Earlier this year, I had the chance to listen to Melissa Febos and Alexander Chee talk about Febos’s new memoir, The Dry Season, a book that was voted one of EL’s top five nonfiction titles of the year. At the event, they discussed a common knock against memoir: That it’s so navel-gazey. “Navel-gazing? More like viscera-gazing,” Febos said. To look into oneself and poke and prod and put on the page something honest is challenging and sometimes ugly work—there is nothing easy or light about gazing at one’s own viscera, and we are all so lucky to have authors who are willing to not only do it, but share that process with readers.
Nonfiction does the difficult work of translating real life into something that helps us make sense of each other, of ourselves, of this increasingly chaotic world we are living in. As we wade through an era of intensified loneliness, in which money-hungry corporations want to capitalize on our disconnectedness by selling us AI friendships and therapists and lovers and even, or perhaps especially, AI that does your own thinking for you, nonfiction insists on connecting: to ourselves, to one another, to our personal and political histories. There is power in refusing to accept the idea that offloading the work of thinking to computers has value while the act of navel-gazing—viscera-gazing—is valueless. In Alligator Tears, Edgar Gomez crafts a humorous and graceful queer coming-of-age story that simultaneously unravels the American bootstraps myth. Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half excavates the links between her recovery from the eating disorder that nearly killed her and her ancestral history of Palestinian displacement and survival. Through harnessing stories only they can tell—their stories—these authors insist on the importance of their own voices and experiences, telling something essential about the world around us in the process.
Good nonfiction books stand as a testament to the value of curiosity and thinking deeply about our lives, our world, and all the people in it. Below are our favorites of the year.
— Katie Henken Robinson, Senior Editor
P.S. Electric Literature’s first anthology, Both/And: Essays by Trans and Gender-Nonconforming Writers of Color, was not eligible for this list due to the conflict of interest. However, I’d be remiss not to mention that it’s a top nonfiction book of the year in our hearts!
TOP 5 NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez
The sophomore book by Lambda Literary Award and American Book Award winner Edgar Gomez, Alligator Tears is a collection of linked essays in turns—and often simultaneously—hilarious and heartbreaking. Through tracing their journey of trying to scramble out of poverty, Gomez lays bare the lies sold by the American Dream while also shining a light on the value of community—especially queer community. Whether writing about getting veneers or being kicked out of school, Gomez’s inimitable voice pulls the reader close and doesn’t let go, making each and every essay a knockout.
The Dry Season by Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos’s The Dry Season tells the story of a year spent celibate while simultaneously delving into the history of other women whose journeys inform her own—from nuns and the Shakers to Sappho and Virginia Woolf. Throughout the book, her celibate period grows into something much greater than just abstaining from sex; it’s about Febos learning her desires, her impulses, and how to center herself. This deeply empowering memoir is a sort of map, one that shows how to seek true, sustaining pleasure and fulfillment within oneself and unlearning the tendency to let romantic and sexual connection consume all else. You can read an excerpt from the memoir here, and read Febos discussing exploring pleasure and joy through celibacy in her interview with EL.
I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman
I Want to Burn This Place Down by cultural critic Maris Kreizman is a sharp and deeply personal essay collection tracing Kreizman’s political evolution as a leftist. She charts her journey from a faithful believer in American institutions and life as a “good Democrat” to a more radical understanding of power, inequality, and cultural disillusionment. The collection captures one woman’s reckoning with an unraveling nation and her search for a new path forward. Read EL’s interview with Kreizman about the book here.
Uncanny Valley Girls by Zefyr Lisowski
Lamba Award-winning poet Zefyr Lisowski’s nonfiction debut, Uncanny Valley Girls, is a memoir-in-essays that weaves theory into her nuanced critiques of horror movies—the author’s most constant comfort. A visceral collection of essays tracking Lisowski’s biography starting from her trans childhood in the south, the book explores gender complications, violence, and class ascension with a careful hand. Liswoski discusses these themes and more in her interview with EL.
The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza had barely survived after being hospitalized due to anorexia. And then—in the hospital cafeteria—the hauntings begin, starting with the voice of Aziza’s deceased Palestinian grandmother. Finalist for the Palestine Book Awards, The Hollow Half untangles family secrets and traumas passed down from generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure, all with urgency and grace. Read an excerpt of the memoir here.
Electric Lit’s Additional Favorite Nonfiction:
Aggregated Discontent by Harron Walker
Aggregated Discontent is the debut essay collection from journalist and cultural critic Harron Walker. Across sixteen sharp, funny, and unflinchingly honest essays, Walker blends memoir, reportage, and cultural critique. Along the way, she examines everything from the gig-economy grind to the failures of U.S. trans healthcare, from the role of art to the messy contradictions of modern life.
Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People by Imani Perry
Winner of the 2022 National Book Award, Imani Perry’s latest contemplates the color blue’s salient role in Black culture. Reexamining Blackness through the lens of a color so intertwined with melancholy, hope, and heartache, Perry presents readers with a bewitching portrait attuned to the most sublime aspects of our humanity.
I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan
Acclaimed poet and novelist Hala Alyan’s debut memoir I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is a profound and lyrical story of addiction, motherhood, and Palestinian exile and displacement. Structured around the growth of her baby during pregnancy, who is being carried by a surrogate many miles away, Alyan prepares for motherhood through looking back on her personal, familial, and cultural histories. In fragmented, hypnotic prose captured beautifully in the memoir’s excerpt in EL’s Personal Narrative, Alyan weaves together an unforgettable narrative of survival in many forms. In an interview with Electric Lit, Alyan discusses the dissonance of writing this memoir during ongoing Palestinian genocide.
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews
Inquisitive, and deeply reflective, Miriam Toews’s A Truce That Is Not Peace traces the path of a writer grappling with creativity and the question once posed to her at a literary festival in Mexico City: Why do you write? Through thoughtful meditations, she returns to family stories, formative moments, and the losses of her father and sister, both by suicide. The memoir offers an intimate portrait of a mind exploring its own patterns, testing ideas, and seeking meaning through the act of making art. Toews discusses the question of why we write in her EL interview.
Clam Down by Anelise Chen
Clam Down by Anelise Chen is a genre-defying memoir written in the wake of her divorce. When her mother’s repeated typo texts urge her to “clam down,” Chen imagines herself transforming into a clam, retreating, hiding, and protecting herself. Through reflections on mollusks and family history that includes a long-absent father, she explores what it means to withdraw into one’s shell and what true healing might look like. Read an interview about Chen’s process writing the book here.
Goblin Mode by Caroline Hagood
Caroline Hagood’s Goblin Mode: A Speculative Memoir dives into the chaotic, uncanny terrain of being a woman, mother, and writer in a world teetering on the edge. Over a three-day period, a mysterious goblin pushes her toward chaos, curiosity, and unexpected freedom. Blending humor, surrealism, and the ordinary challenges of daily life, the memoir explores what it means to live with boldness and abandon.
Nightshining by Jennifer Kabat
In Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat, the author traces the history of flooding in her home in Margaretville, New York, while reflecting on the recent passing of her father. Along the way, she meditates on Cold War–era weather experiments, the history of the Mohawk Nation, and how Kurt Vonnegut’s brother may have caused her town’s catastrophic flood. The result is a rich meditation on memory, place, and the fragile intersection of nature and human action. Read an interview with Kabat about the book here.
Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age by Vauhini Vara
In Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, Vauhini Vara blends memoir and cultural critique to examine how the internet, AI, and Big Tech shape the way we understand ourselves. Drawing on her own experiences, including childhood chat rooms, her sister’s death, and her work as a tech journalist, she reflects on the ethics, power, and influence of technological capitalism. By interrogating her internet life—from her Google searches to her use of AI—Vara probes whether it’s possible to reclaim a more humane, thoughtful relationship with technology. Vara discussed AI and its impacts in an interview with EL.
A Silent Treatment by Jeannie Vanasco
In A Silent Treatment, Jeannie Vanasco confronts her mother’s long, punishing silences, which could stretch on for months at a time. Through detective-like research and introspective reflection, she pieces together their fraught relationship, showing how silence can wound as deeply as words. The memoir is both a personal excavation and a meditation on communication, love, and the void left behind when someone refuses to speak, themes Vanasco discusses in her EL interview.
Authority by Andrea Long Chu
Known for her eviscerating criticisms of even the most highly-regarded artists, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu’s latest collects razor sharp reviews, critical essays, and personal essays unafraid to merge the artistic with the political. Acidic, yet exacting, Authority illuminates how to do criticism in an age of constant crisis and instability, something Chu also discusses in her EL Interview.
Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly
In Human/Animal, Amie Souza Reilly blends memoir and essay to intertwine a deeply unsettling personal story with reflections on the animal world. After moving into a suburban home with her family, she is stalked by the next-door neighbors—two older brothers whose harassment intensifies over three years. Throughout the book, Reilly employs animal metaphors, etymology, and her own sketches to examine fear, boundaries, violence, and what it means to be human in a world that often feels animalistic. You can read an excerpt of the memoir here.
You Have a New Memory by Aiden Arata
Chances are you’re connected to the internet right now. Chances are you’re connected most of the time, actually. In her highly-anticipated debut collection of essays, Aiden Arata interrogates the space between our virtual and tangible selves with searing self-awareness and clarity. Grifting, content creation, doom fetishizing—Arata brings the sinister habits of the internet to consciousness, making readers finally start to blink twice at their phone screens. Read an excerpt of the memoir in EL here.
Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told by Jeremy Atherton Lin
Before he’d become known for writing the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning book Gay Bar, Jeremy Atherton Lin escaped into London fashion shows, Berlin sex clubs, and a “city of refuge” with the boy with his dreams. Set in 1996 as a US Congress was hell-bent on denying same-sex couples federal rights, Atherton Lin’s Deep House questions gay marriage as an object of queer liberation through historical case studies and his own tender, but acerbic lens.
Gaza: The Story of A Genocide edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro
Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, is an urgent anthology of personal testimony, frontline reporting, poetry, and art documenting the ongoing devastation in Gaza. Contributors, including survivors, poets, journalists, and academics, share deeply human stories of loss, resistance, and political violence. The collection bears witness and calls for action, with all royalties supporting UNRWA. Read about the meaning behind the anthology’s cover, created in the style of tatreez, a Palestinian embroidery technique.
How to Be Unmothered by Camille U. Adams
In How to Be Unmothered, Camille U. Adams explores her fraught relationship with her mother within the context of Trinidad’s colonial history. She reflects on generational trauma, her family’s legacy of abandonment, and her own survival through vivid memories from girlhood to womanhood. The memoir is a powerful reflection on building a self in the absence of maternal care through storytelling and connection.
Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li
In Things in Nature Merely Grow, Yiyun Li writes with stark emotional clarity and philosophical rigor about the suicides of her teenage sons, seven years apart. The book offers a moving portrait of two very different boys and the new life Li must build after parenthood. It is an unflinching reflection on living after unimaginable loss and the deliberate choices Li makes to endure.
Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya
In Bibliophobia, Sarah Chihaya explores how books have shaped her life, particularly during periods of depression and suicide attempts. She reflects on her cultural identity as a Japanese American and the ways literature intersected with her struggles. Through works ranging from The Bluest Eye to Anne of Green Gables, Chihaya interrogates the power of reading and the narratives that shape who we are. Read an interview with Chihaya about the book here.
So Many Stars by Caro de Robertis
In So Many Stars, Caro de Robertis presents an oral-history project featuring the voices of 20 trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and Two-Spirit elders of color. From trans activists to queer community leaders, the individuals featured in the book share how they survived crises and carved out space for themselves and their communities. The stories not only illuminate the lives that queer elders have built, but also offer lessons to younger generations following in their footsteps. In their EL interview, de Robertis discusses the process of putting together this oral history.
Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez
In Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, Mariana Enriquez chronicles her visits to cemeteries around the world, reflecting on history, memory, colonialism, and mortality. Her essays blend gothic sensibilities with historical and personal insight. The book is a meditation on the living and the dead, exploring what cemeteries reveal about our present.
The Wanderer’s Curse by Jennifer Hope Choi
In The Wanderer’s Curse, Jennifer Hope Choi explores the nature of her mother’s yeokmasal—the “curse” of being a perpetual nomad—and wonders if she’s destined to the same fate. Choi weaves a sharp and often hilarious mother-daughter story that probes questions of identity, belonging, and the places we call home. You can read an excerpt of the book here.
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