The 2024 Memoir Prize Winners

A MAN OF TWO FACES: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial

by Viet Thanh Nguyen
Grove Press / Grove Atlantic ISBN 9780802160508

Innovative. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his trademark sardonic wit and incisive analysis, as well as a deep emotional openness about his life as a father and a son.

MESHI: A personal history of Japanese food

by Katherine Tamiko Arguile
Affirm Press / ISBN 9781922400703

Cathartic. Meshi is a comfort and for the grieving soul. A hybrid memoir framed by the 72 micro-seasons of Japan, and the food that is so fundamental to the Japanese soul. It reflects on grief, loss, and displacement, and searches for light in adversity through both the personal and universal. It explores ways to transmute suffering into strength, the way the art of kintsugi repairs broken tea bowls with gold to make them stronger and more beautiful than they were before. A stunning hardcover book, each chapter is illustrated with the author’s linocuts.

NERVOUS: Essays on Heritage and Healing

by Jen Soriano
Amistad / Harper Collins ISBN‎ 978-0063230132

Amistad/HarperCollins Transformative. NERVOUS is a deeply moving personal inquiry into the sources of our sufferings, and the ways we can all seek and find healing in a nervous modern world.

From the Introduction: “We are nervous beings, in nervous nations, at an increasingly nervous time. I wrote this book for those of us who have felt crazy and alone. For those of us who have been told to forget about the past, to stop being weak, and to swallow our pain. For all of us with a knowing body. For babaylan who remember a time before silence. For pearls in their shells seeking conditions to shine. My story is just one ripple in an emerging ecosystem of interdependence, where we don’t have to bear generational pain alone.”

CHINESE PRODIGAL: A Memoir in Eight Arguments

by David Shih
Atlantic Monthly Press / ISBN 978-0802158994

Groundbreaking. Hey, Generation X! You know that one Asian kid in your elementary class? Yeah, David Shih, that’s right. Well, he wrote a book and this is it. Its about him and its about you. Yeah, you! What he says is gonna blow your mind! Part memoir, part examination of American culture, and what it means to be Asian American in a country that doesn’t see color –only black or white. It is a moving testimony of a son, father, and citizen stepping outside the identities imposed on him. By mining his own experiences—from his failures of filiality to his negotiations within an interracial marriage—Shih masterfully captures the intimate costs of becoming an American.