Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best Books of 2022
2022 was a strong year for non-fiction. Memoirs in particular — raw, unsparing, impossible to put down. These are the books published that year that earned a Goodreads rating of 4.5 or higher, and that fit the kind of reading I care about most: books about real lives, difficult pasts, and what people do with them.
By Lisanne Swart · 5 books · Non-fiction · Published 2022
Finding Me
Viola Davis goes back to the beginning — to poverty in rural Rhode Island, to a childhood marked by hunger, violence, and shame, and forward through every room she was told she did not belong in. It is one of the most honest celebrity memoirs ever written, and it reads nothing like a celebrity memoir. Davis does not perform gratitude or victory. She tells the truth about what it cost.
What sets this apart from almost every other memoir of its kind is that Davis refuses the redemptive arc where everything difficult becomes useful in retrospect. The pain is allowed to just be pain. That honesty is rare, and it is what makes this book stay with you.
What My Bones Know
Stephanie Foo is a journalist who was diagnosed with complex PTSD in her thirties. This book is the story of what she did next — years of research, treatment, and self-examination — told with the precision and rigor of an investigative reporter turned inward. It covers the science of trauma alongside the lived experience of it, and does both with exceptional clarity.
This is the book I would give to anyone trying to understand complex trauma — either in themselves or in someone they love. Foo writes about the nervous system the way good science journalists write about the world: making the difficult accessible without making it simple. One of the best books on this subject ever written.
I’m Glad My Mom Died
Jennette McCurdy was a child actress best known from the Nickelodeon series iCarly. This is the story of what was happening behind that — an eating disorder, an emotionally abusive mother, and an industry that let it continue. The title tells you where the book ends up. The pages in between are devastating and, frequently, very funny.
The most read memoir of 2022 for a reason. McCurdy writes with a directness that makes you forget this is a book — it reads like someone finally saying out loud what they have been holding for years. The fact that it is also darkly comic throughout is a testament to how good a writer she is.
Empire of Pain
The definitive account of the Sackler family and the opioid crisis they helped create. Keefe spent years reporting this story, and it shows — it is a masterclass in narrative journalism, tracing the family’s rise from immigrant ambition through pharmaceutical empire to catastrophe. Meticulous, gripping, and impossible to put down.
If you read Bad Blood and want the same sustained quality of investigative storytelling, this is the book. Keefe writes about money, power, and the stories families tell themselves with a precision that is almost surgical. One of the best works of narrative non-fiction of the decade.
The Grieving Brain
A neuroscientist who has spent her career studying grief explains what actually happens in the brain when we lose someone we love. It is rigorous and warm in equal measure — the kind of science writing that gives you language for things you have felt but never been able to name. O’Connor takes one of the most universal human experiences and shows you its mechanics.
This is the book I wish had existed when I needed it. Not as a how-to or a five-stage framework, but as a genuine attempt to understand what grief is — biologically, neurologically, humanly. It sits comfortably alongside What Happened to You? as essential reading on how the body carries experience.
Not sure where to start?
If you want the memoir that will stay with you longest
→ Start with Finding Me. Davis writes with a rawness that is genuinely rare in the genre.
If you want the best book on trauma published in years
→ Read What My Bones Know. The science and the personal story are equally good.
If you want something faster, funnier, and just as devastating
→ Read I’m Glad My Mom Died. Clear an afternoon — you will not stop.
From the bookshelf
“The books that stay with you are the ones written by someone who had no choice but to.”
If this list resonated with you, you'll find more books like these on my personal bookshelf Ȕ hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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