Telling a life.(MEMOIR & AUTOBIOGRAPHY)(Recommended readings)

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Looking at a galley that came across my desk a while ago, I see there is no title or author on the jacket, only two quotes on the front cover Anthony Bourdain calls the book "Magnificent. Simply the best memoir of a chef ever." Batali, on the back, writes that the author "has raised the bar for all books about eating and cooking." An editor can't help being simultaneously intrigued and skeptical about such praise for Blood, Bones, and Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef and owner of Prune restaurant in New York City.

No matter, for this memoir will get lots of attention. It's poised to be a standout amid foodie memoirs, whose numbers have been growing for the past few years.

The field of memoir and autobiography is vast and expanding by the season. In travel memoirs Colin Thubron journeys To a Mountain in Tibet to ruminate on the recent death of his mother and the distant death of his sister. Also highly touted for 2011 (announced print run is 200,000): Little Princes: One Man's Promise to Bring Home the Lost Children of Nepal, in which first-time author Connor Grennan tells of taking a humanitarian trip to Nepal for the sole purpose of impressing women, but, once there, he comes across an orphanage and over the course of several years returns to Nepal determined to return its residents to their homes.

The subject of loss, for the most part, defines one of the largest areas of memoir. Joyce Carol Oates tells of losing her husband in A Widow's Story. Meghan O'Rourke, a poet and culture critic for Slate, discusses what it means to mourn as she struggles with the death of her mother in The Long Goodbye. Margaux Fragoso writes of the loss of innocence in a haunting and beautifully written memoir about the years of sexual abuse she endured at the hands of a neighborhood acquaintance in Tiger, Tiger.

Three fiction writers turn to memoir this year. Andre Dubus III, author of The Garden of Last Days and The House of Sand and Fog, writes of growing up in a depressed and violent Massachusetts mill town, in Townie, and how he released his own frustration through physical violence before he turned to writing. In Thoughts Without Cigarettes, Oscar Hijuelos, best known for The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, tells of growing up in Manhattan's Morningside Heights to Cuban im migrants, and the people he knew from his neighborhood. Katharine Weber, author of the novels Triangle and The Little Women, turns to stories of her family, which included her grandmother, the composer Kay Swift, her great-grandfather Paul M. Warburg (creator of the Federal Reserve System, and the inspiration for Annie's Daddy Warbucks), as well as her own filmmaking father in The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family's Legacy of Infidelities.

Finally is the much anticipated book from Tina Fey called Bossypants. It was one of the pricier acquisitions contracted for two years ago (coming at the time of her Sarah Palin impersonations). Expect Fey's smart sense of humor.

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