Speaking Volumes: These memoirs offer up varied slices of life

If you always read novels and would like to try something different, consider reading a memoir. Memoirs can be as involving as a good novel, but they are about real lives. While a biography or autobiography tells the story of a life, a memoir often tells a story from a life, such as touchstone events and turning points from the author's life," according to Wikipedia.

A well-written memoir can also inform us about the wider world than what we experience in our own lives. Many of the most interesting memoirs have been written by people who are not famous.

Consider Rebecca Barry's "Recipes for a Beautiful Life: a Memoir in Stories." The author relates in short diary-like stories the challenges of motherhood, work and marriage after she and her husband move to upstate New York to start a family. Heartwarming and funny, Barry shares the difficulties of juggling everyday family matters and the creative anxieties she faced in attempting to write a novel.

From upstate New York to the rarified environment of Manhattan's Upper East Side, Wednesday Martin, Ph.D., uses her background in anthropology and primatology to analyze the rituals, customs, and behavior of the ultra-wealthy mothers of Park Avenue in her intelligent and humorous memoir, "Primates of Park Avenue."

A reflective, often lyrical meditation on race, class and gender, Margo Jefferson's "Negroland: a Memoir" is the story of growing up in Chicago in the late 1950s and early 1960s as part of the black elite which was "concerned with distancing itself from whites and the black generality while tirelessly measuring itself against both."

Many new memoirs relate true stories of harrowing escapes from conditions that American readers can scarcely imagine. Two recent titles have been written by young women who escaped from North Korea to find eventual freedom in South Korea. "In Order to Live: a North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom" by Yeonmi Park with Maryanne Vollers and "A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea" by Eunsun Kim with Sebastien Falletti, tell similar stories of life in North Korea, one of the most secretive, brutal and oppressive countries in the world. Starvation, school field trips to witness public executions, and imprisonment and torture of family members, led to the risky decision to escape. The books describe the unbelievable hardships and suffering that was endured to reach South Korea, including crossing the Gobi Desert and being sold into sexual slavery in China. The human spirit, at its most indomitable, is evident in both books and give voice to the tens of millions of North Koreans who still suffer in silence.

Speaking Volumes, written by Manatee County Public Library System staff members, is published each Sunday.Access the library at mymanatee.org/library.

This story was originally published May 15, 2016 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Speaking Volumes: These memoirs offer up varied slices of life ."