44 Best Books about Identity

Who are you? Not the roles you hold or the labels other people apply to you, but the essence of you below those things. Books on identity, whether as memoir or fiction, engage with this question in all its complexity — cultural identity, personal identity, the impact of trauma on who you ultimately become, how society attempts to define you, and what happens when you resist. 

All of these books are about the messiness of figuring out who you are, particularly when your culture, beliefs, relationships, and experiences pull you in different directions. There are some stories, guides, and memoirs of people grappling with the conflicting aspects of their identity in ways that don't fit neatly into traditional categories. In either case, these books provide pathways to think more deeply about our own identity and its significance.

Books on identity: Exploring who you really are

Books on identity explore the profound questions: How much of who you are comes from where you are from versus who you choose to be? How do you hold onto yourself when big changes in life shake you up? Whether that's a move across the street, across the world, leaving a religion, coming out, or in moments we often face where the life we have constructed for ourselves no longer feels like our life.

The books that discuss identity approach the topic from a variety of angles. Some are primarily focused on the nature of cultural and racial identity — what it means to live within more than one culture and to navigate both the upside and downside of stereotypes. 

Others consider gender identity, sexual orientation, and what happens when you start to discover that the categories the world assigned never truly reflected you. There are also books about identity that cover personal identity after trauma, loss, or some other major shift in life that forces you to reconstruct from nothing.

Books on identity: Finding yourself in stories

Books on identity serve a unique purpose by revealing that all people have experienced some level of confusion or conflict with who they are. Nothing feels more real than reading someone else's struggle to formulate their identity by their own terms, knowing that you are given an implicit point of validation for you to do the same. There is validation in the difficult, the not really blending in anywhere, negotiating between honoring your place of origin and becoming who you are trying to become, while you balance the exhaustion of explaining your identity (who you are) to others who are not inclined to support or recognize it. 

Some books will reflect your own experience in a way that is shocking. Others will reflect perspectives that are so divergent that they will expand your understanding of identity itself. Regardless, they are both tools for the ongoing work of figuring out who you are and finding the courage to actually be that person.