Books Like Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!

Tina Fey

Like Minnelli's book, it pairs show-business stories with a self-deprecating humour that never hides the hard work behind the success. Fey is candid about her career and her family life.

Carrie Fisher

Fisher talks about addiction, a famous family and Hollywood excess with the same wry, unsentimental honesty that readers find in Minnelli's account of her own life.

Trevor Noah

Noah turns hard childhood experiences into warm, funny storytelling, much as Minnelli does. Both memoirs show how humour can carry real pain without losing its heart.

Christina Crawford

A daughter's account of growing up with a famous Hollywood mother, it speaks directly to the tangled love and damage Minnelli describes in her relationship with her own mother's legacy.

Jeannette Walls

Walls writes clearly and without self-pity about a chaotic, unstable childhood, mirroring Minnelli's frank account of a childhood shaped by fame, loss and emotional hunger.

Tara Westover

Westover's memoir of breaking free from a difficult family is intimate and emotionally honest, appealing to readers who valued Minnelli's willingness to examine the family roots of her struggles.

Augusten Burroughs

Burroughs writes about alcoholism with dark humour and sharp observation, capturing the same mix of wit and pain that runs through Minnelli's account of substance use and recovery.

Caroline Knapp

Knapp's clear-eyed, literary memoir of her own drinking suits readers who want a thoughtful, unflinching look at addiction from someone who has lived it and come through it.

Nic Sheff

Sheff describes his descent into methamphetamine addiction and his fight to recover in direct, raw prose, offering a frank and hopeful view of healing similar to the one Minnelli shares.

Patti Smith, Patti Smith

Smith's memoir of her early years in New York with Robert Mapplethorpe is tender and observant about art, ambition and lifelong friendship, themes Minnelli also returns to in her own story.

Clarke, Gerald, Gerald Clarke

This biography of Judy Garland gives the background to the mother Minnelli writes about, showing the pressures of stardom that shaped both their lives. It is a rich, detailed portrait of a performer.

Joan Didion

Didion's precise, restrained account of grief suits readers who appreciated the emotional honesty of Minnelli's book. It is a sharp, personal meditation on loss from a writer of great craft.