Cover Photo: This photograph shows a laptop open on a desk with a green mug sitting next to it. On the screen, we see blurry faces of people in a video chat meeting.
Photograph by Chris Montgomery/Unsplash

The Best Books I Read in 2020

The best books I read weren’t reviewed in the ‘Times’ or on hold at the library or stacked in a TBR pile. They were in my inbox.

Times

holeyholywantcourse

snap your fingers

funnypage-turnersvoilabang pow

how

what comes after

I’m showing up for the practice. I’m showing up for us.

*

’re interested in reading some of the work generated in Megan Stielstra’s 12-Month Memoir Generator, find excerpts from some of the graduates below:

Erin BranningWanting: A Memoir of Marriage, Patriarchy, and Privilege

Harmony Cox, excerpt from Nothing is Ever Over

Amy Estes, excerpt from Let the Love Surprise You

Jessica Gilkison, excerpt from Even & Especially

Kristin Gourlay, excerpt from The Geographic

Ashley Perez, excerpt from The In-Between

Eva Recinos, excerpt from Underneath the Palm Trees

Marisa Russello, excerpt from Everything You Cant Control

Nancy Wu, excerpt from Notes on America

Megan Stielstra is the author of Everyone Remain Calm, Once I Was Cool, and The Wrong Way to Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year in Nonfiction from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in Best American Essays, New York Times, Poets & Writers, The Believer, Tin House, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for NPR, Museum of Contemporary Art, and theatres, festivals, and classrooms across the country. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a Senior Media Fellow with the Annenberg Innovation Lab at USC.