1. M Train by Patti Smith

The natural follow-up to Just Kids. Dreamy, wandering, full of coffee shops, Polaroids, and reflections on time, love, and making art.

2. Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Not a conventional memoir, but a series of poetic fragments blending personal grief, philosophy, and obsession with the color blue. Raw, lyrical, deeply personal.

3. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

More memoir-philosophy hybrid. Explores family, queerness, art, and identity in a way that’s both intimate and intellectually electric.

4. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

A memoir about art, love, and survival. Brutally honest, yet written with the elegance of a novelist.

5. The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch

Gritty and lyrical; she writes about trauma, sexuality, art, and becoming a writer. Often recommended to people who loved Patti Smith’s openness.

6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

More meditative, but her crystalline style and reflections on grief, memory, and life’s fragility resonate in the same key as Mann and Smith.

7. Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

A memoir of becoming a writer in San Francisco’s art and activist world, written in her signature sharp yet lyrical prose.

8. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

Part memoir, part art criticism, part feminist manifesto. Cult-classic, confessional, and self-aware — blurs the personal and artistic.

9. Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick

A memoir that’s about mothers, daughters, and art-making. Very New York, very sharp, and considered one of the most influential personal narratives.

10. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing

A hybrid of memoir, art history, and cultural criticism. Uses her own loneliness in New York as a lens to look at artists like Warhol and Hopper. Poetic and vulnerable.