Oh, Grow Up!

Running With Scissors: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs (B Burroughs)
Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age 12, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

The Road From Coorain by Jill Ker Conway (B Conway)
One women's journey from a childhood in Australia's outback to adulthood as a successful American career woman. The Road From Coorain is about Everywoman, for it is about childhood loneliness, anguished parent-child relationships, dawning sensibility, discovering a vocation and finding one's own sense of self.

An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland by Michael Dirda (B Dirda)
An Open Book is the story of how comics and adventure stories, poetry and Proust can change your life. In its pages literary journalist Michael Dirda recalls not only his colorful family, friends and teachers but also, and just as importantly, the fictional characters and assorted books that fueled his imagination. In the backyards and branch libraries of a gritty factory town, the pudgy, nearsighted boy discovers an eclectic world of literary characters – the urbane Count of Monte Cristo, the all-powerful Green Lantern, Tarzan of the Apes, the brooding Sherlock Holmes, Hamlet and Raskolnikov, not to mention the sexy Candy and Fanny Hill. He memorizes passages from Thoreau's Walden, writes love poems to high-school heartthrobs and sends away for correspondence-school courses and guides to the great books. Above all he daydreams – about getting in shape, learning to speak properly, becoming "cultivated," having adventures.

Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller (B Fuller)
The British-born Fuller grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), losing three siblings to disease as her father fought in the Rhodesian civil war and her mother managed the farm. She approaches her childhood with reserve, leaving many stories open to interpretation while also maintaining a remarkable clarity about what really transpired in her homeland, in her own home and in her head. The narrative seems complicated, weaving together war, politics, racial issues and alcoholism, but its emotional core remains honest, playful and unapologetic; it hardly seems possible that this 32-year-old has so much to say and says it so well.

Rocket Boys  by Homer Hickam (B Hickam)
The true story, originally published as Rocket Boys, that inspired the Universal Pictures film. It was 1957, the year Sputnik raced across the Appalachian sky and the small town of Coalwood, West Virginia, was slowly dying. Faced with an uncertain future, Homer Hickam nurtured a dream: to send rockets into outer space. The introspective son of the mine's superintendent and a mother determined to get him out of Coalwood forever, Homer fell in with a group of misfits who learned not only how to turn scraps of metal into sophisticated rockets but how to sustain their hope in a town that swallowed its men alive. As the boys began to light up the starry skies with their flaming projectiles and dreams of glory, Coalwood and the Hickams would never be the same. 

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr (B Karr)
Poet Karr's NBCC-nominated memoir of her East Texas childhood is a blackly comic tale of a family prone to alcoholism, violence and insanity.

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel (B Kimmel)
When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of 300 people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period – people helped their neighbors, went to church on Sunday and kept barnyard animals in their backyards. Laced with fine storytelling, sharp wit, dead-on observations and moments of sheer joy, Haven Kimmel's straight-shooting portrait of her childhood gives us a heroine who is wonderfully sweet and sly as she navigates the quirky adult world that surrounds Zippy.

Keeper of the Moon: A Southern Boyhood by Tim McLaurin (B McLaurin)
A childhood gift of a telescope made novelist Tim McLaurin "the keeper of the moon" and set him on the path to becoming a writer. But just as his second novel, WOODROW'S TRUMPET, was about to be published, a diagnosis of bone marrow cancer threatened his life and set him on an introspective journey into his own past that brought raves from critics and his fellow Southern novelists. "Here is an honesty that will make you weep, laugh, grind your teeth and howl at the moon, all of it done – strange to say – with joy as mysterious and unanswerable as the beating of your own heart," says novelist Harry Crews. This book was a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Award and the winner of the Mayflower Cup for nonfiction.

Black, White and Jewish by Rebecca Walker (B Walker)
The Civil Rights movement brought author Alice Walker and lawyer Mel Leventhal together, and in 1969 their daughter, Rebecca, was born. Some saw this unusual copper-colored girl as an outrage or an oddity; others viewed her as a symbol of harmony, a triumph of love over hate. But after her parents divorced, leaving her a lonely only child ferrying between two worlds that only seemed to grow further apart, Rebecca was no longer sure what she represented. In this book, Rebecca Leventhal Walker attempts to define herself as a soul instead of a symbol – and offers a new look at the challenge of personal identity, in a story at once strikingly unique and truly universal.