Have you ever heard that old saying “truth is stranger than fiction”? Well, it is. Non-fiction often gets a reputation for only being popular among grandparents and motivational speakers, but our world is filled to the brim with people who have incredible stories and knowledge that they want to share. As a college student, you have most likely experienced your fair share of confusion and self-doubt in work, life and love. These authors have stories and advice galore to guide you on getting over a loss, dealing with fuckboys, or understanding yourself and your peers on a deeper level.
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1. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
~What It’s About: After losing her mother abruptly and devastatingly to cancer, Cheryl Strayed embarks on a summer-long trek of the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,659 mile long path that runs through rivers, forests and mountains on the west coast of the United States.
~Why You Want To Read It: As college students, we feel lost a lot. Strayed teaches us that getting lost is necessary in order to find out who we really are.
~Memorable Quote: “Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told. I decided I was safe. I was strong. I was brave. Nothing could vanquish me. Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.”
2. The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan
~What It’s About: It’s a collection of essays on subjects like graduating college, why so many people that start as creative majors end up going into finance, the appreciation one feels for a shitty old car that’s been with you through everything and more.
~Why You Want To Read It: Keegan has an uncanny ability to write out those tricky, complex feelings that are so powerful. But she’s gone now, passed away too soon. We have a gift here to have even this small amount of insight from her about loving, being there for people and not cutting your future off before it begins.
~Memorable Quote: “It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went , we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.”
3. Once I Was Cool: Personal Essays by Megan Stielstra
~What It’s About: A girl writes about the weirdness of life and living that we all encounter.
~Why You Want To Read It: Just read any one of its reviews on Goodreads. The girl has a gift for nailing the uniqueness of our daily lives, and strangely we discover that we are not all so different from each other after all.
~Memorable Quote: “I could’ve said a thousand things in that moment, and all of them would’ve been true. I’d like to travel—Florence and Thailand and Prague. I’d like to write books. I’d like to fall in love a thousand times. Live hard and desperate and full, my pulse pounding like a bass drum. And when I wake up one morning suddenly, surprisingly, a grown-up, I’d like to be sure in the knowledge that I enjoyed it. Every fucking second.”
4. Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder by Arianna Huffington
~What’s It About: One of the most influential self-made media magnates in the world explains that money and esteem do not automatically equate to success, and in fact, together without a deeper sense of meaning in your life, they make an existence quite hollow.
~Why You Want To Read It: You’ll learn to start going easier on yourself in school and in work, to make more time for friends and for family, and to cultivate compassion and good will towards others.
~Memorable Quote: “It is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.”
5. Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget by Sarah Hepola
~What’s It About: A woman’s journey into understanding why she felt it necessary to drink so heavily in order to feel comfortable and to bolster her personality.
~Why You Want To Read It: Consider yourself lucky if you’re a college student and chunks of your night have never gone missing. Blacking out is common but it’s a dangerous game and can lead to many regrets and a ruined self-esteem.
~Memorable quote: “I wanted the gift of forgetting. Boozy love songs and brokenhearted ballads know the torture of remembering. If drinking don’t kill me, her memory will, George Jones sang, and I got it. The blackouts were horrible. It was hideous to let those nights slide into a crack in the ground. But even scarier was to take responsibility for the mess I’d made. Even scarier was to remember your own life.”
6. Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari
~What It’s About: Aziz Ansari talks about love for us as the right-swiping, committment-shy, modern folk that we are.
~Why You Should Read It: Because I’m willing to bet that no matter how scary it feels to love one person, it’s not nearly as scary as the thought of being alone. Ansari has some great stuff to say about that.
~Memorable Quote: “For me the takeaway of these stories is that, no matter how many options we seem to have on our screens, we should be careful not to lose track of the human beings behind them. We’re better off spending quality time getting to know actual people than spending hours with our devices, seeing who else is out there.”
7. Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling
~What It’s About: Mindy Kaling write about herself and what values, memories, and moments shaped her into the much beloved female comedic icon she is today.
~Why You Should Read It: Mindy is hilarious. If that’s not reason enough, she has some amazing insights into having to move away from your friends, trying to cultivate body positivity, owning and flaunting your strengths, and letting the haters be.
~Memorable Quote: “Playful arguments would become fits of uncontrollable laughter, and, like magic, that experience would be crystallized into a private joke, and the private joke would get boiled down to a simple phrase, which became a souvenir of the entire experience. For years to come, the phrase alone could uncork hours of renewed laughter. And as everyone knows, the best kind of laughter is laughter born of a shared memory.”
8. F*ck Feelings by Dr. Michael L Bennett and Sarah Bennett
~What It’s About: A Harvard-educated father and his comedy writing daughter decide to write a brutally honest self-help book with the language of sailors that will have you laughing, nodding your head, and dropping your jaw from the first page to the last.
~Why You Want To Read It: The father-daughter duo covers some serious topics about life and mental health in a way that we need. So often discussions like the ones they have are left unsaid because people are nervous to let themselves be vulnerable, but Michael and Sarah Bennett say the things that we are too afraid to say ourselves. Also, it’s hilarious.
~Memorable Quote: “The only book that can actually teach you how to change how others think is a lobotomy manual.”
9. The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
~What It’s About: Issa Rae is awkward and black, two qualifiers that she says don’t really get along that well. Her essays make up a hysterical, relatable, and moving confession about what it’s like to be a twenty-something girl with some confidence issues.
~Why You Want To Read It: We don’t hear about enough works by black writers. We just don’t. You’ll want to read Issa Rae’s book because it’ll speak to you, but you need to read it because we need to make sure that black voices are heard just as loudly as white ones.
~Memorable Quote: “It all made sense: my shyness, all the times I was dismissed for not being “black enough,” my desire to reframe the images of black film and television, which I started to do when I created a series in college called Dorm Diaries, my inability to dance—these were all symptoms of my Awkward Blackness.”
10. We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
~What It’s About: Feminism. Really, that’s what it’s about. Because feminism is not man-hating or creating a world where women are in charge. Feminism is freeing men and women alike from systems of masculinity that have oppressed them. And Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gets this point across beautifully.
~Why You Want To Read It: Sweden thought it was important enough to give to every sixteen-year-old in the country, and really, we should all be feminists.
~Memorable Quote: “We teach girls shame. “Close your legs. Cover yourself.” We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up — and this is the worst thing we do to girls — they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form.”