Some writers of memoir convey images so powerful, they stay burned in our memories like scenes from classic cinema. What pivotal memory from your own life might serve as the backbone for your story? These excerpts from ten of our favorite memoirs will hopefully inspire you to create your own everlasting visual in words.

1. My Life by Bill Clinton

On meeting his childhood hero, President John F. Kennedy:

"On my first day as President, I started out by taking Mother down to the Rose Garden, to show her exactly where I had stood when I shook hands with President Kennedy almost thirty years ago."

2. Wild by Cheryl Strayed

On losing her boot while solo-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail:

"I watched it bounce -- it was lightning fast and in slow motion all at once -- and then I watched it tumble over the edge of the mountain and down into the trees without a sound. I gasped in surprise and lurched for my other boot, clutching it to my chest, waiting for the moment to reverse itself, for someone to come laughing from the woods, shaking his head and saying it had all been a joke.

But no one laughed. No one would. The universe, I’d learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back. I really did have only one boot.

So I stood up and tossed the other one over the edge too."

3. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn

On re-encountering his long-absent father, an alcoholic con man, while working as a caseworker at a Boston homeless shelter:

"When my father arrived I'd already been working there for three years, first as a counselor, then as a caseworker. He wasn't homeless when I first started -- marginal, sure, but not homeless. I remember the day he arrived the nights could still be cold. He raised his arms to enter, because every 'guest' has to be frisked -- no bottles, no weapons. This is the first rule."

4. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama

On getting high:

"Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it...Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man."

5. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

On hitting the rock bottom that preceded her travels to Italy, Indonesia, and Bali:

"It was a cold November, around three o'clock in the morning. My husband was sleeping in our bed. I was hiding in the bathroom for something like the forty-seventh consecutive night, and -- just as during all those nights before -- I was sobbing. Sobbing so hard, in fact, that a great lake of tears and snot was spreading before me on the bathroom tiles, a veritable Lake Inferior (if you will) of all my shame and fear and confusion and grief.

I don't want to be married anymore.

I was trying so hard not to know this, but the truth kept insisting itself to me.

I don't want to be married anymore. I don't want to live in this big house. I don't want to have a baby."

6. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

On living in Paris and skipping meals to conserve money after quitting journalism:

"There you could always go into the Luxembourg Museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and see how he truly made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless and hungry. Later I  thought Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way."

7. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

On suddenly seeing her estranged mother from the window of a car in New York City:

"I was sitting in a taxi, wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a Dumpster. It was just after dark. A blustery March wind whipped the steam coming out of the manholes, and people hurried along the sidewalks with their collars turned up. I was stuck in traffic two blocks from the party where I was heading...I slid down in the seat and asked the driver to turn around and take me home to Park Avenue."

8. Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

On balancing work and motherhood, while traveling with her children to a business conference, flying on a plane owned by eBay CEO John Donahoe:

"Then just as finally as the flight finally took off, my daughter started scratching her head. 'Mommy! My head itches!'...I urged her to lower her voice, then examined her head and noticed small white THINGS. I was pretty sure I knew what they were. I was the only person bringing young children on this corporate plane -- and now my daughter most likely had LICE!" [Upon landing, an employee at the nearest pharmacy confirmed her diagnosis.]

9. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

On processing the sudden loss of her husband -- fellow writer John Gregory Dunne -- after he died of a heart attack while the two were sitting down to dinner:

"Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened. The computer dating on the Microsoft Word file ("Notes on change.doc") reads "May 20, 2004, 11:11 p.m.," but that would have been a case of my opening the file and reflexively pressing save when I closed it. I had made no changes to that file in May. I had made no changes to that file since I wrote the words, in January 2004, a day or two or three after the fact.

For a long time I wrote nothing else."

10. Darkness Visible by William Styron

On traveling to Paris in 1985 to receive a lifetime literary achievement award while exhausted and paralyzed by an almost suicidal depression:

"In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind -- a struggle which had engaged me for several months -- might have a fatal outcome. The moment of revelation came as the car in which I was riding moved down a rain-slick street not far from the Champs-Élysées and slid past a dully glowing sign that read HOTEL WASHINGTON."

They’re the people you've known longer than anyone else. You love them; they drive you crazy; you see their facial expressions when you look in the mirror. Who in life do we know more completely than our parents? Maybe no one, but that doesn't mean we actually know them at all. In the documentary "Stories We Tell," director and actress Sarah Polley discovers that what she thought she knew about her mother, an actress who died when Polley was eleven, has only a glancing relationship with the truth.

As she interviews her mother’s former friends, lovers, and her own siblings and father, Polley uncovers a stunning secret that the family has kept from her for decades. The solution to the mystery changes not just what Polley understands about her mother and her family, but herself. Polley’s not the only one to have to reorganize her beliefs about a parent. Here are just a few memoirs about the lengths a family will go to keep a secret safe, and the shattering effects on the children who happen upon them, years later.

One Drop by Bliss Broyard

Bliss Broyard grew up thinking she was a stereotypical Connecticut WASP, the daughter of a prominent critic and writer who chronicled the Greenwich Village scene in New York City in the 1950s before decamping for the suburbs. Only after her father, Anatole Broyard, died, did his daughter learn that her father was part black, and had spent his life passing as white in order to be accepted by literary society. In this memoir, Broyard traces her father’s Creole family from Brooklyn to New Orleans, and considers the effect his racial subterfuge had on her parents, and her own life.

The Scientists by Marco Roth

For the Roth family, intelligence served as a kind of defense against the uncertainties of the world, and they raised their son, Marco, to be as well armed as possible. By the time he was a teen, Marco spoke foreign languages, listened to classic music, read Shakespeare and played violin. But all this erudition couldn’t protect the family against Roth’s father’s secret life, which was devastatingly revealed when he died of AIDS. Roth uses his father’s duplicity to explore his own privileged, precocious childhood, and the ways his parents both protected him from and left him vulnerable to real life.

The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris

To hear Michele Norris’s calm, smooth, commanding voice delivering the news on NPR’s All Things Considered, you’d think the woman behind the voice has never been surprised or caught off guard by anything. In fact, the opposite is true -- and it was Norris’s job that shattered that illusion of calm. While reporting on the state of racial relations in the country after Obama’s election, Norris turned her investigative eye to her own family. What she found was a history rife with secrets, including her father’s painful past in a racially divided Birmingham, and her grandmother’s work as a traveling “Aunt Jemima” for Quaker Oats, which caused Norris’s mother deep embarrassment.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

Henrietta Lacks had been dead for twenty years when her family learned of the extraordinary contribution their mother had made to science and medicine -- a contribution Henrietta herself had never known about. Lacks’s cells were taken without her knowledge, and developed by scientists to become the first “immortal” human cells, used in polio vaccines and for research into cancer, cloning, and in vitro fertilization. The cells would have made Lacks a rich woman, had she known about their harvesting or seen any of the profits -- instead, her descendants grew up unable to afford health insurance. In this biography, Skloot uncovers the dark history of the cells, and the secret of who Henrietta was, beyond her biology.

Have you read other memoirs and biographies that reveal a shocking family secret? Include your thoughts in the comments below.

When it comes to memoirs, it’s a dog-read-dog world. It seems just about anyone who ever had a dog has written a book about dear old Bowser/Spot/Fifi, and yet, each season brings a new litter of tributes to the best/worst/smartest/most heroic dog that ever walked on four paws. Maybe that’s because when writing about dogs, with their indomitable spirits, their unflagging enthusiasm for life, and their endless capacity for forgiveness, it’s nearly impossible to fall into whiny self-pity and self-absorption that can be the pitfalls of memoirs about our all-too-human selves. Dogs are the ideal literary super ego – in writing about them, we write about not who we are, but who we wish we were.

In A Dog Walks into a Nursing Home, writer Sue Halpern describes what happens when she decides to train her Labradoodle, Pransky, as a therapy dog, and take him into a public nursing home to work with the elderly residents. In the process, Pransky makes Halpern consider the meaning of life, and death, and explore what it means to live a genuinely meaningful, useful existence. For more adventures in canine companionship, check out these books.

Rin Tin Tin by Susan Orlean

When the first Rin Tin Tin died, in 1932, radio stations broke into regular programming to announce the sad news; legend had it that the noble dog had passed away in the arms of the movie star Jean Harlow. His legend was destined to live on, but not just the legend -- by the 1980s, the eighth Rin Tin Tin, a descendant of that first star -- was still drawing fans to the Official Rin Tin Tin fanclub. The wise-eyed German Shephard was a stable of movies, vaudeville, comics, books, and TV for the span of the Twentieth Century, and in this biography, Orlean traces the birth of the original dog, on the battlefields of the First World War, through stardom to something approaching immortality.

Marley and Me by John Grogan

It’s hardly the first dog memoir, but it may be the biggest. This charming book, which began life as a series of newspaper columns by Grogan about his adventures with his extremely ill-behaved yellow Lab (aka “the world’s worst dog”), has since grown into an empire of all things Marley, including a Hollywood movie and several spin-off books. In this memoir we find out how it all began, with a chance visit to a puppy farm that results in the spontaneous adoption of the exuberant, inexhaustible Marley, through Grogan and his wife’s struggles to train, or at least contain, the dog that drives them to the brink of insanity but eventually becomes an irreplaceable, deeply loved member of the family.

My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley

Before Marley, there was Tulip, and the decidedly non-dog-loving writer J.R. Ackerley. Through happenstance Tulip came into the middle-aged writer’s life and, well, you can guess the rest. The original “man meets dog, man falls in love” story, this memoir of the writer’s slavish devotion to his dog set the bar for all dog memoirs to follow. To those who prefer cats, Tulip may come across as just your run of the mill canine, but to Ackerley she was the world, far better company than most humans, the “ideal friend” he’d despaired of ever finding among his two-footed peers.

The $60,000 Dog by Lauren Slater

Writer Lauren Slater has a lifelong bond with animals. Her husband Benjamin? Not so much. Their value, he believes, is directly related to their “edibility,” and when Slater’s beloved Shiba Inu, Lila, goes blind, Ben cynically calculates that the dog has cost the family $60,000, in exchange for which Lila’s main contribution has been 400 pounds of poop. But when Ben becomes sick himself, Lila teaches him important lessons about resilience and bravery in the face of the unknown. In this memoir, Slater describes the deep relationship of mutual need that can develop between humans and their pets, and questions the belief that animals are, in any sense, “lesser” creatures than human beings.

Uggie: My Story by Uggie the Jack Russell

The movie The Artist tells the story of a silent film actor upstaged by younger talent with the advent of “talkies.” In real life, the film won an Academy Award, but the cast was still upstaged by the youngest -- and furriest -- star: Uggie, the Jack Russell who plays the main character’s faithful companion. In this pun-filled memoir (expect lines about “pawdicures” and “p-mails”) Uggie recalls his life in the limelight, from his early days as a waterskiing, skateboarding stunt dog, to his Hollywood debut, and through to his retirement due to health problems. Along the way, the reader gets glimpses of how animal actors learn to hit their marks, nail their lines, and steal audiences’ hearts.

On May 16, 1929, in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a tradition was born: the Academy Awards ceremony, honoring the previous years’ best films, directors, and actors. The ceremony showed that the movie business was in transition, as Warner Bros. studio was recognized for its outstanding achievement in producing Al Jolson’s “The Jazz Singer,” the first full-length “talkie.” Within a few years, the silent movie business would give way entirely to sound, and in 1934 the Motion Picture Association of America began enforcing the Hays Code, intended to clean up the louche image and loose morals of 1920s Hollywood. Those early years of experiment and excess generated some of the all-time great life stories; here are our picks for eight of the best books on the studio era.

Jeanine Basinger’s The Star Machine explores where icons like Chaplin, Pickford, and their heirs came from: how the studio system produced, shaped, and exploited them, and how fame affected their lives and careers. Structured around case studies of dazzling and disobedient stars like Tyrone Power, Lana Turner, and Loretta Young, Basinger’s richly illustrated biographical study shows how actors were groomed, primped, polished, and presented to a public insatiably hungry for new screen idols.

Lyle Talbot’s life followed the trajectory of early twentieth-century American popular entertainment: After leaving home as a teenager to join a traveling carnival, Talbot became a stage actor, a Warner Bros. film star, and eventually a cast member of television shows including "Leave it to Beaver." In her acclaimed biography, The Entertainer, Talbot’s daughter Margaret uses her father’s extraordinary story to explore the changing landscape of American mass culture as it evolved from small-town sideshows, through the glamour of movie palaces, to the domestic comforts of the small screen.

Born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, Mary Pickford was a child stage actress who was spotted by D.W. Griffith and invited to join his Biograph film company at the age of seventeen. After becoming a beloved fixture in silent film, Pickford began to exert more control over her career as the producer of her own movies, and in 1919 -- along with Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks -- Pickford founded United Artists, cementing the power of producers and on-screen talent in Hollywood. Eileen Whitfield’s illuminating biography, Mary Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood, reveals Pickford’s tough upbringing, her years of stardom, and her lasting influence on the film industry.

Few actors could match Mary Pickford’s fame in her day, but her United Artists co-founder Charlie Chaplin was one such star. His modestly self-titled autobiography, first published in 1964, is a standout of the genre: witty, revealing, and full of outlandish tales that may play fast and loose with the truth (like the one about foiling Japanese assassins), but they are so infectiously told, the reader hardly cares.

Harpo Marx, the brother who never spoke, was an off-screen charmer and bon vivant. His memoir Harpo Speaks! is cherished by Marx fans for its breezy style and insight into the professional and social whirl of the 1920s and 1930s. Harpo was a friend of critic Alexander Woollcott and a member of the glamorous, cynical circle at the Algonquin Round Table in New York, but he was also devoted to his wife, actress Susan Fleming, and their four adopted children (he was the only Marx brother never to divorce). His memoir, published shortly before he died in 1964, is a touching and unpretentious tale of talent, fame, and family, enlivened by the Marx Brothers’ signature offbeat wit.

The inimitable silent film actress Louise Brooks opens up in Lulu in Hollywood -- a series of autobiographical essays on her life, career, and struggles against the constraints of the studio system. One of the most famous faces of her day, Brooks escaped the claustrophobic Hollywood scene for Weimar, Germany, where she made "Pandora’s Box" and "Diary of a Lost Girl" with the renowned avant-garde director G. W. Pabst -- a move for which she was unofficially blacklisted in Los Angeles. The films, which included frank depictions of such taboo topics as prostitution, illegitimacy, and lesbianism, remain classics of the silent era, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that Brooks was recognized as an icon in her own right.

In the years between the first Oscars ceremony and the enforcement of the Hays Code in 1934, Hollywood films freely depicted women behaving badly, talking dirty, and making their own way in the world. In his survey Complicated Women, Mick LaSalle focuses on the female stars whose antics on and off the screen scandalized America, as their characters took lovers, enjoyed careers and sex, had babies outside marriage, and stood up to cheating husbands. He shows how stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Mae West shocked and seduced their audiences during a brief golden age for women on screen.

The prolific film critic and historian David Thomson has written biographies of stars including Orson Welles and Marlon Brando, as well as the mammoth New Biographical Dictionary of Film, and is one of the most skillful chroniclers of America’s love affair with the movies. In The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, he offers a sweeping yet intensely personal narrative of the business and art of cinema, from its early days to its modern machinations, and of the personalities that drove its development.

Editor's Note: M.E. Thomas is the author of Confessions of a Sociopath, a psychological study of diagnosed sociopaths by none other than one who is diagnosed herself. Thomas turns conventional wisdom of sociopathy on its head, revealing how one in twenty-five people are sociopaths (that's four percent!), and -- before you quake with paranoia -- how harmless the majority of them actually are. We've asked Thomas to share with us some of the most common misconceptions of sociopathy -- the violence, the inhumanity, the gender constructs -- and have given her the opportunity to swiftly debunk each and every one of them. While psychologists quibble ad naseum on the psychological classification of sociopathy, here's a chance to take a crash course on the human psyche from someone who's been forced to reflect on her own every day. 

I’m a diagnosed sociopath, but that doesn’t mean I’m an evil serial killer. You would like me if you met me. I’m fun, exciting, the perfect office escort—your boss’s wife has never met anyone quite so charming.  I have never stalked prison halls; I prefer mine to be covered in ivy. I’m accomplished and easy to talk to, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about me is my ability to blend in seamlessly in my surroundings. Everyone has met a sociopath, probably without realizing it. Sociopaths are notoriously difficult to spot, particularly since most people don’t know what to look for. Here are some of the biggest myths about sociopaths:

1. Myth: Sociopaths are psychotic. Nomenclature for “sociopathy” is not standard. Some psychologists call it psychopathy, others refer to it by the DSM-5’s title “antisocial personality disorder”. What is clear, however, is that although people sometimes refer to sociopaths as “psychos,” sociopaths do not suffer from psychosis, a condition characterized by derangement and detachment from reality that might take the form of delusions and hallucinations. We’re not crazy. And the truth is that we are sometimes quite successful. It is just that we live, think, and make decisions in a way that some people find loathsome and most find disturbingly amoral.

2. Myth: Sociopaths are all violent, sadistic, killers. “Most psychopaths are not violent, and most violent people are not psychopaths,” according to psychologist and researcher Scott Lilienfield. Sociopaths have a constant need for stimulation, and that can sometimes manifest itself in malicious or violent acts, particularly if those are the opportunities that regularly present themselves to the sociopath. I’m not necessarily a sadist. I intentionally hurt people sometimes, but don’t we all? For the most part, I find my stimulation through more legitimate routes: thrill-seeking sports, risky stock trading, and the occasional consensual choking of a significant other.

3. Myth: Sociopaths are all in prison. Only 20 percent of male and female prison inmates are sociopaths, although we are probably responsible for about half of serious crimes committed. Although sociopaths are more likely to be in prison than the average person, “psychopathy can and does occur in the absence of official criminal convictions, and many psychopathic individuals have no histories of violence," according to psychologist and researcher Jennifer Skeem.

4. Myth: Sociopaths are all men. Sociopathy is diagnosed much more frequently in men. One possible explanation is that very little research data exists regarding sociopathy in women. However, what research has been done reveals that female sociopaths exhibit only two or three main features that are similar to those found in men—usually, a lack of empathy and a pleasure in the manipulation and exploitation of others—but do not often exhibit violently impulsive behavior. This may be one reason that while I’m a diagnosed sociopath, I am not a prototypical sociopath.

5. Myth: Sociopaths are inhuman. When I first started writing about sociopathy, I hoped to help people realize that sociopaths are natural human variants. I thought at the time that the big challenge would be to try to showcase some of our strengths in a more positive light, to demonstrate that we are not as bad as people might think. Recently I have been thinking that the real problem is not in getting “normal” people to believe that we’re better than they think, but in getting them to see that the “normal” ones are actually worse than they believe themselves to be. It is convenient to define normal as whatever you happen to be. No need to confront the possibility that maybe you aren’t as empathetic as you seem. Maybe your conscience doesn’t have quite the sway that you thought it did. Maybe you are both capable and incapable of much more than you had hoped. Maybe you have a lot more in common with sociopaths than you’d like to think. Maybe it is just one big long spectrum with only a few people at the extremes and the rest huddled closer to the middle.

Phillip Lopate, who began as a novelist and poet, has grown into the foremost American source of perspective and wisdom on the subject of autobiographical writing. In 1994, he solidified this role with The Art of the Personal Essay, a thick anthology including writers from Plutarch to Joan Didion. He directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the author of more than a dozen books, including three personal essay collections.

Earlier this year, Lopate published To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction, a conversational guide incorporating the tips and insights of a writer and teacher at the peak of his mastery. It has quickly become one of the the most referenced and dog-eared books on our bookshelf, and here’s why:

1) He includes an authoritative and eclectic reading list of genre-defining autobiographies, essays, and memoirs, from the classic to the contemporary, organized by subject. Some of our favorites from the more than 300 titles he includes are Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son, Ryszard Kapuściński’s Another Day of Life, Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, and Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage.

2) He admits to his discomfort with the evolving classifications of “creative nonfiction,” “memoir” and “lyric essay,” settling on “literary nonfiction.” If he’s not totally clear on what it all means, then we feel reassured about our own questions. “Nonfiction writers are the resident aliens of academia,” he writes. As enrollments in nonfiction MFA programs continue to increase, Lopate is doing all he can to legitimize the validity of writing about one’s own life and promoting professional outlets for personal narrative.

3) He helps writers achieve the necessary distance between their circumstances and their story by offering insight into how to turn oneself into a character. “When I sit down to write, I hear a voice in my head. Who sent me that voice?...All I know is that I keep listening for the voice to surprise me, say something out of the ordinary, provocative, mischievous, borderline dangerous…I wait to pounce with glee on some received truth,” he writes. It is only at the editing stage that he constructs or fabricates what he refers to as an “object” -- his persona on the page.

4) In the chapter “On the Ethics of Writing about Others,” Lopate provides tongue-in-cheek instruction on how to write with honesty and confidence about loved ones (“If you plan to write about friendship, make lots of friends, because you are bound to lose a few,” etc.), but he also offer practical tips derived from his own experience: when he first began writing about his family, he changed the names of his siblings, but not his parents, since his parents were already established, and his siblings were still in the thick of navigating their own young lives.

5) He reminds us that there are no right answers, only right efforts. Exploring the subject of how to end an essay, he admits that the conclusions to his own essays often arise from a combination of fatigue and optimism that “a possible solution, an intriguing glimmer” might function as an ending. He consciously leaves readers with some unresolved things to work out on their own, and after tinkering with lines and paragraphs as much as he can, he leaves them alone. He writes, “I am not interested after all in perfection; this ending will serve, it is good enough, it will have to do.”

Jim Gaffigan has joined a cult, but he hasn’t done anything unusual. As he explains in his new memoir about parenting, Dad is Fat, becoming a parent is like joining a fringe religious sect: you only socialize with others who have joined, you try to convince everyone how great it is, and you reorganize your needs to suit the whims of your leader.

The leader, of course, is your kid.

He’s kidding, sort of. Like when he says that changing a diaper is like The Hurt Locker, only dangerous. Gaffigan has a light touch with this material, and he’s figured out a funny way to write a therapeutic book for himself. There’s no shortage of books about parenting, but you get the feeling Gaffigan needed to make this one.

Sometimes overcome by the responsibilities of parenting, and just as often overjoyed by his family, Gaffigan isn’t going through the motions as a dad. He finds a lot of it weird, some of it disturbing, and sometimes can’t believe it’s happening.

A successful stand-up comedian, Gaffigan is surprisingly adept in the longer form of memoir while keeping a punchy and anecdotal pace. In one chapter, he tells a story from the time before he and his wife had kids, when they took a trip to the Grand Canyon with friends who had a newborn. The trip didn’t go so well, mostly because the parents were crazy people. (They’d joined the cult.) At least that’s how it seemed at the time.

Now, of course, Gaffigan’s the crazy one, living a "normal" life that could drive him insane. Luckily for us, he’s been taking notes.

Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan. Illustration by Nathan Gelgud, 2013.

It’s hard to believe now, but New York’s Soho neighborhood was not always a virtual outdoor mall with Sephoras and J. Crews and Starbucks on every corner and shopping-bag-laden tourists clogging the sidewalks. In the 1970s and '80s, the streets were dirty, the rent on the abandoned warehouses and factories was cheap or nonexistent, and artists made the neighborhood their own. At the center of the whirlwind downtown New York art scene at that time was Eric Fischl, who rocketed to fame with his provocative, unabashedly sexually charged paintings of domestic discomfort.

Fischl was still in his thirties when his canvases began fetching million dollar prices, and, along with his contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Andy Warhol, and Jean Michel Basquiat, he became emblematic of the transformation not just of a neighborhood, but of the way Americans thought about, and bought, art. In his memoir, Bad Boy, Fischl recalls the heady days of the early 1980s, the price he paid for the excesses of his youth, and his ultimate acceptance of his place in the art world. For more tales of the cocaine-and-acrylic-scented milieu in which Fischl came of age, check out these biographies and memoirs.

Andy Warhol Prince of Pop by Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan

If you had to choose just one figure to represent the craziness, decadence, extravagance, and wit of the New York art scene in the 1980s, Andy Warhol would win by a mile. The impish Svengali who taught the world that Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo pad boxes are works of art continues to be world-famous decades after his death, while his paintings fetch record prices every time they come up for auction. In this biography, the authors combine research into the life and times with Warhol with astute art criticism, placing the artist in context of the larger Pop Art movement, and arguing that without Warhol, there simply would have been no Pop.

Inside the Painter’s Studio by Joe Fig

Part of what made downtown New York so attractive to artists in the 1980s was the availability of large, empty loft spaces, where they could fling their paint with abandon and the only limit to the size of their canvases was their ambition. In this book, artist Joe Fig combines photographs of artists’ studios with the answers to an extensive “Artist Questionnaire” investigating artists’ work habits, materials, inspiration, process, and the relation of their workspace to their work. Among the twenty-four artists included in the project are New York notables such as Fischl, April Gornik, and Chuck Close.

Widow Basquiat by Jennifer Clement

Strikingly handsome, prodigiously talented, wildly creative, and dead before the age of thirty, Jean Michel Basquiat had all the makings of the tragic poster child of the New York downtown art scene. Seemingly overnight he went from graffiting the sides of buildings to selling his canvases for millions, hanging out with Andy Warhol, painting in Armani suits (and wearing the paint-splattered results out to parties), and throwing cash around like empty paint tubes. After his death of a heroin overdose, his legend only grew. But who was the man behind the boldly visceral, slyly humorous works? In this biography, Clement looks at Basquiat’s relationship with his muse and girlfriend, Suzanne Mallouk as a way of getting at the private side and inner life of the artist.

Keith Haring Journals by Keith Haring

His drawings appear so simple a child could do them -- and, in fact, often feature children, such as his “radiant baby” figure -- but those babies, dogs, and dancing figures made Keith Haring a star by the time he was little older than a child himself. With his joyous, exuberant graffiti scenes, Haring took street art out of the subways and alleys and into the galleries of the downtown New York art world. In his journals, which he started keeping as a teenager, he describes his inspirations and ambitions, and his struggles with his growing success. The apparent simplicity of his work is belied by the attention and care he put into each drawing, with no detail left to chance. While the work may appear whimsical, these journals show the artist to be a deeply committed, thoughtful, philosophical man, who knew his time was running out and wanted to leave an indelible mark on the world.

Today, The New York Times published an opinion piece written by Angelina Jolie in which the actor, director, and mother of six candidly discusses her decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. She reveals that after losing her mother to cancer (she died at fifty-six), Jolie tested for -- and learned she had -- the BRCA1 breast cancer gene mutation. Jolie stood at an eighty-seven percent risk of breast cancer and a fifty percent risk of ovarian cancer, but chose to be proactive about the news. Since her surgery, Jolie's chances of developing breast cancer has dropped to under five percent. Now, she is telling her story so that other woman may benefit and learn from her experience.

Television writer Jessica Queller faced a similar reality. In Pretty is What Changes, Queller details her agonizing decision and the toll is took on her body, mind, and self-perception.

Below is an excerpt from Pretty is What Changes by Jessica Queller.

Pretty is What Changes by Jessica Queller

Chapter One
November 2001

My mother declared that none of us were to leave the hospital until Harriette woke up. Her voice was tense, near frantic. She stood in the fluorescent-lit waiting room of Lenox Hill's ICU, her arms crossed. My sister and I sat on a sofa nearby. It was midnight. My grandmother Harriette Tarler had been a patient at Lenox Hill on and off for years, but recent kidney failure had landed her there permanently. Over the past few weeks she'd withered in fast-motion, like a movie playing at double-speed. She'd developed sepsis. This morning she'd fallen into a coma. The doctor did not expect her to wake up.

My mother looked out of place in this shabby waiting room—like a swan in a chicken coop. Her dark, luxurious hair evoked Jacqueline Bisset, though some people compared her to Diane Von Furstenberg. (“I’m much prettier than she is—her face is too broad,” she’d insist.) My mother was five foot four but stood taller in her signature Manolo Blahnik stilettos. My mom had been wearing Manolos back when Sarah Jessica Parker was in diapers. In fact, my mother had been friends with Patricia Field—the costumer for Sex and the City—in the late seventies. As children, my sister Danielle and I spent hours sitting on the floor of Patricia Field's Eighth Street boutique, collecting pins and pushing them into a cotton tomato pincushion while our mom shopped. When I was about ten years old and Danielle six, Patricia asked our mom if Dani and I could appear in one of her fashion shows. We dressed up in sexy spandex and I disco–roller–skated alongside a dozen adult models while Danielle walked around the rink wearing her yellow rain boots because there were no roller skates in her small size. My mother had always been ahead of fashion trends, but in this instance she'd recognized the talent of Patricia Field twenty years before the rest of the world.

I had just arrived at the hospital after taking a flight from Los Angeles to New York, but my mother and Danielle had been there for eight hours without a break. My mother leaned against the arm of a vinyl reclining chair and said she was thirsty, so I went to the nurses’ station to fetch her some water. When I returned, Dixie cup in hand, my mom was sitting next to my sister on the sofa. Though Danielle is tall and golden blond and our mother was petite and brunette, they were unmistakably mother and daughter. Danielle had inherited our mom's panache: an urban brand of beauty that turned men’s heads and intimidated other women. Danielle had also adopted her style. They each wore layered cashmere and long, narrow pants of the same color—my mother all in black, my sister all in cream. The look was finished with a spectacular pair of heels and two or three pieces of expensive jewelry. My coloring and features resembled my mother’s, but that's where the similarity ended. I’d been a struggling theater actress for years and had recently segued into writing. I was a “ragamuffin” (my mother’s word) who clutched worn copies of Chekhov and made friends with homeless people on the street. During that time, to my mother’s chagrin, my wardrobe consisted of sweaters with holes and old jeans. The closest thing to jewelry I owned was a string of thrift–store beads.

When our mother went to the ladies’ room, Danielle briefed me on what I’d missed. On his rounds, Dr. Roth had informed them that Harriette's case was considered terminal, so she would not be allowed to remain in the ICU for long; the hospital needed the bed. He broached the subject of taking her off life support and our mom became hysterical. She insisted that Harriette would wake from her coma. “Harriette’s threatened to die for ten years but she always bounces back,” my mother cried. “Turning off the life support would be like murder! She will wake up.” The doctor placed a compassionate hand on my mother's shoulder and promised to stall the bed issue as long as he could.

Dr. Roth was fond of Harriette—he’d been treating her for years and got a kick out of her. She’d given him glossy stills of herself as a young starlet with the Three Stooges. Harriette had been an aspiring actress in Hollywood in the 1950s. She’d had a recurring role as the French waitress in the Stooges pictures, which didn't prevent her from sometimes standing in as a girl who got a pie tossed in her face. In those days, her hair was a tawny shade of red and she dressed in form–fitting, slinky attire. Her nickname was “Tiger.” When I was fourteen and won the coveted role of Abigail in the high school production of The Crucible, Harriette coached me on how to market myself as a professional actress: “It’s not enough to be pretty and talented—you need a gimmick, a way to stand out. All the studio heads knew me as ‘Tiger’—I’d sign my notes with a paw print.” Long after she’d stopped acting and moved to New York, Harriette draped her apartment with tiger and leopard prints—the bedding, the rugs, the walls. As an old woman, she still resembled a tiger. She wore a floor–length fox–fur coat, colossal tortoiseshell glasses, and her hair long, silky, and golden red.

Martin Short will write a memoir for publishing house HarperCollins, making this the first book he will write, as well as read from start to finish: “Although I've never read a book all the way through, I’m sure excited to write one,” he says. His tale will wander through the comedic years he spent as a SCTV and“Saturday Night Live” cast member -- where he created characters like eccentric man-child Ed Grimley, as well as impressions of Mick Jagger and Katherine Hepburn -- on through his thirty-year marriage, and his Hollywood friends. While a title is still forthcoming, publication is set for 2014. [via The New York Times]

Like him or not, tennis great Jimmy Connors's has written a memoir, and it hits stores today. Within its pages, the candid Connors retains his straight-shooting style -- the one that earned him status as one of the sports all-time stars and his wife, Patti, the press title of “saint” for sticking by him through public infidelities and gambling addictions. Connors will also detail his relationship and broken engagement to fellow tennis star Chris Evert, and his now twenty-year-long break from the sport that still celebrates his unique two-fisted backhand as well as his intense lifestyle and professional rivalries. [via Broadway World]

Reese Witherspoon will star in the James Mangold-directed film adaptation of "Three Little Words," a memoir by Ashley Rhodes-Courter about her childhood in the U.S. foster care system. Witherspoon will take the adult lead, playing the volunteer who meets nine-year-old Rhodes-Courter -- already a foster child for five years -- and takes her into her life. With the “Walk the Line” team producing, and with a script by Lewis Colick (“The Fighter”) and Michael Petroni (“The Book Thief”), Rhodes-Courter’s ultimately triumphant story may also earn Witherspoon another round of Oscar attention. [via The Hollywood Reporter]

Aretha Franklin’s life is edging closer to its on-screen debut. In a recent meeting, the Queen of Soul chatted with the likes of Clive Davis and “Ray” director Taylor Hackford in order to put together a roster for her highly anticipated biopic. Possible front runners include Jennifer Hudson and Audra McDonald, who Franklin sees as suitable fits for her vision of the film -- a tall order considering her career that has lasted more than half a century and includes flawless renditions of gospel, jazz, blues, R&B, pop, rock, and funk. [via Triblive]