Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

by Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Like Allison, Ernaux uses her own family's story as a lens to examine how personal shame and class intersect across generations, but she does it through a radical collective voice that shifts between 'I' and 'we.' Where Allison photographs the Gibson women, Ernaux photographs French society itself through the intimate details of her family's rise and fall—same unflinching honesty about desire and bodies, but filtered through a completely different cultural moment.

by Jonathan Williams

This is my surprise pick for you—it's technically a lyric essay about color and heartbreak, not a traditional memoir, but Nelson does what Allison does with photographs: she fragments and reassembles fragments (numbered sections, color theory, personal confession) to make meaning from pain. It's shorter and more experimental than what you just read, but that same willingness to be 'provocative and confrontational' about desire and vulnerability runs through every page.

by Barry Windeatt

I'm reaching back to 1436 here because Kempe's medieval autobiography has that same raw, almost embarrassing honesty about female desire, family dysfunction, and spiritual searching that Allison brings to the 20th century. Both women refuse to be palatable; both write themselves as complicated, sometimes unlikeable, always truthful. The distance in time actually makes the parallel more striking—these concerns aren't new, and Allison knew that.

by Stephen Matterson

Zeniter traces three generations of an Algerian family across displacement, immigration, and silence—the way Allison traces the Gibson women across poverty and abuse. But where Allison works through photographs and direct memory, Zeniter uses the gaps and silences, the things her grandmother won't say, as the actual subject. Both writers understand that family history isn't just what happened; it's what gets told, what gets hidden, and how those stories shape who we become.