Washoe County Library System

This memoir introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move, yet they develop an extraordinarily close, almost telepathic relationship. As Toby fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and...

"The story begins when the Kempowski family moves into a new apartment in Rostock on April 16, 1939. This is followed by a description of the situation in the new apartment and the events in the family, during a meal together, during a visit to the grandfather and at a scene with the neighbor's daughter"--

After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.

"Stephen Digges is the kind of angry adolescent a lot of parents would have given up on. He is out of control by the time he is 13 -- running with gangs, stealing cars, fooling around with drugs and guns, and in general making his family’s life hell. Confronted with his growing recklessness and defiance, his mother, the poet Deborah Digges, decides to try to accept Stephen on his own terms--a course that stuns her family and leads to the breakup...

""Both heartbreaking and life-affirming" (Edith Eger, author of The Choice), the long-awaited memoir of Holocaust survivor Hannah Pick-Goslar, who shares an intimate look into her life and friendship with Anne Frank. In 1933, Hannah Pick-Goslar and her family fled Nazi Germany to live in Amsterdam, where she struck up a close friendship with her next-door neighbor, an outspoken and fun-loving young girl named Anne Frank. For several years, the inseparable...

"Italy’s great chronicler of the macabre and of growing up geeky. Long before the latest vogue for autofiction, Michele Mari, one of Italy’s most beloved authors, cast his mind back to the days of his own childhood, and found it crawling with monsters. Raised on comic books and science fiction, the young Mari constructed an alternate universe for himself untouched by uncomprehending grownups or sadistic peers. Compared to the horrors of real life,...

A memoir about growing up in a cluttered and rat-infested home--the result of her father's struggle with compulsive hoarding--describes how the burden led to the author's suicide attempt and her against-all-odds bond with her parents.

During a trip to visit both sets of grandparents in Mississippi, brothers Eli, Cooper, and Peyton, and their father, former NFL star Archie Manning, take advantage of every opportunity to play football, practice plays, or play sports trivia games.

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema’s childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that reads like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema’s coming of age is colored by tent revivals...