I love reading books detailing personal life experiments. It's a very specific genre of memoir that has a reality TV vibe. An author, a journalist, sometimes a blogger decides to try *insert crazy thing here* for *insert time frame here* and writes about it. I am here for it.
I guess the OG would be Nelly Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House.
John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me is probably one of the more famous books from this genre. I believe it is assigned reading (or was before the new age of book banning) in many schools. I have issues with that book though. It wouldn't include on my list of recommendations even though I think it is incredibly well written.
Fairly recent favorites that come to mind:
Riding Buses With My Sister: A True Life Journey by Rachel Simon
Post Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing by Reba Riley
Living With the Monks: What Turning Off My Phone Taught Me About Happiness, Gratitude, and Focus by Jesse Itzler
Living With a Seal: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet by Jesse Itzler
I'm tempted to include Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus on the list, but I think travel memoirs is a well established genre that could exist adjacent with a very blurry line between.
Yesterday I finished Rachel Held Evans's The Year of Biblical Womanhood: How a Liberated Woman Found Herself Sitting on Her Roof, Covering Her Head, and Calling Her Husband Master. I was on the fence about this one through most of it. In the end, I lean toward like.
The problem is that in order to prove that first goal, she has to know she's going to fail in her experiment. Which she does. Miserably. So instead of following the Bible literally, she creates thematic to-do lists each month that "relate" to an aspect of the book's take on womanhood. Each chapter focuses on scriptures related to one topic and the author gives herself a to-do list to complete by the end of the month. Topics include beauty, purity, obedience, justice.
Here are the things she does that won me over to her in the end:
1. She honors the voices of women who understand their faith differently from her. It reads as a very respectful conversation.
2. She defends things like singlehood and choosing to be childless by playing her own game of Bible pick and choose. Take that!
3. She's snarky, and some of the tasks on her to-do lists are pretty creative.
In searching for a name for this genre (and of course more books!), I stumbled upon this list, put together by the New York Public Library. And off I go on my own reading experiment. Does that count as my own experiment? My Year of Reading Books About Personal Experiments
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/01/01/one-year-experiment-books
