As guilty pleasures go, reading memoirs seems pretty tame. But when we solicited staffers, book reviewers, and friends of
City Paper to name their favorite memoirs, many of the respondents denied having any interest in the genre. The truth emerged, however, as we talked up a couple of our own favorites and found ourselves engrossed in detailed conversations about books our friends claimed to have no knowledge of. It seems we do read memoirs, but we don't want to be known as memoir readers.
We'll leave the psychological analysis of that finding to the experts, but we did manage to compile a list of shared favorites. After much cajoling and occasional bribery, we even convinced our contributors to take responsibility for their choices. Herewith, our top 10 memoirs (listed alphabetically by author).
