Our favorite books 2006.

By Kate Clinton

In a year when Oprah had blown a righteous gasket at being pretexted by James Frey, I waded cautiously into the memoir genre. But the following memoirs invite such deep experiential reading, all caution is gone with the wind.

If the Creek Don't Rise: My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War, by Rita Williams, is her story of being orphaned at four and being raised by her resentful Aunt Daisy in the Colorado Rockies. The long lunacy of slavery fuels Rita's story of extended family, legacy, and ambition in the 1960s and '70s. Williams is a great storyteller, and at excruciatingly personal moments, layered with adolescent angst and racial isolation, I hoped she was lying, but knew she wasn't.

Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World, by Eve Ensler, is a mix of personal history and reportage. She candidly reveals the terror beneath her secure-seeming childhood and connects that with the terror told to her by women in Mexico, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and America in the age of 9/11 and Katrina. Ensler's voice is of a practical and spirited spirituality. I kept thinking of Mae West's devastating, "Most men want to protect me; can't figure out from what."

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, lacks the long clarifying subtitle that is apparently mandated in publishing law, but it is a stunning and poignant memoir. And you thought Jim McGreevey's memoir was graphic. This is a memoir that keeps on giving. I reread it. I stared at individual pages. Through nearly obsessive, perfectly rendered detail and spare prose, Bechdel documents her coming of age as a woman and lesbian in the context of her relationship with her closeted father.

Somewhere the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life?" and answered, "The world would split open," must be smiling.

Kate Clinton is a humorist.