Behind-the-Scenes Memoirs: A Reading List
This installment of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Lay the Favorite: A Story About Gamblers by Beth Raymer.
A wild ride through the high-stakes sports gambling underworld, as seen through the eyes of a young woman who’d come to Las Vegas hoping to land a job as a cocktail waitress and instead found herself seduced by the adrenaline-fueled, high risk/high reward gambler’s life, and the complicated, funny, sexy, dangerous, rule-breaking roguish types who became her mentors, her enemies, her family. Raymer brings to life a world that teems with pathos and ecstasy in this wild picaresque that also tells the story of a young woman’s crazy, sexy, most unlikely coming-of-age.
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Last week, we asked for your favorite behind-the-scenes memoirs. Here’s a list of books that satisfy your voyeuristic literary urges and provide a peek behind the curtain of an otherwise secretive culture or group, as collected from your recommendations in the comments and on Facebook and Twitter.
Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
Hell’s Angels by Sonny Barger
Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck
Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen
The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort
The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx
Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
The Mistress Contract by She and He
The Devil in the Kitchen by Marco Pierre White
How to Make Love Like a Porn Star by Jenna Jameson
The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch
Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington
Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres
Escape by Carolyn Jessup
The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
SEAL Team Six by Howard E Wasdin
Fair Game by Valerie Plame Wilson
Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman
The Burn Journals by Brent Runyon
Blood, Bones & Butter by Gabrielle Hamilton
Motley Crue: The Dirt by Tommy Lee
What would you add?
