [her] knees," who still hides past due bills under her pillow. The essays in this collection draw on the raw, hilarious particulars of Irby's new life. Wow, No Thank You is Irby at her most unflinching, riotous, and relatable"--Amazon.com.
You never forget your first : a biography of George Washington
Alexis Coe
BIOGRAPHY Washington, George
"In a genre overdue for a shakeup, Alexis Coe takes a closer look at our first--and finds he's not quite the man we remember Young George Washington was raised by a struggling single mother, demanded military promotions, chased rich young women, caused an international incident, and never backed down--even when his dysentery got so bad he had to ride with a cushion on his saddle. But after he married Martha, everything changed. Washington became the kind of man who named his dog Sweetlips and hated to leave home. He took up arms against the British only when there was no other way, though he lost more battles than he won. Coe focuses on his activities off the battlefield--like espionage and propaganda. After an unlikely victory in the Revolutionary War, Washington once again shocked the world by giving up power, only to learn his compatriots wouldn't allow it. The founders pressured him into the presidency--twice. He established enduring norms but left office heartbroken over the partisan nightmare his backstabbing cabinet had created. Back on his plantation, the man who fought for liberty finally confronted his greatest hypocrisy--what to do with the hundreds of men, women, and children he owned--before succumbing to a brutal death. Alexis Coe combines rigorous research and unsentimental storytelling, finally separating the man from the legend."--