If you love fiction, switching gears and picking up a nonfiction book can be kind of intimidating. Michelle Regalado from BookRiot takes a look at memoirs that are as engaging and compulsively readable as that of any fiction novel:
![Lab Girl by [Jahren, Hope]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51VQ0Ayp%2BCL.jpg)
Lab Girl
by Hope Jahren
4.5 stars – 1,399 reviews
An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world
Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together.
![I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by [McNamara, Michelle]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51PcBJI6FcL.jpg)
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer
by Michelle McNamara
4.5 stars – 1,353 reviews
For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.
Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called “the Golden State Killer.”
![All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir by [Chung, Nicole]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51i-40D6HiL.jpg)
All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
by Nicole Chung
4.1 stars – 124 reviews
What does it mean to lose your roots—within your culture, within your family—and what happens when you find them?
Nicole Chung was born severely premature, placed for adoption by her Korean parents, and raised by a white family in a sheltered Oregon town. From childhood, she heard the story of her adoption as a comforting, prepackaged myth. She believed that her biological parents had made the ultimate sacrifice in the hope of giving her a better life, that forever feeling slightly out of place was her fate as a transracial adoptee.
![Educated: A Memoir by [Westover, Tara]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41Ld1sqdhgL.jpg)
by Tara Westover
4.7 stars – 6,147 reviews
An unforgettable memoir about a young girl who, kept out of school, leaves her survivalist family and goes on to earn a PhD from Cambridge University
Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara’s older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University.
![Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by [Shapiro, Dani]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41I%2BcxbrOvL.jpg)
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
by Dani Shapiro
4.3 stars – 162 reviews
From the acclaimed, best-selling memoirist and novelist—“a writer of rare talent” (Cheryl Strayed)—a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test: an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.
What makes us who we are? What combination of memory, history, biology, experience, and that ineffable thing called the soul defines us?
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