10 of the Best New Nonfiction Books To Read in March 2024

When an ableist troll said that Melissa Blake should be banned from posting photos of herself, Blake posted three photos of herself smiling. In her new memoir, Blake writes about her life as a disability rights activist and social media influencer, calling for the nondisabled to take action and become better disability allies.

Feeding Ghosts is a memoir that follows three generations of women, beginning with Hulls’s grandmother, Sun Yi, who flees China with her young daughter, Rose. Sun Yi experiences a mental breakdown, and when Rose moves to the U.S., she eventually brings Sun Yi to live with her.

RuPaul is one of pop culture’s biggest icons. Supermodel, mogul, television producer — RuPaul has done it all. But with his new memoir, he peels back the layers of his life, revealing the experiences from his early life that made him who he is today.

When Anna Gazmarian is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she realizes that her conservative evangelical community will not accept it. She spends the next decade reframing what her community calls a “heart problem” to better understand mental illness and how it impacts her life.

Literary powerhouse Morgan Parker is out with a new collection of essays that examine Parker’s feelings of alienation in just about every part of her life. She describes living with depression and a deep sense of loneliness. She expands from ideas of the personal, giving her readers a bigger picture of Black life in America.

Literary icon Marilynne Robinson is blessing us with a new work of nonfiction where she examines the creation story in Genesis. Robinson walks us through the creation story, including the original King James Version in her text. Robinson emphasizes God’s never-ending love for humanity and His eternal faith in Creation.

Cameron Russell shares her life as a model, a job she didn’t necessarily even want in the first place. It was an opportunity, and she took it. But it led to years of surviving a sexist, image-obsessed industry that forever warped how she saw her body and understood her sense of self. How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone begs us to examine the question, what does it mean to be seen as an object of beauty meant to be enjoyed by others?

When she was a young girl, McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. She was raised by her grandmother in Los Angeles, a city particularly ravaged by the disease. Later in life, McCalden begins researching HIV/AIDS and realizes that the internet and AIDS developed at the same time in history. The Observable Universe braids together ideas around the internet and HIV/AIDS, giving readers a unique portrait of late 20th-century America.

Poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib grew up in Columbus, Ohio, during the 1990s. He watches basketball stars like LeBron James rise from places he could recognize. In There’s Always This Year, he discusses ideas around who we think deserves success and what society decides is exceptional.

In this series of letters, Mimi Khúc examines ideas around mental health and wellness. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, society’s understanding of illness has changed. Khúc argues that we can no longer have Asian American studies without an intersectional understanding of Asian American wellness.