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. _________________________ 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?