The 17 Best Nonfiction Books of 2018

In Chelsea Hodson's essay collection Tonight I'm Someone Else, Hodson launches from her eclectic work history through other ways in which a human sacrifices body and will, reaching out to anyone who has ever questioned what a person is worth and what a person can endure.

Piper Weiss's memoir, You All Grow Up and Leave Me, tells the story of her childhood in Manhattan's exclusive private-school scene in the early 1990s and her middle-aged tennis coach, who killed himself after a failed attempt to kidnap one of his teenage students.

Published after journalist Michelle McNamara's sudden death, I'll Be Gone in the Dark tracks McNamara's dogged pursuit of the Golden State Killer, a mysterious and violent predator who committed 50 sexual assaults and 10 sadistic murders in California.

In Katie Heaney's book of essays, Would You Rather?, she opens up about realizing at the age of 28 that she is gay, as well as how she learned to accept herself and her new identity in the New York City dating scene.

Part memoir, part personality test, Dana Schwartz's memoir, Choose Your Own Disaster, offers a candid and oftentimes hilarious exploration of a millennial woman's journey through her early 20s, including all of the dating gaffes and identity crises along the way.

In this searing essay collection, Dead Girls, Alice Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles while dissecting our society's fixation on battered, brutalized women, exploring everything from iconic pieces of literature to popular culture.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is the true story of Clemantine Wamariya, who fled the Rwandan massacre at 6 years old, only to find herself taken in by a family in Chicago, raised as their own, and given opportunities she couldn't have dreamed of in Rwanda.

Tara Westover's memoir, Educated, is about her unconventional upbringing by Mormon survivalists who homeschooled Westover and her six siblings.

In Ashleigh Young's essay collection, Can You Tolerate This?, Young explores the frailty, anxiety, and limitations of the body as she comes of age in a colorful, isolated community.

Through dozens of interviews with historians, creators, authors, and other experts, journalist Kayleen Schaefer's Text Me When You Get Home offers a new sociological perspective — as well as a celebration — of female friendships today.

I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's moving memoir about the 17 near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her and her daughter's lives.

In former Olympic swimmer Casey Legler's memoir, Godspeed, she explores the unbearable pressure of being one of the fastest swimmers in the world at 15 (as well as the copious drugs, partying, and sex that come with it) and what it takes to make it out of that world in one piece.

In this debut memoir from the daughter of the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs offers an insightful and oftentimes painful look into what it's like to be raised by someone whose seen by the public as a mythical figure, but is known to her as her cold, brilliant, and unpredictable father.

Written by award-winning investigative journalist Shane Bauer, American Prison follows the four months Bauer spent working undercover as an entry-level prison guard in Winnfield, LA, detailing all of the dysfunction and cruelty he witnessed and the injustices that the private prison system deliberately hides from the public.

In his memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here, Casey Gerald subverts the classic rags-to-riches tale by detailing his rise from poverty in Texas, to Yale football star, to Lehman Brothers intern, to Harvard Business School student, and finally to his decision to turn his back on a potential political career and return home, disillusioned with the vast power of the elite and the myth of salvation stories.

In Dopesick, journalist Beth Macy delves into the opioid crisis in America, tackling everywhere from impoverished Appalachian towns to wealthy suburbs, and covering everything from the medical culture of overprescribing to the way overdose statistics have ravaged both communities and families.

In his eclectic and witty debut essay collection Impossible Owls, journalist Brian Phillips covers everything from man-eating tigers in India, to a multigenerational mystery involving an oil tycoon, noting the way these modern-day oddities and curiosities are all connected.