Powerful Memoirs by Powerful Women

It sounds like a really bad joke. You're in constant pain and are diagnosed as having a Clostridium difficile (C-diff) infection; then your madcap mother has a bad fall, goes into a coma and dies. Still clutching your stomach in agony, you split up with your girlfriend, you're diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and you get a double mastectomy. Hilarious, right? Actually, yes. In 2012, at age 41, stand-up comic and recording artist Tig Notaro greeted an audience with the following now-famous words: "Hello. Good evening. Hello. I have cancer. How are you? Hi. How are you? Is everyone having a good time? I have cancer." She brought down the house. "Everyone, including me, was living moment to moment, processing raw truths in the dark," she writes in this moving, funny, achingly honest memoir, in which she riffs on God ("During my wretched four months, I heard ‘God never gives you more than you can handle' way more than I could handle"), the school system (she resolutely flunked eighth grade—twice) and her own wild insecurities. Considering her troubled childhood and her current soul-soothing marriage, she marvels at the staying power of love, even when the lights grow dim.