Most Read Biography & Memoir Books

Jennette McCurdy was six years old when her mother enrolled her in acting, chasing the Hollywood dream she wanted for herself. What followed was a childhood organized entirely around her mother's approval: auditions, a breakout role as Sam on Nickelodeon's iCarly, and a mother who monitored her body, taught her calorie restriction as "a secret between us," and controlled nearly every part of her life. In this memoir — adapted from her acclaimed one-woman show — McCurdy writes with startling honesty and a mordant sense of humor about eating disorders, addiction, the pressures of early fame, and the disorienting grief and relief that came after her mother's death in 2013. It is a book about untangling love from harm, and about learning to want a life of one's own. A number-one New York Times bestseller that spent years on the list, I'm Glad My Mom Died became one of the most talked-about memoirs of the decade for the clarity and dark wit McCurdy brings to painful material.

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

In July 1942, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank went into hiding with her family in a concealed set of rooms behind her father's business in Amsterdam, sheltering from the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. For just over two years, she kept a diary — addressed to an imaginary friend she called Kitty — recording daily life in the cramped "Secret Annex" she shared with seven others. Anne writes with startling candor and wit about the frictions of confinement, her prickly relationship with her mother, her tentative first love, and her fierce ambition to become a writer. Alongside the ordinary tensions of adolescence runs the constant, unspoken fear of discovery, and a remarkable, hard-won faith in human goodness. The diary ends abruptly in August 1944, when the annex was betrayed and its occupants deported; Anne died in Bergen-Belsen the following year. Published by her surviving father, The Diary of a Young Girl has become one of the most widely read accounts of the Holocaust — an intimate, indelible testament to a single life set against unimaginable history.

• coming of age

A candid, funny memoir of a woman's twenties as she navigates friendship, heartbreak, and the messy path toward self-acceptance.

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

Two parallel stories unfold in 1893 Chicago: Daniel Burnham, the visionary architect behind the World's Columbian Exposition, races to build a world-class fair while battling fire, funding shortages, and engineering failures; and H.H. Holmes, a charming con man who constructs an elaborate 'murder castle' and lures victims to their deaths under the guise of the fair's crowds. Erik Larson weaves these true accounts together in a single narrative, juxtaposing Burnham's ambition with Holmes's calculated depravity.

In April 1942, Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew, is transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because he speaks several languages, he is put to work as the Tätowierer, the tattooist tasked with permanently marking the numbers onto the arms of his fellow prisoners. It is a position that grants him a sliver of privilege and a measure of relative safety, which he uses at great personal risk to smuggle food and small comforts to those around him. One day he tattoos the arm of a frightened young woman named Gita, and in the midst of unimaginable horror he resolves to survive the camp and one day marry her. Over more than two years of captivity, Lale witnesses appalling cruelty and clings to small acts of courage, kindness, and love as the means to stay human. Based on the real testimony of Lale Sokolov and first in Heather Morris's trilogy, this is a story of endurance and hope drawn from one of history's darkest chapters. Readers should know it is a novelized account inspired by, but not a literal record of, actual events.

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 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.

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.

A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.

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.

In a poor fishing village in 1929, nine-year-old Chiyo is sold along with her sister and taken to Kyoto, where her striking blue-grey eyes catch the attention of an okiya in the famous Gion geisha district. Torn from her family, she must survive the cruelties of the house and the rivalry of a reigning geisha before she can begin the long, exacting training that might transform her. Under the guidance of a legendary mentor, Chiyo becomes Sayuri, one of the most sought-after geisha of her generation, mastering an art of dance, music, conversation, and illusion in a world where a woman's heart is a luxury she can rarely afford. Through the Depression and the upheaval of the Second World War, she pursues a love she has held onto since childhood. Arthur Golden's sweeping novel offers an intimate, richly detailed portrait of a vanished world and one woman's struggle for autonomy within it.

• coming of age

Michelle Zauner grew up feeling half in and half out of her Korean heritage — the only Asian kid in most rooms in Eugene, Oregon, but Korean enough at home, where her mother expressed love not in words but in the food she cooked and the ritual of their frequent trips to H Mart, the Korean grocery chain that stocked the ingredients of Zauner's childhood. When her mother is diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, Zauner moves back home to become her caretaker, relearning her mother's recipes as a way of holding onto her and of finally understanding her. Cooking jjigae and kimchi becomes an act of grief and an act of connection at once, a way to keep a language and a culture alive after the person who taught it to her is gone. Michelle Zauner, also known as the musician Japanese Breakfast, writes with unflinching candor about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, the particular ache of losing a parent in your twenties, and the way food can hold a person's memory when words fail. Crying in H Mart is a wrenching, funny, and generous memoir about grief, identity, and the inheritance of love through the kitchen.

In 1992, Christopher McCandless gave away his savings, abandoned his possessions, and walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness under the name Alexander Supertramp. Four months later he was dead. Jon Krakauer retraces his two-year journey across the American West through journals, letters, and the people who met him — a haunting, unflinching portrait of an idealistic seeker and a meditation on risk, family, and the pull of the wild.

• survival

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.

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.

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.

A number-one New York Times bestselling memoir. Belle Burden built an enviable life around her husband, James — until a stranger's message in 2020 reveals his affair and detonates their marriage. In its wake she re-examines everything she thought she knew, reckoning with betrayal, self-erasure, and the stories women inherit about how to endure it. Memoir as unsparing autopsy.

• betrayal

The true story of Louis Zamperini: Olympic runner, WWII airman, survivor of 47 days adrift at sea and years in Japanese POW camps. Laura Hillenbrand's acclaimed account of resilience and redemption.

• survival
• redemption arc

In 1967, two young artists — Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe — meet in New York and become lovers, then lifelong friends, sustaining each other through years of poverty and fierce devotion to their work. From Coney Island to the Hotel Chelsea and the edges of Warhol's Factory, Smith's National Book Award-winning memoir is a luminous portrait of two people becoming artists, and an elegy for a vanished New York.

• coming of age

At twenty-four, novelist Matt Haig's world caved in and he came close to ending his life. This bestselling memoir is his frank, hopeful account of living through severe depression and anxiety and slowly finding his way back — part personal story, part reflection on mental illness, and part reassurance, addressed to anyone in the dark, that things can and do get better.

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.

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.

• family saga

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

In 1996, journalist Jon Krakauer joined a climbing expedition on Mount Everest, a journey that tragically became the deadliest in the mountain's history. Krakauer details the extreme conditions and harrowing events that unfolded on the treacherous slopes. This account explores the immense physical dangers and the powerful human drive that leads people to face such extreme risks.

• survival
• quest

Tina Fey turns her comic eye on her own life — an awkward Pennsylvania childhood, improv in Chicago, becoming Saturday Night Live's first female head writer, impersonating Sarah Palin, and running 30 Rock while raising a daughter. Written in her signature deadpan, it mixes memoir with sharp, funny commentary on women in comedy, show business, and working motherhood.

Financier Bill Browder made a fortune in post-Soviet Russia — until exposing corruption got him expelled and marked as an enemy of the state. When his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a $230 million fraud and was beaten to death in a Moscow prison, Browder became a full-time justice campaigner behind the Magnitsky Act. A true story of high finance, corruption, and murder, told with the pace of a thriller.

Jessie Stephens's debut work of narrative nonfiction follows three real people through the aftermath of heartbreak. Claire returns to her Australian hometown to find something wrong in her relationship; Patrick, a lonely student, falls for a classmate who may not feel the same; and Ana, happily married with three children, unexpectedly falls in love with someone else. Reported with a novelist's eye, it is a tender, precise look at how loving and losing changes us.