My PhD project examines Anglophone autobiographical accounts of moving from the working class to the middle class through education. Focusing on selected autobiographical works from the United States and the United Kingdom published between the 1980s and today, my dissertation investigates how experiences of upward class mobility are represented across different forms of life writing, including memoirs, single-author essay collections, and multi-author essay anthologies. I use the recent genre concept of “Autosociobiography” as a heuristic framework for bringing these formally diverse works into conversation and examining recurring themes, narrative patterns, and ideological tensions in Anglophone narratives of upward mobility. In this talk, I focus on two case studies from my corpus: Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1982) and Teri A. McMurtry-Chubb’s Tress-passing: A Hair-raising Tale of Surviving by Migrating to the Un(Class)ified Mind (2014). Both texts present the racialized body as a site where the social meanings of bodily appearance shift with upward mobility. Focusing on skin color in Hunger of Memory and hair in Tress-passing, I examine how the two authors negotiate the relationship between bodily appearance and racialized expectations of respectability.