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The literary world of the 2010s delivered a number of noteworthy memoirs by African American authors.

They include the firsthand accounts and coming-of-age recollections both of their authors and the people they lived with and among. Often, these stories emphasize the strength many families espoused as the long-felt impact of The Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement enveloped them and the communities around them.

For author Morgan Jerkins, memoirs are also the perfect vehicle to tell often hidden stories of the black experience. Jerkins, author of the 2018 New York Times bestseller “This Will Be My Undoing,” partly attributes this rise in published memoirs to an increase in personal stories many people — particularly young women — have been sharing online.

Morgan Jerkins is the author of the 2018 New York Times bestseller “This Will Be My Undoing" and the upcoming “Wandering in Strange Lands," due to publish in 2020. Courtesy

“Luckily I was a part of that wave,” Jerkins told NBC News. “The truth is, though, we've always had our personal stories to tell. I think we're all generally nosy people to various degrees but now there's a profitable market from it, and you have to move with those waves, you know?”

Jerkins — currently the senior editor at Medium’s ZORA magazine, explored her own relationship to feminism and pop culture in her first book. Jerkins’ next memoir “Wandering in Strange Lands” (due out in 2020) will focus on her family’s experiences during The Great Migration. Jerkins said she was motivated to do so after realizing there was much she didn’t know about her family's experiences — and challenges — in the South.

“I wanted to slightly shift the lens away from my personal life solely and investigate more of the secrets and broken pieces of my families' histories which had been ‘lost’ or just not talked about since they moved away from the South,” she said.

Jerkins is not alone in using her writing as a way to tell family stories in a deeper and more personal way. As the decade comes to a close, we’re looking back at notable memoirs from black authors.

1. “The Yellow House” by Sarah M. Bloom

Author Sarah M. Bloom titled her memoir after the small New Orleans shotgun house her mother Ivory Mae bought in 1961. The house was situated in then up-and-coming New Orleans East, home to a NASA plant — the neighborhood was deeply invested in science and the space race throughout the sixties. A widow, Ivory Mae would later marry the author’s father Simon Broom and raise her blended family (which would eventually number 12 children) between the yellow house’s walls.

Everything changes for the family when Simon dies just a few months before Bloom’s birth. Through the lens of the house, Bloom navigates 100 years of her family’s history, while also examining how the yellow house’s legacy endured even after Hurricane Katrina wiped it off of the map.

2. “The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother's Life in the Detroit Numbers” by Bridgett M. Davis

Growing up in Detroit in the 1960s, Bridgett Davis always felt she had a secret. Her mother Fannie was a numbers runner which meant that, as Davis puts it, “Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by taking others’ bets on three-digit numbers, collecting their money when they didn’t win, paying their hits when they did, and profiting from the difference.”