These three memoirs (and three of my favorite books of the year!) pair personal reflection with a) feral cats, b) Virginia Woolf, and c) technology reporting.

During a precarious time in her life, Gustafson found herself in a rental home surrounded by feral cats and couldn’t stop herself from becoming deeply involved with them.  Chapters about the cats are interspersed with stories about her work at a food bank, her relationship with an emotionally abusive boyfriend when she was a teen, and her interactions with the Tucson community as she enlarges her animal rescue work.  I was worried this might be saccharine but found it hopeful and compassionate instead.

This one is hard to describe, so I’ll let LitHub and Publishers Weekly convince you:

LitHub

"The experience of reading Heather Christle's hybrid memoir, in which she weaves together threads of trauma shared by herself, her mother's life, and Virginia Woolf, feels like being in a conversation with a brilliant and deeply curious friend. It's a knockout."

Publishers Weekly 

"With lyrical prose, a sharp analytical sensibility, and staggering reserves of empathy, Christle delivers a unique and potentially transformative catalog of healing. Readers will be rapt."

Vauhini Vara was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her novel The Immortal King Rao, but she is probably best known for her viral essay Ghosts, where she let a ChatGPT predecessor help her write about her sister’s death.  That essay is included here, along with others that meld autobiography with insights into our current relationship with technology and the companies that created it.

Some of the topics under discussion: 

• the internet in the early 1990s (Your Whole Life Will Be Searchable)
• the tension between feeling exploited by big tech companies and continuing to use their products (A Great Deal: she made up a rule that every time she ordered something from Amazon, she had to review it, “explaining my justification for shopping on Amazon"; this is a collection of those reviews)
• some of ChatGPT’s failings (Thank You for Your Important Work)
• the racial, gender, and other biases that are built into these tools (Record the World: about AI image generation)

“Dana, my best friend from college, who went on to business school at Stanford and a career as a tech founder and executive, consults for companies and universities about entrepreneurship.  Recently, preparing a presentation for Stanford’s business school about how to evaluate business ideas, she asked ChatGPT for some images of female executives in a graphic-novel-like style.  They kept turning up white, with enormous cleavage and tight tops.  “I’ll ask for a CEO giving a board presentation and she looks like she’s a stripper,” she texted me.”