Most Read Biography Books

The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir by the iCarly and Sam & Cat star, about a childhood organised entirely around her mother's ambitions — auditions from the age of six, calorie restriction taught as "a secret between us," and the eating disorders, addiction and early fame that followed — and the disorienting grief and relief that came after her mother's death in 2013. Adapted from McCurdy's one-woman stage show and written with mordant, disarming humour.

• coming of age

A thirteen-year-old's diary of two years in hiding from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, addressed to an imagined friend she called Kitty, and one of the most widely read personal accounts of the Holocaust.

• coming of age
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• forced proximity

In her memoir The Woman in Me, Britney Spears tells her own story for the first time. Growing up in small-town Kentwood, Louisiana, she found in music a refuge from a turbulent home, and by her late teens she had become one of the most famous pop stars in the world. The book traces that ascent alongside its costs: relentless media scrutiny, a public relationship and breakup with Justin Timberlake, marriage and motherhood, and the personal crises that unfolded under the glare of the tabloid press. The heart of the memoir is the thirteen-year conservatorship that placed Spears's father and others in control of her money, her career, and the intimate details of her daily life. She writes plainly about how little freedom she was allowed, the toll it took, and the movement of fans and supporters that helped bring it to an end. Written in a direct, unguarded voice, The Woman in Me is a reflection on fame, family, faith, and autonomy, and an account of one woman's long effort to reclaim her voice and live on her own terms.

Born a Crime (2016) is Trevor Noah's sharp, funny, and moving memoir of growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and the turbulent decade that followed. The son of a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, Noah was born when such a union was literally illegal — his very existence was evidence of a crime. He recounts a childhood spent partly in hiding, navigating the absurd and brutal logic of a system built on racial classification, and the poverty, violence, and improvised survival of township life after apartheid's fall. At the center of every story is his mother, Patricia — fearless, devout, stubborn, and endlessly resourceful — whose tough love and refusal to be limited shaped the man Noah became. Told in vivid, self-deprecating vignettes, the book is by turns hilarious and harrowing, a portrait of a singular family and a country remaking itself.

• coming of age

Elie Wiesel's memoir of his year in the Nazi camps: deported as a teenager from Sighet to Auschwitz, Buna and Buchenwald, he records less the catalogue of atrocity than what the camps did to a devout boy's faith. One of the central texts of Holocaust literature.

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Michelle Zauner's memoir of losing her Korean mother to cancer, and of relearning her mother's recipes and language as a way to hold onto her.

When Mitch Albom stumbles across a television interview with his old college sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz, he realizes how far he has drifted from the person he once meant to become. Sixteen years after promising to keep in touch, Albom—now a driven, workaholic sports journalist—reconnects with Morrie, who is in the final months of his life after a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). What begins as a single visit becomes a standing appointment: every Tuesday, Albom flies across the country to sit with his dying mentor for one last course, this one on the meaning of life. Over fourteen Tuesdays, Morrie shares hard-won wisdom on the subjects that matter most—love, work, family, aging, forgiveness, regret, and how to make peace with death—while his body steadily fails him. Published in 1997, Tuesdays with Morrie is a slim, deeply personal memoir that became one of the best-selling books of its kind. Its power lies less in plot than in the plain, unsentimental honesty of Morrie's lessons and the quiet transformation they work on the student who came to say goodbye.

In 1893, Chicago staked its reputation on the World's Columbian Exposition — a fair meant to outshine Paris and announce America's arrival as a global power. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City tells the story of the men who built it, centered on architect Daniel Burnham, who battled financial setbacks, engineering failures, and the death of his design partner to raise the "White City" from a swampy park in barely two years. Running alongside that story is a darker one. H. H. Holmes, a charismatic young doctor, built a block-long building near the fairgrounds outfitted with hidden rooms, a gas chamber, and a basement crematorium. Using the anonymity of the fair's crowds — young women drawn to the city for work, tourists passing through — Holmes lured victims into his "World's Fair Hotel" and killed an unknown number of them, a case that later shaped how Americans understood the idea of a serial killer. Larson tells both stories side by side, drawing on letters, court records, and contemporary newspapers to reconstruct the fair's engineering triumphs — the first Ferris wheel, the electric-lit "White City" itself — against the quiet horror unfolding a few streets away. It's history written with the momentum of a thriller, without inventing dialogue or events the record doesn't support.

Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Born to survivalist parents in the mountains of rural Idaho, she grew up without a birth certificate, without school, and without doctors — her father distrusted the government and modern medicine, and the family spent its days preparing for the end of the world and working in a dangerous scrapyard. Educated is Westover's account of how she taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to win a place at university, and of the widening gulf that opened between the person she was becoming and the family she left behind. From Brigham Young University she went on to Cambridge and a doctorate — an education that gave her the tools to understand her own past, including the violence and denial that fractured her family. Honest and unsparing, this bestselling memoir is about the price and the promise of self-invention: how learning can remake a mind, and how hard it is to hold on to those you love when you can no longer share their version of reality.

• coming of age

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl draws on his survival of three years in Nazi concentration camps to ask why some prisoners kept their will to live while others gave up. His answer — that we always retain the freedom to choose our attitude — grounds logotherapy, his conviction that the deepest human drive is the search for meaning. A sober, humane, and quietly hopeful classic.

Jeannette Walls recounts her unconventional childhood in this memoir. Raised by nomadic, artistic parents who moved the family constantly and often left them without food, heat, or a fixed home, Walls and her siblings learned early to fend for themselves. The book follows her from a mining-town Southwest childhood to a chaotic settling-in in Welch, West Virginia, and eventually to New York City, where she builds an adult life apart from her parents even as they remain a persistent, complicated presence. It is a clear-eyed account of poverty, resilience, and the pull between loyalty to family and the need to leave.

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Former First Lady Michelle Obama's candid, best-selling memoir traces her life from a working-class childhood on the South Side of Chicago, through Princeton and Harvard Law, to marriage, motherhood, and the White House. Structured as "Becoming Me," "Becoming Us," and "Becoming More," it's an intimate meditation on identity, resilience, and finding your voice.

The first part of Marjane Satrapi's celebrated graphic memoir. Marji is a bright, headstrong girl in Tehran when the 1979 Islamic Revolution overturns her world. As the regime tightens and war with Iraq begins, she witnesses arrests, bombings, and the gap between public conformity and private life — until her parents make the wrenching decision to send her abroad. A coming-of-age story told in bold black-and-white artwork, balancing humour and horror.

• coming of age

Anthony Bourdain invites you into the intense, often wild world of professional kitchens. This memoir chronicles his journey from dishwasher to acclaimed chef, offering a candid look at the industry's highs and lows. Prepare for a no-holds-barred account filled with memorable people and incredible food.

• anti hero

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never met, Susanna Kaysen was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and sent to McLean Hospital. This memoir recounts her two-year stay in the psychiatric hospital, offering a candid look at the lives of the young women she met there. Kaysen navigates the blurred lines between sanity and madness, reflecting on her experiences and the nature of mental illness.

In April 1992 Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan bush north of Mount McKinley. Four months later moose hunters found his body. Jon Krakauer retraces the two-year odyssey that took him there, drawing on journals, letters and the people who met him along the way.

• survival
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• coming of age

In this candid memoir, actor Matthew Perry looks back on his life on and off the screen: the boy from Ottawa and Los Angeles who dreamed of stardom, the sudden overwhelming fame of playing Chandler Bing on one of the most beloved sitcoms in television history, and the decades-long addiction that ran alongside it all. With dark humor and unflinching honesty, Perry recounts the highs of Hollywood success and the far greater struggle happening behind the scenes — the hospitalizations, relapses, and near-death experiences, and the hard-won lessons of recovery. He writes frankly about what fame could and could not fix. "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing" is a raw, funny, and sobering account of survival from a performer who made the world laugh while fighting for his life.

Adapted from her celebrated TEDx talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short essay makes a warm, clear-eyed case for feminism as the simple belief that everyone should be treated equally. Drawing on her life in Nigeria and beyond, she examines how gender expectations shape us from childhood — an accessible, quotable primer that has become a touchstone of modern conversations about equality.

When Breath Becomes Air is the posthumously published memoir of Paul Kalanithi, a gifted neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at the age of 36, just as he was completing a decade of training and preparing to begin his career. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a runaway bestseller, it is one of the most widely read meditations on illness and meaning of its generation. The book moves between two lives: Kalanithi's path into medicine and literature — the questions about mortality and the mind that drew him to neurosurgery — and his abrupt transformation from the doctor delivering diagnoses to the patient receiving one. With clarity and candor, he confronts what makes a life meaningful when the future he planned is taken away, and how to keep living fully while dying. Left unfinished at his death in 2015 and completed with an epilogue by his wife, Lucy, When Breath Becomes Air is a spare, unsentimental, and profoundly humane reckoning with mortality, vocation, and love.

This book tells the incredible true story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman whose cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951. These cells, known as HeLa, became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine and countless other breakthroughs. Yet, Henrietta's family remained unaware of her contribution and its impact for decades, living in poverty while her cells were bought and sold worldwide.

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After a devastating loss shattered her life, Cheryl Strayed impulsively decided to hike over a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone. With no prior hiking experience, she faced extreme conditions, dangerous wildlife, and profound loneliness. This journey became a test of her physical and emotional limits, ultimately leading to her healing and rebuilding her life.

Elizabeth Gilbert's blockbuster memoir of a year spent rebuilding herself after a shattering divorce: pleasure and food in Italy, devotion and silence in an Indian ashram, and balance—and unexpected love—in Bali. Candid, funny, and searching, it became a defining book of modern self-discovery.

Part memoir, part practical handbook, On Writing is Stephen King's account of how one of the world's most successful authors became a writer — and what he learned about the craft along the way. King opens with a candid, often funny recollection of his childhood, his early struggles, the stacks of rejection slips, and the years of poverty and addiction that preceded his success. The second half turns to the work itself: King's no-nonsense advice on grammar, vocabulary, the "toolbox" every writer needs, the danger of adverbs, the importance of reading widely, and his conviction that plot should be discovered rather than imposed. Threaded throughout is the 1999 accident that nearly killed him and the role writing played in his recovery. Honest, direct, and free of mystique, On Writing has become one of the most widely recommended books on the writing life — as much a portrait of an artist as a manual for aspiring ones.

Lori Gottlieb is a practicing psychotherapist whose days are spent helping other people untangle their lives. Then her own long-term relationship collapses without warning, and she finds herself doing something she has spent her career recommending to others: sitting on the other side of the room, in a state of crisis, seeing a therapist of her own. The book braids Gottlieb's sessions with her wry, unsparing therapist, Wendell, together with the stories of four of her own patients. There is John, an abrasive Hollywood producer convinced everyone around him is an idiot; Julie, a young newlywed forced to reckon with a devastating diagnosis; Rita, approaching seventy and haunted by regret; and Charlotte, a twenty-something caught in self-defeating patterns. As their lives unfold, the line between healer and patient blurs, and Gottlieb turns the same searching attention on herself. Funny, humane, and quietly profound, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a memoir about the strange intimacy of therapy and a wide-ranging meditation on change, mortality, and meaning. It demystifies what actually happens in the consulting room and makes a persuasive case that self-examination, however uncomfortable, is where real change begins.

Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to grow up Black in America with no illusions about safety for one's own body. He draws on his own childhood in West Baltimore, his years at Howard University, and the killing of his college friend Prince Jones by a police officer, to argue that the comfortable, unexamined life he calls "the Dream" rests on history that most of the country refuses to see.

What would you say if you knew you had only one chance left to speak? Computer science professor Randy Pausch, facing a terminal cancer diagnosis, delivered a powerful "Last Lecture" that became a message about living life fully. This book shares his inspiring wisdom on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles, and cherishing every moment.

Chris Kyle's own account of four combat tours in Iraq as a Navy SEAL sniper, credited by the Pentagon with more than 150 confirmed kills, the most in U.S. military history. He describes his training, the raids and rooftop watches that made up his deployments to Fallujah, Ramadi and Sadr City, and the toll the war took once he came home. His wife Taya narrates sections of her own, describing what the deployments and the readjustment afterward looked like from the home front.

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Dave Pelzer's account of the childhood he survived in Daly City, California — singled out by his alcoholic mother, stripped of his name, and starved and beaten while his father looked away. The first volume of his memoir trilogy.

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Comedian and writer Mindy Kaling's debut essay collection traces her path from comedy-obsessed daughter of Indian immigrants to breakout writer on The Office — with detours through best friendship, awkward auditions, romantic comedies, and Hollywood beauty standards. Warm, breezy, and consistently funny, part memoir and part comic manifesto.

Matthew McConaughey invites you to explore the lessons and philosophies that have shaped his extraordinary life. From his Texas roots to global stardom, he shares candid stories and unconventional wisdom. Discover how to navigate life's challenges and find your own 'greenlights' for a more authentic existence.

• coming of age