Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Books Like The Choice
The Choice stays with you. Not because of what Edith Eger survived, but because of what she chose to do with it. These 6 books share that same quality: they are about people who were broken by something real, and who decided — slowly, painfully, sometimes imperfectly — to heal anyway.
By Lisanne Swart · 6 books · Memoir & Nonfiction · Updated May 2026
01
Memoir
Man’s Search for Meaning On my shelf
Viktor Frankl · 1946
Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz. What he wrote afterward became one of the most important books of the 20th century. Like Eger, he argues that even in conditions of absolute horror, the last human freedom is the freedom to choose your response. This is the book that laid the philosophical foundation for everything The Choice is built on.
Read this one first if you want to understand the idea behind The Choice. Then read Eger to see what it looks like to actually live it.
Read my full recommendation →
02
Memoir
Educated On my shelf
Tara Westover · 2018
Tara Westover grew up in a family that kept her from school, from doctors, from the world. She educated herself into a different life — and then had to grieve the family she left behind to get there. Like The Choice, this is a book about the cost of becoming who you really are when everything around you says you shouldn’t.
The hunger to survive and become whole. The grief of outgrowing the people who shaped you. The question of whether healing means forgiveness.
→ On Lisanne’s Bookshelf
03
Nonfiction
What Happened to You? On my shelf
Oprah Winfrey & Bruce D. Perry · 2021
The central shift in this book is the same one Eger spent her life teaching: stop asking “what’s wrong with you?” and start asking “what happened to you?” A series of conversations between Oprah and psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry on trauma, resilience, and the science of healing. Warm, accessible, and deeply humane.
If The Choice is the personal testimony, this is the clinical explanation. Together they answer two sides of the same question.
→ On Lisanne’s Bookshelf
04
Memoir
Tell Me Who I Am On my shelf
Alex & Marcus Lewis · 2013
Alex wakes from a coma with no memory — not of his name, his family, his past. His twin brother Marcus decides what to tell him. And what to hide. This is a book about the stories that hold us together, the truths that break us open, and what it means to choose to face what happened instead of building a life around the lie.
One of the most unsettling books I’ve read. It asks the same question as The Choice in a completely different way: what do you do when you finally know?
→ On Lisanne’s Bookshelf
05
Memoir
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls · 2005 · Goodreads 4.08
Jeannette Walls grew up in a family of nomads, intellectuals, and dreamers who couldn’t keep the lights on. Her father was brilliant and alcoholic; her mother prioritized art over food. This is the memoir she wrote about surviving them — and about choosing, eventually, not to be defined by what they couldn’t give her.
Like Eger, Walls doesn’t spend the book in bitterness. What makes both books extraordinary is the refusal to reduce a complicated life to a single wound.
06
Nonfiction
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb · 2019 · Goodreads 4.24
A therapist has a crisis and starts seeing a therapist. Lori Gottlieb interweaves her sessions with four very different patients — each stuck in a story they’ve been telling themselves for too long. Funny, warm, and unexpectedly wise. It reads like a novel and makes therapy feel like something any human being might need, rather than something shameful.
Eger built her career helping others unlearn their prisons. Gottlieb shows what that process looks like from both sides of the couch.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the philosophical core
→ Read Man’s Search for Meaning first. Frankl is where the idea behind The Choice begins.
If you want another memoir with the same emotional power
→ Read Educated. It’s the closest in tone and impact to The Choice.
If you want to understand the science of what trauma does
→ Read What Happened to You? It makes everything in The Choice make sense on a neurological level.
Frequently asked questions about books like The Choice
What is The Choice by Edith Eger about?
The Choice is Edith Eger’s memoir about surviving Auschwitz as a teenage ballet dancer, and the decades of work it took to truly heal afterward. The book weaves together her own story with her work as a psychologist, arguing that while we cannot choose what happens to us, we always retain the freedom to choose how we respond. It is both a Holocaust memoir and a psychology book — and one of the most quietly powerful books I have ever read.
Is The Gift by Edith Eger a sequel to The Choice?
Yes. The Gift (2020) is Eger’s follow-up to The Choice and works as a direct companion. Where The Choice tells her own story, The Gift draws on her decades of clinical work to identify twelve prisons of the mind that keep people from living fully — including victimhood, avoidance, and the inability to forgive. Most readers who loved The Choice find The Gift equally powerful.
What makes The Choice different from other Holocaust memoirs?
Most Holocaust memoirs focus on bearing witness — on telling the world what happened. The Choice does that too, but its primary concern is what comes after survival: how do you choose to live when you carry that weight? Eger’s training as a psychologist gives the book a different lens than Night or The Diary of a Young Girl. It’s less about testimony and more about healing.
Is The Choice suitable for people dealing with trauma?
Many readers find The Choice deeply helpful when navigating their own difficult experiences — not because it minimizes smaller traumas by comparison, but because Eger is explicitly clear that the tools she describes apply to any suffering. That said, the book contains detailed accounts of violence and loss, so it’s worth reading at a time when you have the emotional space for it.
