Editor's Note: Beth Kephart teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania. Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir was recently named a finalist in the 18th Annual Books for a Better Life Awards program. For more on grand memoirs and their writing, please visit her blog, Beth-Kephart.blogspot.com. Here, for Biographile, Beth acknowledges the slippery meaning of "favorite," and instead opts to share with you memoirs she's recently read, ones that have left the most indelible of marks on her reading experience.

That word favorite? It does me in. Arrests me.

My favorite husband is my only husband. My favorite child is my only child. My favorite condition is alive. Beyond that, I have too many favorite foods to count, and my favorite color depends on the day, and my favorite flower is anything that somehow manages to survive my gardening ways, and I like pinot noir most, much of the time, except when there’s also a malbec around or a really fine cabernet.

Perhaps because I wrote a book called Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir that happens to celebrate nearly 100 memoirs that we can learn from, live through, teach, I’m often asked to narrow the field, to choose just a handful of truest favorites.

I can’t.

Sure (profoundly), Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception and Natalie Kutz’s Road Song and Jean-Dominique’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly thrill me as literature and move me as a human being; they represent some of the very best of what memoir can and must be and they are, in my own memoir education, core.

But don’t think I’m going to leave Patti Smith’s Just Kids off the list, or Elizabeth McCracken’s An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, or Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home, or C.K. Williams’ Misgivings, or Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club.

Really? Truly? Don’t get me started. Annie Dillard and Dani Shapiro, Colleen Mondor and Lucy Grealy, Frank Conroy, Marie Arana, Jeannette Winterson, Alison Bechdel, Terry Tempest Williams, Caroline Knapp, bell hooks, Katrina Kenison, Abigail Thomas, Mark Doty, Edwidge Danticat, Paula Fox, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, Diane Keaton, Chris Offutt -- I haven’t even scratched the surface.

Because even if there are too many misguided memoirs to count -- too many writers outting “truth” for the wrong reasons, too many autobiographies masquerading as memoir, too many tomes delivering hurt instead of hope, retaliation instead of understanding, falsities instead of authenticities, too much of too much -- there are still so many stellar memoirs that I cannot narrow the list.

Here, though, is what I’ll do.

I’ll tell you about a few memoirs that I recently read and loved. I will hope that they lead you, as great memoirs do, toward other memoirs that sear, abide, and deliver hope, other memoirs that reinforce the fragile glory of life itself.

Howard Norman got under my skin with I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place -- a book of parts that constitutes a rousing whole. Each of the five interludes in this book is designed around and about a place -- Norman's employment (as a 15 year old) by a bookmobile, Norman as a young man in a cold Canadian city, Norman heartsick and alone among the Intuits, Norman hallucinatory in Vermont, and Norman as the man who famously invited a poetess and her young son into his home and was later forced to live among the ghosts of these two guests -- one dead from suicide, one murdered. Gorgeously written, beautifully structured, Beautiful Place teaches time, art, and the art of remembering.

I am a big fan, too, of Lise Funderburg’s Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home -- a book about a grown daughter traveling back into time with a father who does not have long to live. It’s a book about family traditions, the implications of racism, the questions a daughter must ask while there is still time. It is immaculately researched, and it is elegantly crafted, and I share it with you for all it will confirm for you or suggest to you about the role of meals in family lore, the ironic tenderness of old age, the things people do out of love and misunderstanding.

Now let me suggest, as I have suggested to others, Joan Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, a memoir I desperately wish I had read before the publication of Handling the Truth. How do you tell the story of a father’s suicide, and keep it true, faithful, wise? Wickersham’s answer is to tell the story many different ways -- through imagined perspectives, through actual perspectives, through the periscope of many shifts in time. Wickersham doesn’t pretend that she knows why her father did what he did, and that is what makes this memoir true. Her search to understand is the journey she takes us on. Her multiple literary modalities are tremblingly good.

You want more, I know, but I am almost out of words. So let me just say this: When searching for a good memoir, think beyond crisis, celebrity, and category. Look for authors who understand that the big questions in life can often be approached, assessed, and entered into through seemingly small and always carefully chosen details. Look for writers who recognize that chronology is not necessarily structure, that the unsaid matters as much as the said, that instant decrees and damning judgments are not nearly as interesting as thoughtful, and thoughtfully rounded, ideas. Look for authors who write humanely, who seek out loud, who open their worlds to you in ways that open you unto yourself.

It’s out there.