Essential — Start Here
The memoirs most likely to make you rethink the genre.
Educated
Tara Westover · 2018
Westover grew up in rural Idaho without schooling, in a survivalist family where her father's religious extremism and her brother's violence were facts of life. She taught herself enough to get into BYU, then Cambridge, then Harvard. The book isn't about success — it's about the cost of seeing clearly in a family that forbids it. The most lauded memoir of the decade.
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When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi · 2016
A neurosurgeon is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36 and spends what remains of his life asking what makes it worth living. Kalanithi died before finishing it — his wife wrote the epilogue. The writing is extraordinary: a man trained to understand the brain using it to understand its own end.
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The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls · 2005
Walls grew up with nomadic, brilliant, neglectful parents who moved their children from desert to mining town across America, living in poverty and intellectual freedom simultaneously. The memoir's refusal to condemn is what makes it extraordinary — the love and the damage occupy the same space without either cancelling the other.
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Night
Elie Wiesel · 1960
Under 130 pages. Wiesel's account of Auschwitz and Buchenwald — written after years of silence, after the deliberate murder of everyone he loved — is the densest moral document of the twentieth century. The scene on the gallows is one of the most unbearable and necessary passages in literature.
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Family and Childhood
Memoirs that excavate what childhood does to us — and what we carry from it.
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr · 1995
The memoir that relaunched the genre in the 1990s. Karr writes about growing up in a refinery town in Texas with an alcoholic mother and a father who told tall tales — with prose that is sharper and funnier than almost any fiction of the period. Essential for anyone who wants to understand what memoir can do at the sentence level.
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This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff · 1989
Wolff's account of growing up in the 1950s Pacific Northwest with a violent stepfather — and the elaborate fantasies of escape and reinvention he constructed to survive it. One of the finest examples of scene-construction and dialogue in nonfiction. The basis for the film with Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.
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The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion · 2005
Didion's account of the year after her husband John Gregory Dunne died suddenly at the dinner table. Grief as a cognitive and neurological event — irrational thinking, magical bargaining, the persistence of disbelief. The most precise account of acute grief ever put into prose, by one of the finest writers America produced.
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Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt · 1996
McCourt's Pulitzer-winning memoir of growing up in abject poverty in Limerick, Ireland — with a charming, alcoholic, absent father and a mother struggling to keep them alive. Written in present tense with a child's perspective intact, which makes the suffering neither sentimental nor bleak. One of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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Identity and Race
Memoirs about existing in a body or identity that the world has decided is a problem.
Know My Name
Chanel Miller · 2019
Miller was known for years only as "Emily Doe" — the anonymous victim in the Brock Turner sexual assault case. This memoir, written after she chose to be named, is one of the most devastating and meticulously constructed accounts of what the justice system does to survivors. The writing won the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award.
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Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015
A letter to his teenage son about the vulnerability of Black bodies in America — the constant calculation of safety, the history of violence, the failure of the dream. Half memoir, half essay, entirely necessary. National Book Award winner, and one of the defining texts of the Black Lives Matter era.
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I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou · 1969
The first of Angelou's seven autobiographies — and the one that established the form. Her account of growing up Black in the Depression-era South, including the sexual violence she experienced as a child and the years of selective mutism that followed, is written with a grace that makes it more devastating, not less.
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Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 1956
Technically a novel — but Baldwin's autobiographical voice is so present throughout that it belongs in this list. His actual memoir, Notes of a Native Son, is the purer document: essays on being Black and gay and American in mid-century Paris, written with the precision of a poet and the fury of a prophet.
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Illness and Addiction
Memoirs from inside experiences that most people only know from the outside.
Beautiful Boy
David Sheff · 2008
A father's account of watching his son's methamphetamine addiction consume him over years. Sheff's memoir strips away the moralism that usually surrounds addiction narratives — the helplessness, the love, the enabling, the recovery and relapse cycle are all present without judgment. Devastating and honest.
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Tweak
Nic Sheff · 2008
Published simultaneously with Beautiful Boy — the son's account of the same addiction, told from inside it. The two books read together are extraordinary: the gap between how a father perceives his son's addiction and how the son experiences it is itself a study in human blindness and love.
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The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath · 1963
Technically a novel, autobiographically a memoir — Plath barely fictionalised her 1953 breakdown, hospitalisation, and electroconvulsive therapy. The most important first-person account of severe depression in literary history, and still the most accurate description many readers have encountered of what depression actually feels like from inside.
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Brain on Fire
Susannah Cahalan · 2012
Cahalan, a New York Post reporter, lost a month of her life to a rare autoimmune disorder that attacked her brain — causing psychosis, seizures, and catatonia. She reconstructed it from medical records, security footage, and others' accounts. Part thriller, part medical mystery, entirely true.
IllnessMedical mysteryBrain
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War, Survival, and Witness
Memoirs from inside extreme experience — war, displacement, atrocity.
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank · 1947
The most widely read Holocaust testimony in history. Written in hiding, between 1942 and 1944, by a thirteen-year-old girl who had no idea she would not survive. The alive, funny, furious voice makes the ending more devastating than any retrospective account could achieve.
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A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
Ishmael Beah · 2007
Beah was thirteen when he became a child soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war. His account of violence, drugs, and the rehabilitation that partially retrieved him is told without self-pity or self-justification — just the facts of what war does to a child. One of the most important testimonies to come out of Africa's wars.
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini · 2003
Fiction — but so autobiographically sourced from Hosseini's childhood in Kabul and emigration to the US that it reads as memoir. For pure memoir on Afghanistan, Hosseini's later A Thousand Splendid Suns is the better choice. Both illuminate a country that most Western readers knew only as a news item.
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Athletes and Extraordinary Lives
Memoirs from lives lived at an extreme of physical or psychological intensity.
Open
Andre Agassi · 2009
One of the finest sports memoirs ever written — and one that almost no tennis fan saw coming. Agassi hated tennis. The entire arc of his career — from his father's obsession through his crystal meth use to his comeback — is told with a transparency that most athletes never achieve in print. Co-written with J.R. Moehringer.
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Can't Hurt Me
David Goggins · 2018
Goggins grew up with severe abuse, obesity, and a learning disability — and became a Navy SEAL, ultramarathon runner, and world record holder. The memoir is about the "40% rule" (when your mind says stop, you're only 40% done) and is simultaneously motivational and harrowing. Not subtle, but effective.
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Unbroken
Laura Hillenbrand · 2010
Olympic runner Louis Zamperini survived 47 days adrift in the Pacific after his bomber went down in WWII, then survived Japanese POW camps. Hillenbrand, who wrote Seabiscuit and suffers from severe chronic fatigue syndrome, writes physical ordeal with a precision that puts you in the raft beside him.
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Becoming
Michelle Obama · 2018
The bestselling memoir of all time. Michelle Obama's account of growing up on the South Side of Chicago, navigating elite universities, building a career, and eight years in the White House is more honest about the sacrifices of political life than almost any Washington memoir. Warm, precise, and unexpectedly funny.
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