While fiction can include fantastic world-building — or at the very least, an alternative view of real-world events — nonfiction gives us a glimpse into how the world actually works. What is our shared history? Where do we find our joy? And how do we sand down the rough edges of society so more people can thrive? Telling a true story, whether it’s rooted in personal experience or simply a passionate idea, is no easy task. Ultimately, it requires a willingness to take readers on a ride through history, be it personal, factual, or scientific. And though that can be intense, it can also be thrilling.
Which is why this month we’re celebrating five women doing just that. From stories of bravery and personal strength to dives into social justice, mental health, and even inventions, here are the nonfiction books you need on your autumn reading list.
Nikki Vargas, author, travel writer, and senior editor of Fodor’s Travel
As a travel writer, Nikki Vargas, author of the upcoming memoir Call You When I Land, is no stranger to writing about herself. As she explains, often the job is literally to describe your experience at a destination. However, there have been moments when her confidence was tested under fire.
“After deciding to call off my wedding in my 20s, I began to dabble in writing about myself outside the context of travel,” she says. “One of my first stories was an article I wrote for a digital women’s lifestyle publication about my decision to cancel my wedding. I was relatively new to publishing stories and shy about sharing too much about myself, so I opted for an anonymous byline and watched as my article was eviscerated with hateful comments by people who could not stomach my choice. While I had to work up the courage to write about myself again, I’ve grown a lot stronger since and now find joy in owning my story and using it to inspire others.”
It’s that energy that Vargas brings to her new book. Not just a travel highlight reel, Call You When I Land is also an exploration of the emotional side of hitting the road, and how just one trip can inspire you to change your life.
Writing about difficult parts of her story
“In my forthcoming travel memoir, Call You When I Land, I wander into the jungle of my past, confronting everything from a haunting family murder to career failures to becoming a runaway bride to chasing my dream of becoming a travel writer around the globe. I decided early on to write my travel memoir in the present tense, to place myself back in that moment and headspace in order to better bring forth those emotions on the page. Rehashing the feelings around my last-minute decision to cancel my wedding was difficult. That decision sent shockwaves across my life that broke hearts, ended friendships, and damaged family relationships. At that time, I wanted nothing more but to run away and hide from all the drama I had caused, but as difficult as it was to place myself back in that moment, writing this memoir pushed me to not only think about the reasons that led up to my choice, but to own them in a way that felt beautiful and inspiring.”
Advice for would-be memoirists
“Earlier this year, I spoke at the Women’s Travel Fest in New York and had the joy of meeting aspiring authors who all harbored a beautiful book idea that they had yet to put into words. What struck me about each of these women was how wild, exciting, and thrilling their individual stories were, and how much they downplayed them. Nearly all the women felt embarrassed to share their book idea, convinced their story would seem too dull to lend itself to a book. When I first set out to write Call You When I Land, I remember feeling something similar. I felt intimidated by other memoirs I admire and convinced that other travelers might have more compelling stories to share, but what I realized is this: We all have a story to tell, and what’s more, we all have a story worth sharing. My advice to memoirists is to push aside your doubts and be proud of your story.”
How life has surprised her recently
“I am getting married this September! Let me tell you, it has been a surreal experience to pen a memoir that relives my decision to call off my wedding while simultaneously planning my upcoming wedding. Professionally, I am in the early stages of writing my third book: a fiction novel closely inspired by a recent father-daughter trip I took through Norway with my 20-something sister and our dad. The novel toggles between the present of road-tripping through the Norwegian fjords — and all the chaos that ensues — and the past, exploring the complex and beautiful relationships between a father and his two adult daughters.”
Aparna Nancherla, comedian, actor, and author of Unreliable Narrator
Aparna Nancherla is a character actor whom you don’t know you know. But even when appearing on fan favorites like What We Do in the Shadows, BoJack Horseman, Bob’s Burgers, and Search Party, in addition to nurturing a stand-up career, she admits that she’s not immune to impostor syndrome — something that hit hard during 2020. While not intended as a therapy session, writing her recent collection of essays, Unreliable Narrator, turned out to be a healthy way through things.
“Stand-up was sort of in a weird liminal space where there were Zoom shows for a while, and people started finding other ways to perform,” recalls Nancherla, who, in Unreliable Narrator, dissects everything from her own mental health to body image to the struggles with her stand-up career. “So, I think in that sense, my break was kind of at a fortuitous time, but I think the bigger problem for me was writing this book where I was wrestling with all of these feelings that made me feel pretty raw a lot of the time. If I take a break, who am I without stand-up? Am I allowed to do this? Does this mean I’m not a committed artist? But nowadays, I really am just like, ‘It’s okay to not be a multi-hyphenate every moment of your life.’”
How she decides if a story is meant for stand-up or book form
“Each medium requires its own set of skills, and each one is its own muscle. I think what really got me interested in writing a book is exploring more of those gray areas that maybe you’re not able to get into quite as messily in stand-up, where you need the clarity of the punch line and the polished delivery. I felt like with writing something more long-form, I could kind of lollygag a little bit more and take my time with certain ideas, and maybe not have as clean a resolution every time.”
On writing as discovery
“I think it helps me to be able to name things and kind of look at things from a distance. So, I think this book was a tricky balance between writing things and kind of dissecting them but then also having all these feelings come up in writing about them, and having realization that feelings don’t really have that same cleanness of rationality, where you can just be like, ‘And now, I’m going to put this away for the day!’ It would just kind of trickle into everything else. And so, I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I should have anticipated that if you write a book about self-doubt, you’re probably going to experience a lot of self-doubt when you’re writing it.’”
Why we’re all a bit of an unreliable narrator
“There’s certainly connotations associated with the term ‘unreliable narrator,’ like you’re not giving the full story, or your stories are kind of skewed compared to what actually happened. But I think of it more as we’re all performing various aspects of our lives in the ways that we want to be seen and the ways we want the world to see us. So, in that sense, we’re all kind of unreliable, and we’re only providing our lens of seeing the world. But then, I also kind of see the flip side of it, where it’s like the world is kind of reading you a certain way based on its assumptions about you, and that can also be unreliable. So, we’re all kind of in this weird balance between presenting a sense of self and then the world mirroring it back to us. And there’s always discrepancies between the two.”
Roma Agrawal, structural engineer, author, and broadcaster
Roma Agrawal has a piece of advice for you the next time you visit the Shard, London’s tallest building. Mainly? Skip the view.
“Forget about the River Thames; it’s a sludgy brown river,” she laughs while describing it to an audience at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts. “Look at it in person to get all of that, and look up, and look at the steel, and look at the thousands of bolts that we spent months working on!”
That passion has taken Agrawal a long way. As a student in India, where, as she explains, there’s a heavy emphasis on STEM subjects, it never occurred to her that it was strange she loved math and science. It wasn’t until doing her A-levels in London and then studying physics at Oxford that the structural engineer realized that, yes, women are wildly underrepresented in her field.
In addition to high-profile projects (those are indeed her fingerprints on the Shard bolts), Agrawal is aiming to increase STEM accessibility through storytelling. Her books, including the recently published Nuts and Bolts: Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), explore building and innovation through the lens of history. How do our discoveries change over time? What little things go into bigger structures and inventions? And should we give up the phrase “you can’t reinvent the wheel”? As Agrawal describes it, the answers are more dramatic than you might expect.
When she realized that she had a curious mind
“I must have been about 5 or 6 years old. I was still living in the U.S. at the time. I had one of those really cool 1980s plastic lunch boxes with The Muppets on the top. Inside wasn’t food — it was just every crayon, in every color, and thickness, and length. And one day, I decided I wanted to discover what was inside crayons and basically broke a lot of them. I just sat there, snapping them into two. And I have to say, I was a little bit disappointed because, you know, inside a crayon is just more crayon. But for me, it’s about the innate sense of curiosity, which I think all of us have. My daughter is now 3 1/2. She went through a phase where she would just throw everything. And it’s not because she was trying to be disruptive. She’s just exploring the world. And that was one way of doing it. Does that stick to the floor? Does that balance? Or does that shatter into a thousand pieces? There’s that sense of curiosity, which I think really helped me come to my science education.”
On picking what inventions to include
“There was a bit of physical actual dismantling and breaking of things, like a ballpoint pen, which you can get back together — unlike crayons. And then, I just started thinking about my blender or dishwasher. And I just started thinking like, even if I think of the International Space Station, which is probably one of the most complicated pieces of engineering out there, what are the actual elements that make it up? What [are the] novel things without which these bigger pieces of technology couldn’t exist? And I just started making lists. And I came up with seven in the end.”
From the wheel to the space station
“The way [the space station] is navigated is based on a type of wheel. You know the phrase ‘don’t reinvent the wheel’? I’m not fond of that phrase. Basically, humans have been reinventing the wheel ever since it was invented. The wheel is almost the most obvious example in my book of the seven. We actually created it for pottery. And then, we created solid wheels on its side, which went onto wagons. And then, it took a little bit of time before we figured out spoked wheels, which are lighter. And then, it took a very long time before we came up with wire wheels, which were in fact invented for flying machines, which almost came before the bicycle and kind of blows my mind. And then came gears, which are important in almost every machine that we have. The most complicated version of the wheel, at least that we’ve got at the moment, is the gyroscope. So, what they do on the International Space Station is to have huge wheels that they call flywheels, on four axles. And if you orientate them in a particular way, then they create zero maximum momentum so they aren’t doing anything. But then if one of the solar panels opens up and starts forcing the ISS to revolve and move in a different way, then they tweak the position of these axles and that exerts a force back, and it brings it back to where it should be.”
Aubrey Gordon, writer and podcaster
For years, Aubrey Gordon was known as “Your Fat Friend,” a cutting columnist willing to tell skinny people what they can’t fully comprehend about plus-size life. However, there came a time when she realized the pseudonym wasn’t doing what she had hoped.
“I wrote anonymously for years, in part because I thought anonymity would keep me safe from threats to my safety, but it just didn’t,” she says. “I still got threats, still got doxxed, still had to deal with all the stuff that so many fat people on the internet have to deal with. So, it was less about feeling comfortable, and more about realizing that anonymity wasn’t keeping me safe in the way I’d hoped it would.”
Since Gordon started writing under her given name, her career has grown to include books, including the recently released “You Just Need to Lose Weight” and 19 Other Myths About Fat People. She’s also co-host of the meticulously researched and often quite funny medical myths and misinformation podcast Maintenance Phase. And while she admits it can be difficult to occupy a space that can be so willfully misunderstood — “There are no diet or exercise interventions that reliably lead to long-term weight loss in most people, and even if there were, it’s no one’s duty to be thin” — ultimately, Gordon’s goal is to arm people with the facts and understanding they need to navigate and find joy in the world regardless of what body they inhabit.
Researching the podcast versus reaching books
“They’re often similar. On the show, we’re more likely to deal with topics that are unfolding right now, so we may rely more on research that’s not yet settled, and journalism rather than historical analysis with a little more perspective. But overwhelmingly, the research for both is very similar.”
The most difficult topic she’s had to tackle
“Researching fat camps was a real heartbreaker, especially knowing that dieting at a young age puts kids and teens at a greatly heightened risk of developing an eating disorder. I watched video after video of parents discussing their kids’ bodies in a disgusted way, right in front of their child. It was a tough topic both because it’s an area where I have some personal experience but also because so much media still lifts up fat camps as inspiring places, even as so many people who went to fat camps speak up about what tough places they were. I’m currently researching Ozempic, which is a real bear if only because hundreds and hundreds of pieces have been written about it.”
A sneak peek of her upcoming book
“This next one will focus considerably more on the diet and wellness industries, and why so much of what we think we know about health and wellness is oversimplified, misinterpreted, or just plain wrong.”
Heather Radke, author of Butts: A Backstory and a contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab
As a reporter at RadioLab, Heather Radke is used to looking at scientific and social topics through a critical lens. But her first book, Butts: A Backstory, came from a more personal place.
“The idea is from growing up as a person in the ’90s,” she says. “I have a big butt, and when I was a teenager, I got teased a little bit for having a big butt. I think it’s a very common experience to be teased about a part of your body that you have no control over and to become very self-conscious about it. At that time, having a big butt was not attractive. But over the next couple of decades, as I moved to different parts of the country and as cultural norms shifted in mainstream culture, big butts became fashionable in a mainstream way, in a way they really hadn’t been.”
Equal parts a historical and scientific dive, Butts: A Backstory takes readers through the historical and social connotations. The book is an engaging, if not always pleasant, swing through the history of the derriere. (One doesn’t have to dig very far to find the sexist and racist factors playing into beliefs about the beauty of one’s backside.) However, Radke hopes that by shedding light on the often-unseen role that butts play in society and the forces that have shaped our perception, readers will be armed with the kind of understanding powerful enough to shape the way they perceive their own bodies.
“Can knowing all this stuff really make you feel better about your body?” she muses. “I definitely still feel feelings when I go into the dressing room and try on pants. Even though I know so much about that specific experience and why pants don’t really fit most people, it still feels bad sometimes to not have clothes that fit my body. Knowing things doesn’t solve them, but it does give me something that I can say back to myself when I’m feeling that — and I think that’s actually quite powerful. I know that actually what’s happening is these pants aren’t designed to fit enough people, and that it’s not really my body that’s the problem.”
How she decided what from the vast history of butts should be included in the book
“I was a curator before I was a writer, and part of what the curatorial [mindset] is that it’s my eye that’s making these choices. I’m a historically minded person. And so, the history was really important, like the history of this woman, Sarah Baartman, who was brought up from South Africa and displayed in London. That story is very foundational to the Western understanding of big butts and stereotypes. So, that was a starting point. I’m also a science reporter, so I wanted to go into the world and talk to real people. I talked to these guys who make butt pads for drag queens, and I went to the V&A [Museum] in London and talked to bustle historians. I did all this reporting that is very of this moment that we’re living in because it’s really important to see the ways that history lives inside the present too. And that we’re not as far away from the past as it can often seem.”
Unexpected facts about butts
“It was very prevalent in the ’90s, in evolutionary-psychiatry psychology theories about bodies, the idea that women with big butts are more fertile, or men like women with big butts because of x, y, z reasons. But I think what I quickly learned when I started talking to scientists is that’s not real at all. There’s no evidence for any of that. And then, I got really interested in why we don’t want to ask those questions. It feels like a thing that is so tempting to do, which is to use science to justify aesthetic choices that we maybe are making for cultural reasons.”
Why everyone makes butt jokes
“There’s not an official word for butt! I talked to a surgeon friend about this. I was like, ‘What does a butt surgeon or anal surgeon say?’ I learned that those are the most fun surgeons because they have to kind of be able to joke around with people about their butts because when people come in, they’re so humiliated about having a problem with this part of their body. That is kind of so taboo! So, what do you call the butt? When I ask, people usually come back with ‘buttocks.’ But even as I speak to you, it just feels so embarrassing. The only time I’ve ever heard anyone actually say that is in aerobics videos or yoga class.”
Laura Studarus is a Los Angeles-based travel writer who has contributed to Fast Company, BBC Travel, and Thrillist. Follow her on Twitter at @Laura_Studarus.
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