Canada Reads champion and Jeopardy! superstar Mattea Roach recommends 3 'must-read' memoirs
When Mattea Roach isn't busy winning Canada Reads or Jeopardy!, they're busy reading — and one genre they particularly enjoy is memoir.
"It feels very powerful in a way that fiction can also be, but often isn't quite as much just for me as a reader," they told Ali Hassan on The Next Chapter.
During Canada Reads 2023, the Halifax-born Roach championed Kate Beaton's graphic memoir Ducks.
On this week's episode of The Next Chapter, they shared three other must-read memoirs that resonated with them.
Where I Was From by Joan Didion
"Essentially, one key thing to know about Joan Didion is not only did she live most of her life in California, but she was a fifth-generation Californian.
"She was born in the 30s, a time where a lot of people were migrating to California from the Dust Bowl. And so for her family to have already been so rooted there was quite unusual for a settler family. You can tell she's rooted in a sense of place; the knowledge of the history and how the state works in terms of governance, how agriculture works seems to be something that shows up in a lot of her works. It's very important to her to understand these things.
She still feels very connected to that sense of place, that sense of heritage.- Mattea Roach on Where I Was From by Joan Didion
"And you can tell that in her writing, when she does not live in California, because she eventually did move out to New York, she still feels very connected to that sense of place, that sense of heritage. It's something that was clearly instilled in her from a very young age and that she held very dear, I think, right until the end of her life.
"I think I have completely a new appreciation of Didion's writing about California since I've spent a fair amount of time out there over the past two years. I think for me, what I've come to appreciate is that grounding in history and also politics that Didion's writing has."
Best Young Woman Job Book by Emma Healey
"Emma Healey grew up in Toronto. She doesn't say specifically in this book where she went to high school, but based on the description of the high school, I believe she went to a high school that many of my best friends actually also attended. She wants to become a writer. She goes to Montreal for the creative writing program and then graduates into this milieu where it's not clear what you're supposed to do with that sort of an education and a background.
"You want to write. You want to perhaps publish poetry — she has published works of poetry in the past. You want to maybe work as an editor or something, but the job opportunities are just often not there. They're poorly paid.
"And so what this book describes basically is the series of jobs that she had post graduation and some that she had while she was in school: working in captioning, where she'd go to this office and work the night shift, writing subtitles and descriptions of videos that would then go out to streaming services or things like that, working at an adult entertainment office (I think it's kind of implied to be like MindGeek, the Pornhub office in Montreal) and just trying to make a writing career work alongside all of this.
"It's definitely something that resonates with me and a lot of the people that I know."
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
"I've been listening to Japanese Breakfast since their first album came out in 2016. So I was familiar with the music well prior to the book coming out, and I waited to read this book, actually. I was very excited to read about it when it came out. And then for whatever reason, I just never made it a priority.
"And then this summer, after my dad passed away, I read it.
It's funny, there seems to be like two schools of thought of what you should do if you're grieving. Some people are like, 'You should embrace the grief and read a bunch of stuff about it and really just kind of get in the zone and work out all your feelings.' And then some people are like, 'No, it's going to be too much.' I'm very glad I waited to read it.
For many people, it's a connection to a culture, to a community that they may not be able to access in other places.- Mattea Roach on Crying in H Mart
"H Mart is an Asian grocery store chain. And so what's very common is for people that are in Asian diaspora communities — so in Michelle Zauner's case, her mom was Korean, and so that's her connection there — they'll go to H Mart to buy products that they may not be able to find in their local conventional supermarket. And so for many people, it's a connection to a culture, to a community that they may not be able to access in other places.
"In Michelle Zauner's case, she's biracial: her dad is white, her mom was Korean. After the loss of her mom (her mom died of cancer when I think Michelle was like 25, so similar age to me), she finds herself trying to reconnect or stay connected, with her mom and that side of her family through food."
Mattea Roach's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
