🔑 7 Memoirs & Self-Help Books by People I Adore
Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book.
Amelia Hruby:Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading, a podcast where we talk about the many pleasures of reading books, and I share curated book lists, fave recommended reads, tiny book chats, and more. If we haven't met yet, I'm your host, Amelia Froomey. I am the founder of Doctor. Sounds Podcast Studio. And here on this show, I am your fellow bookworm in this beautiful garden of reads that we're exploring together.
Amelia Hruby:And today's episode is a very special one to me because I am sharing 7 memoirs and self help books by people I adore. And these are all people that I actually know I have a friendship with or who might be my clients at the podcast studio or who have been a guest on one of my podcasts. They are people that I have had the pleasure of being an ongoing conversation with, and I'm just so thrilled to bring you their books today. So with that glowing recommendation shared, let's go ahead and dive into this list of 7 memoirs and self help books by people I adore. We'll begin with the memoirs.
Amelia Hruby:So the first memoir I want to recommend is called Joy Enough by Sarah McCall and in this book, Sarah recounts the sort of dual loss of her mother and her marriage, and she does so through these beautifully captured and crystallized memories of different moments of her childhood, of her college years, and after that both give us a sense of immediacy, like we're experiencing some of these things with Sarah, but also keep her point of view front and center. I read this on a plane and shed a few quiet tears as we were taking off and landing and it was just like a really beautiful journey to go on with her as I was going on a literal journey from one place to another. So my first recommendation is Joy Enough, A Memoir by Sarah McCall. My second memoir recommendation is Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body by Rebecca Taussig. So Rebecca is one of my clients at Softer Sounds, and both her and her cohost on their podcast, Scratch That, have books on this list, which is such a joy.
Amelia Hruby:Rebecca's memoir is actually an essay collection that walks through different topics, themes, stories from her journey as a wheelchair user and disability advocate. There are 8 essays in the book and I think that what Rebecca does so well is share her personal story while also teaching people about the realities of ableism and the things that people with different abilities and disabilities face just while trying to move through our ableist world. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the feminist pool party because I think that it was a really personal and political exploration of the ways that many feminist spaces or movements do not consider ability and disability on their axis of oppression, and they can become so focused on gender and a specific idea of women's experience, quote unquote, in a way that becomes very exclusionary, and in my opinion, defeats the purpose of doing feminist work in the first place. So I think that this book offers so much to so many different readers and it's written beautifully. I think that the prose is very accessible.
Amelia Hruby:Rebecca's voice is both really poignant and also sometimes just funny and lighthearted and I really appreciated the range of emotions that came through and so I highly recommend Sitting Pretty by Rebecca Taussig. The 3rd memoir on my list of 7 memoirs and self help books by people I adore is How to Be Alone by Nicole Antoinette. So Nicole is a good friend of mine whose writing I have been reading for years before we were even good friends. And this book, How to be Alone, recounts the story of her 800 mile hike on the Arizona Trail. And I wanna read you the description because I think it's just so clear and hopefully will make you wanna go out and order it immediately.
Amelia Hruby:So the back of the book reads, in 2017, stuck in a loop of codependency and people pleasing, 32 year old novice backpacker Nicole Antoinette sets off to find her self belief and inner resilience by doing something she does not for one second believe she can actually do, solo hike all 800 miles of the rugged Arizona Trail. The guiding question she brings with her is this, what do we find when we push ourselves further than we ever thought we could go? How to be Alone is a cathartic adventure memoir that explores the privilege to be able to choose your own suffering as well as the process of becoming a better friend to yourself along the way. If you are a fan of adventure memoirs, if you were an avid reader of Cheryl Strayed's Wilde, you're going to love this book. It is the perfect gift for yourself or anyone else who is struggling to find their way or who has ever dreamt of going on a long hike to do so.
Amelia Hruby:It's also a really great book about learning to stand on your own, learning to step out of these patterns of codependency and people pleasing. And then Nicole's written a second book called What We Owe to Ourselves about her journey on the Colorado Trail that kind of steps back in with this journey of more interdependence and support. So we see, I think, between these two memoirs, just this really beautiful recountings of independence and interdependence, how we support ourselves and others, and what it looks like to step off the traditional paths of day to day life. So highly recommend How to Be Alone by Nicole Antoinette. I personally have gifted this to both my sister-in-law and my aesthetician, and I will continue gifting it to many other people.
Amelia Hruby:So So please head to the show notes and get your own copy for you and all your friends. And then the last memoir on this list is Rust Belt Femme by Rachel Ann Jolie. This book is a coming of age memoir charting Rachel's journey from Ohio poverty and childhood trauma to life as a Proudly Femme queer academic. I met Rachel when I interviewed her for my podcast 50 Feminist States. At the time, she was living in the Twin Cities and running a podcast called Feminist Killjoys with another grad student friend of hers, and I was just really glad we got to have that conversation.
Amelia Hruby:Rachel's book really takes you into a sort of feminist punk culture that was brewing in the nineties and early 2000 in the Midwest, particularly Northeast Ohio for her. And she just has this way of writing that always reminds me that the personal is political. And I think that she weaves her personal story with the political realities of life under capitalism, as well as her own feminist politics and punk aesthetics into this memoir, and I just can't recommend it enough. So that is Rust Belt Femme by Rachel Ann Jolie. It was published by Belt Press, and you can get your own copy at the link in the show notes.
Amelia Hruby:Okay, so our 4 memoirs of this episode were Joy Enough by Sarah McCall, Sitting Pretty by Rebecca Taussig, How to be Alone by Nicole Antoinette and Rust Belt Femme by Rachel Ann Jolie. Now let's talk about some self help books. I wanna say in advance that all of these self help books, I think, blend into memoir. I was hesitant to even use the phrase self help because I know it can be a little polarizing, but all of these writers, like, share their personal experience throughout the books. So we're getting just a little bit more support for how to reflect on the lessons of their lives and your own life and some changes or actions you might want to take if so inspired by their work.
Amelia Hruby:So the first book that I want to include here is You Belong, A Call for Connection by 7 a Salasse. 7 A. Is someone that I have really loved getting to know through a few online spaces that I've hosted over the past 2 years. So You Belong, as you might expect, is a book about belonging and the book opens by deconstructing this idea that we are all separate, that people are separate from each other, that people are separate from the planet, from the animals, from the plants, like, we are all interconnected. And 7 a really beautifully weaves many different philosophies and practices and cultures together to make this case for the fact of our belonging.
Amelia Hruby:This book also very adeptly critiques white supremacy and capitalism and the ways that these systems of oppression make many of us feel that we do not belong or cannot belong. And I think that anytime that I'm reading a more spiritual book, perhaps, I'm always looking for those lenses of structures of oppression. I'm always wanting to see that this writer is not spiritual bypassing, that they're grappling with both the realities in the material world that we live in and its systems of power, as well as the fact that we are so much more and our lives are so much more than those systems would have us believe. So You Belong by Sabine Salasih is a wonderful book if you or anyone you know is struggling with feeling like you belong or wants to find your way to a deeper sense of belonging. The first two chapters do that more deconstructive and critical work.
Amelia Hruby:And then there are 5 chapters that walk through a process for coming back and into yourself that takes the steps of ground yourself, know yourself, love yourself, connect yourself, and be yourself. And the book ends with tips for meditating at home and some journal prompts and meditations for practice. So it is both a reflection of 7 A's life and journey, as well as a text that can help you take new and different steps in your own life and I cannot recommend this book enough. You Belong A Call For Connection by 7 A. S.
Amelia Hruby:Lassie. Next up, we have Feel Something, Make Something by Caitlin Metz. Caitlin is the co host of Scratch That podcast with Rebecca Taussig who I shouted out earlier for her memoir essay collection, Setting Pretty. And feel something, make something is a guide to collaborating with your emotions. So this book is so beautiful because Caitlin is an illustrator and illustrated the entire book.
Amelia Hruby:So it's really put together with this beautiful, like, handwritten style that so deeply supports the content of the book. I find that this book is just an amazing gift, and I highly recommend getting many, many copies and giving them to folks for the holiday season. The book is separated into 3 sections. There's an introduction where Caitlin talks about what art making has meant to them over the years. There is a part on feelings where they share practices for getting in touch with your feelings and then a part on making where they go through many different functions of art making and practices for experimenting with it on your own.
Amelia Hruby:And then the final part of the book, which is printed on these beautiful peach colored pages, really goes into the exact how tos and tutorials of making things. So there is a whole section on how to make small books. There's a section on how to do contour line drawings, on self portraiture, on how to play more. And then in the back of the book, there's a tiny little zine that's kind of printed inside of the book, which I've never seen before, but it walks you through how to channel your feelings into your art. So this book is, again, it's so wonderful.
Amelia Hruby:Can I say that enough times? It's a wonderful book and it's a really beautiful gift. So that is Feel Something Make Something by Caitlin Metz. And finally, we are ending this episode of 7 memoirs and self help books by people I adore with the person on this list that I am probably the closest to in real life and that is Taylor Elise Morrison, who is the author of Inner Workout, Strengthening Self Care Practices for Healing Body, Soul and Mind. So Taylor is a dear friend and business partner of mine and Inner Workout is both the name of her book and of her business.
Amelia Hruby:She also has an app called the inner workout app now that I highly recommend downloading to support your own self care practices. But this book is another one that's just like a beautiful object. And in the book, Taylor talks through her framework for the 5 key dimensions of well-being, which are physical, energetic, mental and emotional, wisdom, and bliss. So there's an assessment that you can take to determine which dimension you might want to focus on right now or which might have the highest priority. And then throughout the book, there are just so many practices and reflections and invitations for ways to support each dimension.
Amelia Hruby:It's really interactive. It's really comprehensive. And again, it's really beautiful. So Inner Workout by Taylor Elise Morrison is the final recommendation of this list and I really hope you'll get a copy for yourself and for a friend. And that's it, friends.
Amelia Hruby:So we have now gone through 7 memoirs and self help books by people that I adore. Those books, just to recap, were Joy Enough by Sarah McCall, Sitting Pretty by Rebecca Taussig, How to be Alone by Nicole Antoinette, Rust Belt Femme by Rachel Ann Jolie, You Belong by Sabine Salasse, Feel Something, Make Something by Caitlin Metz and Inner Workout by Taylor Elise Morrison. I wanted to make sure I got this episode out in November because as you heard me mention throughout my descriptions of the books, all of these books make great gifts. I think that books are a perfect holiday gift. They are such an affordable, but also really full of care way to show your loved ones that you see them.
Amelia Hruby:You see what they're going through, you see what they're dreaming about, you see what they're having fun with, and you're giving them this book to help support them in all of those things. I think that all of these books make amazing gifts for different people in our lives and I hope that you will consider gifting a few of them this holiday season. Plus, if you do that, it'll support these wonderful people that I know in real life. Let me tell you, they're all wonderful and buying their books is a way to help them keep writing and keep sharing more of their experiences and perspectives on the world with us, which I think makes us all the better. So that is it for today's episode of Pleasure Reading Podcast.
Amelia Hruby:If you want a little behind the scenes peek at what is coming up next, I have been working on a dark academia episode that just keeps ballooning and ballooning and ballooning. I thought I was gonna read 3 books. Now I've read like 8 books. I keep starting things and then being like, Well, I have to finish the whole series. And so eventually, hopefully next week, you will get the 1st installments of my dark academia series.
Amelia Hruby:We're going to be reading dark academia books that fall under the umbrella of adult fantasy. And I can't wait to tell you about some of these standalone books and series. So that's what's coming up next on Pleasure Reading. As always, if you like this episode, if you like this show, I would love to ask you to support it with a rating and review in whatever app that you're listening in. If you're in Apple, you can rate and review the show.
Amelia Hruby:If you're listening in Spotify, you just give us that 5 star rating, and that helps just build a little social proof and goodwill so if people discover the show, they will know that it's great and they should tune in. Thank you in advance for taking the time to do that. And until next time my friends, here's to your next best book.