Charles M. Blow is known for his innovative graphic opinion column in the New York Times, but readers will soon get to know the man behind the viewpoints and data: his memoir Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which none other than Alice Walker called "luminous," is out September 23.

The book follows young Blow from a tiny Louisiana town, steeped in historical segregation, through his years in college, where he learns to navigate an increasingly complicated world of sexual and racial identity politics. With his first book, Blow makes a great contribution to the wonderful sub-genre of memoir: stories of a journalist's evolution. Below are our favorite picks of memoirs by accomplished reporters and seekers of truth who know a thing or two about psychological growth.

The Night of the Gun by David Carr

Another prolific contributor to the Gray Lady, Carr -- a culture and media columnist -- decided to approach a memoir about his drug addiction and rehabilitation the way a reporter would conduct an investigation. He visited his old haunts, interviewed former bosses and drug dealers, examined his arrest records, and then posted all his research online in the name of transparency.

A Writer’s Life by Gay Talese

The most fashionable man in letters brings his trademark wit to this memoir, which focuses mainly on the life of a working journalist. Talese, well dressed since birth, came to journalism in high school and continued to study the subject in college at the University of Alabama. Later, he would return to the state to cover the riots in Selma. "I chose journalism as my college major because that is what I knew," he later recalled, "but I really became a student of history."

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

Jeannette Walls made her name as a gossip columnist in New York, but those who knew her as a reporter-about-town could never have guessed the world Walls came from. In her wildly successful 2009 memoir, Walls writes of her unconventional childhood as the daughter of parents who balked at society’s constraints, sometimes to their own detriment. After living an itinerant life in the deserts of the Southwest, the family moves to a bleak mining town in West Virginia, where young Jeannette begins plotting her escape.

Drinking with Men: A Memoir by Rosie Schaap

The Times’ Drink columnist’s 2013 memoir is about -- what else? -- boozing, and the bars we drink in. A precocious Schaap earned her bartending chops in the bar car of a Metro-North train and proceeded to spend many a happy evening throughout her life imbibing in various cozy haunts with quirky regular patrons.

Daring: My Passages by Gail Sheehy

Another new addition to the genre, Daring is the life story of new journalism pioneer Gail Sheehy, whose earlier book Passages codified what she saw as "the arithmetic of life" for an anxious generation entering its twenties and thirties. Just as Blow describes the effect of racial identity on his life and career, Sheehy shows us what it means to be a female journalist in the days when the newsroom was all too often a boys’ club.