Books
A short reading list, with one sentence on what each book is for.
Philip Roth · Vintage · 1969
A man talking at his analyst for an entire novel, and the analyst answering only in the final line.
Susanna Kaysen · Vintage · 1993
Eighteen months on a psychiatric ward at nineteen, and a diagnosis she spends the book examining.
Kay Redfield Jamison · Vintage · 1995
A clinical psychologist writing about her own manic depressive illness, from both sides of the desk at once.
William Styron · Vintage · 1990
A novelist describing his own depression precisely, at a point when almost nobody was doing so in public.
Jean-Dominique Bauby · Fourth Estate · 1997
Dictated letter by letter through one eyelid after a stroke. A mind intact inside a body that will not move.
Joan Didion · Vintage · 2005
The year after her husband died, and the thinking that kept expecting him back. Grief examined by a reporter.
Primo Levi · 1947
Ten months in Auschwitz, written down immediately afterwards. What the camp does to the idea of a person.
Primo Levi · Abacus · 1986
Forty years on, about the grey zone and about the shame carried by those who came back.
Winfried Georg Sebald · Modern Library · 2001
A man in his sixties recovering a childhood that was taken from him, in one long unbroken current of talk.
Winfried Georg Sebald · New Directions · 1992
Four lives in which the damage surfaces decades after the event, told with photographs that prove nothing.
Imre Kertész · Vintage · 1975
A boy in the camps with no framework to put it in, reporting it exactly as it arrives.
Georges Perec · David R. Godine · 1975
A fable and a memoir alternating around a childhood the author cannot reach. Perec was in analysis with Pontalis.
Charlotte Delbo · Yale University Press · 1965
Delbo's distinction between deep memory, which the body keeps, and the ordinary memory that can be spoken.
Art Spiegelman · Penguin · 1991
A son drawing his father's survival and their arguments about it. His own analyst appears in the second volume.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Faber and Faber · 1989
A butler on a motoring holiday reviewing a life given entirely to service. Repression narrated by the man doing it.
John Maxwell Coetzee · Vintage Classics · 1999
A professor who will not perform contrition, and a daughter who will not press charges. Shame without redemption.
Lionel Shriver · Serpent's Tail · 2003
A mother writing to her absent husband about their son, and about whether she ever wanted him at all.
Elena Ferrante · Europa Editions · 2006
A woman on holiday admits she once left her children for three years, and does not entirely regret it.
Elena Ferrante · Europa Editions · 2011
Two girls in postwar Naples, and a friendship in which each becomes herself by watching the other.
Rachel Cusk · 2014
A narrator who asks and listens and tells us almost nothing about herself. The analytic position written as a form.