What Book? Wednesday Question: Sometimes life is stranger than fiction…and sometimes a bit more entertaining. Whether it be a biography, autobiography, or memoir what book would recommend to someone looking for a real life story that is just as entertaining as a work of fiction.

What Book? Wednesday Answer: I will start off by saying that I’m not a huge fan of biographies. The only time that I will pick up a biography if it is about someone that I am completely obsessed with and I need to know every nitty-gritty detail of their lives.  Katherine Hepburn and Queen Elizabeth I being two of them. The main issue I have with biographies, for me, is that I am a complete slave to plot. I need to know that the story is going somewhere and that somewhere cannot just be a death at the end.

With all that negativity being said, there are a couple of real life stories that I absolutely loved. One of my favorite all time memoirs is Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt. What completely made me fall in love with this book is that the characters were so vivid. In Angela’s Ashes, I fell in love with Frank’s mother and rooted for Frank all through the book. There are characters that aren’t so perfect (Frank’s father) and character’s who strive to be better (Frank), but each of the characters have such a human quality to them that I felt by the end of the book that I knew these people and I was sad to see the novel end.

The follow-up novels, ‘Tis and Teacher Man, were not quite as warm as Angela’s Ashes, but were good nonetheless.  In Angela’s Ashes, Frank’s mother is the heart of the novel and in his other books, she’s not there and I missed her. I highly recommend Angela’s Ashes to anyone who is looking for a good memoir.

Related Reading

• Honoring Frank McCourt
• An Unlikely Stripper
• A Complete Mix of Controversy: Violence, Sex, and Religion