top ten autobiography books 2022

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The best memoirs and biographies of 2022

Heartfelt memoirs from Richard E Grant and Viola Davis, childhood tales of religious dogma, and vivid insights into Agatha Christie and John Donne

The best books of 2022

C elebrity memoirs often follow the same trajectory: a difficult childhood followed by early professional failure, then dazzling success and redemption. But this year has yielded a handful of autobiographies from famous types determined to mix things up. Richard E Grant’s vivacious and heartfelt A Pocketful of Happiness (Gallery) recounts a year spent caring for his late wife, Joan Washington, who was diagnosed with lung cancer shortly before Christmas in 2020, and the “head-and-heart-exploding overwhelm” that followed. The book interweaves hospital appointments with memories of the couple’s courtship plus showbiz stories of Grant at the Golden Globes, or hijinks on the set of Star Wars. This juxtaposition of glamour and grief shouldn’t work, but it does.

Minnie Driver’s Managing Expectations (Manila) comprises spry and amusing autobiographical essays that detail pivotal moments in the actor’s life. These include her experience of becoming a mother, cutting off all her hair on a family holiday in France and the time her father sent her home to England from Barbados alone, aged 11, including a stopover at a Miami hotel, as punishment for being rude to his girlfriend (Driver got her revenge by buying up half the gift shop on her dad’s credit card). She also recalls the disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein bemoaning her lack of sex appeal, which she notes was rich from a man “whose shirts were always aggressively encrusted with egg/tuna fish/mayo”.

Alan Rickman’s Madly, Deeply (Canongate) diaries provide insight into the inner life of the late actor who, despite his many successes, frets over roles turned down and rails at the perceived ineptitude of script writers, directors and co-stars. He nonetheless keeps glittering company, hobnobbing with musicians, prime ministers and Hollywood megastars, and almost single-handedly keeps the tills ringing at the Ivy. And while he seethes at critics’ reviews of his own work, his assessments of less-than-perfect films and plays are so deliciously scathing, they deserve a book of their own.

In Finding Me (Coronet), the actor Viola Davis gives a clear-eyed account of her deprived childhood and her rise to fame, along with the violence, abuse and racism she endured along the way. The book is not so much a triumphant tale of overcoming adversity as a howl of fury at the injustice of it all. Davis may now be able to survey her career from a place of Oscar-winning privilege, but she doesn’t hesitate in calling out her industry and its ingrained racial bias, which leads to white actors landing plum roles and “relegates [Black actors] to best friends, to strong, loudmouth, sassy lawyers and doctors”. In The Light We Carry (Viking), the follow-up to her bestselling memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama also touches on the impossible-to-meet expectations that dog anyone trying to make it in a world that sees them as different, or deficient. “I happen to be well acquainted with the burdens of representation and the double standards for excellence that steepen the hills so many of us are trying to climb,” she writes. “It remains a damning fact of life that we ask too much of those who are marginalised and too little of those who are not.”

Away from the world of global fame and its attendant scrutiny, the journalist Chitra Ramaswamy’s touching memoir Homelands (Canongate) documents the author’s friendship with 97-year-old Henry Wuga, who escaped Nazi persecution as a teenager and began a new life in Glasgow. Interwoven with Wuga’s recollections is Ramaswamy’s own family story – she is the daughter of Indian immigrant parents – through which she digs deep into matters of identity, belonging and the meaning of home. Similar themes are explored in Ira Mathur’s multilayered Love the Dark Days (Peepal Tree), which, set in India, Britain and the Caribbean, reads like a fictional family saga as it leaps back and forth in time. The book charts the lives of the author’s wealthy, dysfunctional forebears against a backdrop of patriarchal hegemony and a collapsing empire.

The Last Days (Ebury) by Ali Millar and Sins of My Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) by Lily Dunn each tell harrowing stories of families torn apart by religious dogma. Millar, who grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness on the Scottish borders, reflects on a childhood haunted by predictions of Armageddon and blighted by her eating disorder. As an adult she marries, within the church, a controlling man and has a baby, though at 30 she makes her escape and is “disfellowshipped”, meaning she is cut off for ever from her family. Meanwhile, Dunn recalls losing her father to a commune in India presided over by the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, where disciples were encouraged to “live in love”, meaning they could engage in guilt-free sex. Dunn’s book is her attempt to pin down this charismatic, mercurial and unreliable figure and the ripple effects of his actions on those closest to him. In Matt Rowland Hill’s scabrously funny Original Sins (Chatto & Windus), it is the author who is the agent of chaos. The son of evangelical Christians, Hill shoots heroin at the funeral of a friend who died from an overdose, and tries to score drugs on a visit to Bethlehem. Were his account a novel, you might accuse it of being too far-fetched.

In Kit de Waal’s first autobiographical work, Without Warning and Only Sometimes (Tinder Press), the author recalls how she and her four siblings would go to bed hungry while their father blew his earnings on a new suit, and her mother would work off her rage by collecting empty milk bottles and throwing them at a wall in the back yard. After a bout of depression in her teens, De Waal eventually found comfort and escape in literature. Her book is a brilliant evocation of the times in which she lived, when children learned to make their own entertainment and adults didn’t talk about their feelings, and a funny and tender portrait of a complicated family.

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The Crane Wife (Viking), by the American author CJ Hauser, began life as a confessional essay about the time she travelled to the gulf coast of Texas to study whooping cranes 10 days after breaking off her engagement. Published in the Paris Review, the essay blew up online, prompting Hauser to expand her thoughts on love and relationships into this thoughtful and fitfully funny book. Across 17 confessional essays, we find her furtively spreading her grandparents’ ashes at their old house in Martha’s Vineyard, contemplating breast reduction surgery and reflecting on her relationships with a high-school boyfriend and a divorcee who is clearly still in love with his ex.

Finally, some excellent biographies. Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman (Hodder & Stoughton) by Lucy Worsley is a riveting portrait of the queen of crime viewed through a feminist lens. The book acknowledges Christie’s flaws, most notably in her views on race, while portraying her as ahead of her time in putting women at the centre of her stories and showing how older women “have more to offer the world than meets the eye”. Super-Infinite (Faber), winner of this year’s Baillie Gifford prize, is a biography of the 17th-century preacher and poet John Donne by Katherine Rundell, the children’s novelist and Renaissance scholar. Ten years in the writing, the book approaches its subject with wit and vivacity, bringing to life Donne’s inner world through his verse.

Jonathan Freedland’s The Escape Artist (John Murray) is a remarkable account of the life of Rudolf Vrba, a prisoner at Auschwitz who was put to work in “Kanada”, a store of belongings removed from inmates which revealed that the line fed to them was a lie: they were not there to be resettled but murdered. Vrba and his friend Fred Wetzler pledged to escape and tell the world about the Nazis’ industrialised murder, hiding beneath a woodpile for three days before slipping through the fence to freedom. The horror of this story lies not just in its account of “cold-blooded extermination” but in the slowness of authorities to react to the Vrba-Wetzler report, which laid out the workings of Auschwitz, complete with maps showing the chambers. Freedland recalls the words of the French-Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron, who, when asked about the Holocaust, said: “I knew, but I didn’t believe it. And because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know.”

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The Best Biographies of 2022

Summer Loomis

Summer Loomis has been writing for Book Riot since 2019. She obsessively curates her library holds and somehow still manages to borrow too many books at once. She appreciates a good deadline and likes knowing if 164 other people are waiting for the same title. It's good peer pressure! She doesn't have a podcast but if she did, she hopes it would sound like Buddhability . The world could always use more people creating value with their lives everyday.

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The following are the best biographies 2022 had to offer, according to my brain and my tastes. And I know it might sound like something everyone says, but it was really hard to pick them this year. Like many people, I love “best of” lists for the year, even when I disagree with the titles that make the cut. There is something about narrowing the field to “the best” that makes me excited to read the list and see what I’ve read already and which gems I’ve missed that year. If you want to look back at some of the titles Book Riot chose in 2021, try this best books of 2021 by genre or best books for 2020 . Both will probably quadruple your TBR, but they’re super fun to read anyway.

For 2022 in particular, there were a ton of excellent titles to choose from, in both biographies and memoirs. I am not being polite here but let me just say that it was genuinely hard to choose. To make it easier on myself, I have included some memoirs to pair with the best biographies of 2022 below. If you don’t see your absolute favorite, it’s either because I didn’t like it (I don’t believe in spending time on books I don’t like) or because I ran out of space. And it was most likely the latter!

His Name is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa

Samuels and Olorunnipa are two Washington Post journalists who meticulously researched Floyd’s personal history in order to better understand not only his life and experiences before his death, but also the systemic forces that eventually contributed to his murder. While very interesting, this is also a harder read and very frustrating at times as there is so much loss wrapped up into this story. Definitely one of the best biographies of 2022 and one that I think will be read for years to come.

Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird by Gene Andrew Jarrett

This is one of those classic biographies that I think readers will just love diving into. Rich in detail and nuance, it drops readers into Dunbar’s life and times, offering a fascinating look at both the literary and personal life of this great American poet. If you are able to read on audio, you may want to check out actor Mirron E. Willis’s excellent narration.

Didn’t We Almost Have it All: In Defense of Whitney Houston by Gerrick Kennedy

Maybe you’re a huge fan or maybe you don’t know who Whitney Houston was, but either way, you can still read this and enjoy it. Kennedy is very clear that he didn’t set out to write a traditional biography. He wasn’t trying to dig up new “dirt” about the singer or to ask people in her life to reflect back on her now that she has been gone for 10 years. Instead, Kennedy tackles something deeper and possibly harder: to see and appreciate Houston as the fully-formed and talented human being that she was and to understand in full her influence over popular culture and music.

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Finding Me by Viola Davis

If you are also interested in reading a memoir from 2022, you could pair Whitney Houston’s biography with Viola Davis’s book. It was a title I saw everywhere in 2022, but didn’t pick up until the end of the year. My only two cents to add to this strong choice is that I was also just about the last person on earth who hadn’t heard about Davis’s childhood. Please don’t go into this without knowing at least something about what she had to overcome. However, despite all that, I still think it is an excellent and ultimately uplifting read. Content warnings include domestic violence, child endangerment, physical and sexual abuse, rape and sexual assault, drug addiction, and animal death. And also the unrelentingly grinding nature of poverty.

Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee by Daryl Joji Maeda 

This is a much more academic presentation of Bruce Lee and the myriad of ways he can be “read” in his connections and contributions to American pop culture. If you or someone you know is itching to read an extremely detailed and deeply considered look at Lee’s life, then this is the book for you. If you read on audio, be sure to check out David Lee Huynh’s narration.

We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story by Simu Liu

If you want to read something much lighter but still connected to Asian representation in Western movies, you could do worse than Liu’s 2022 memoir. In comparison to other books on this list, this felt like a much lighter read to me, but it is not without some heavier moments. While I am not a superfan of Liu (because I’m not really a superfan of anyone), I did enjoy learning about Liu’s childhood and especially hearing little details like that his grandparents called him a nickname that basically translated to “little furry caterpillar” as a child. I mean, is there anything more adorable for a kid?

The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya

This is another meaty biography that readers will just adore. Complex and fascinating, von Neumann’s curiosity was legendary and his contributions are so far-reaching that it is hard to imagine any one person undertaking them all. This is a good choice for readers who are fascinated by mathematics, big personalities, and intellectual puzzles.

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley

This is another best biography of 2022 that many, many readers will want to sink into. The audio is also by the author so you may want to read it that way. Whether someone reads it with eyes or ears (or both!), this book is sure to interest many curious Christie fans. And if Worsley’s biography isn’t enough for you, you may also enjoy this breakdown of why Christie is one of the best-selling novelists of all time or these 8 audiobooks for Agatha Christie fans .

The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler by Deborah Cadbury

Cadbury writes a fascinating biography of Anna Essinger, a schoolteacher who managed to smuggle her students out of a Germany succumbing to Hitler’s rise to power and all the horror that was to follow. Essinger’s bravery and clear-eyed understanding of what was happening around her is amazing. This is a thrilling and fascinating biography readers will no doubt find inspirational.

The Escape Artist: The Man who Broke out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

Freedland is a British journalist who has written this thoroughly engrossing book about Rudolf Vrba, a man who managed to escape from Auschwitz. It’s no surprise that this is a very important but difficult read. For those who can manage it, I highly recommend immersing oneself in this historical nonfiction biography about a man who survived some of the darkest events of human history.

That is my list of the best biographies of 2022, with a few memoirs for those who are interested. And now of course, I need to mention several titles I have yet to get to from 2022: Hua Hsu’s Stay True , Zain Asher’s Where the Children Take Us , Fatima Ali’s Savor: A Chef’s Hunger for More , and Dan Charnas and Jeff Peretz’s Dilla Time , to name a few!

Also Bernardine Evaristo published Manifesto: On Never Giving Up in 2022 and somehow it slipped through the cracks of my TBR. I will have to make time for that one soon.

If you still need more titles to explore, try these 50 best biographies or 20 biographies for kids . And to that latter list, I might add that a children’s biography came out about Octavia Butler in 2022 called Star Child by Haitian American author Ibi Zoboi, so you might want to check that out too!

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The 20 Best Memoirs of 2022

From marriage to medicine to masculinity, the year's best memoirs dig deep into thorny topics.

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Still, our favorite memoirs of 2022 elevate the form to new heights. They tackle personal, psychological, and philosophical concerns through topics ranging from ancestry to medicine to marriage. With guts and grace, these authors dive deep into their loves and losses, and come ashore with these dazzling treasures for you to read. (Or give ! What better gift than that of a remarkable true story?)

Stay True, by Hua Hsu

When Hsu arrived at Berkeley in the 1990s, a rebellious undergrad obsessed with creating zines and developing “a worldview defined by music,” he made an unexpected friend. At first, Hsu wrote his fraternity brother Ken off as “mainstream,” thinking they had nothing in common beyond their Asian American identities—but soon, an unlikely friendship blossomed, with the two young men penning a screenplay together and discussing philosophy late into the night. It all came crashing down when Ken was murdered in a carjacking, sending Hsu into a decades-long spiral of grief and guilt. Ever since, Hsu has been trying to write Stay True , a wrenching memoir about who Ken was and what Ken taught him. At once a love letter, a coming-of-age tale, and an elegy, it’s one of the best books about friendship ever written.

The Man Who Could Move Clouds, by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

“They say the amnesias were a door to gifts we were supposed to have,” Rojas Contreras muses in this poetic memoir. After a head injury afflicted the author with amnesia, she learned that this had happened before: decades ago, her mother took a fall that left her with amnesia, and when she recovered, she gained access to “the secrets.” The first woman to know “the secrets,” Rojas Contreras’ mother inherited them from her father, known to the family as Nono, a Colombian community healer renowned for his ability to communicate with the dead, predict the future, heal the sick, and move the clouds. After Rojas Contreras’ accident, she and her mother traveled to Colombia to disinter Nono’s remains and tell his story. That quest, recounted here with mesmerizing prose and bracing insight, sent the women on a journey through the brutal colonial history that shaped their family and their nation. Rich in personal and political history, The Man Who Could Move Clouds is an effervescent read.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, by Paul Newman

After six decades of Hollywood superstardom, it’s difficult to imagine that anything could remain unknown about Paul Newman . But that’s the particular magic trick of this memoir, assembled by way of a literary scavenger hunt. Between 1986 and 1991, Newman sat down with screenwriter Stewart Stern for a series of soul-baring interviews about his life and career. With the actor’s encouragement, Stern also recorded hundreds of hours worth of interviews with his friends, family, and colleagues. The whole enterprise was destined to become Newman’s authorized biography, but his feelings on the project soured; in 1998, he gathered the tapes in a pile and set fire to them. Luckily, Stern kept transcripts—over 14,000 pages worth. Now, those transcripts have been streamlined into this honest and unvarnished memoir, in which the actor speaks openly about his traumatic childhood, his lifelong struggle with alcoholism, and his tormenting self-doubt. But the highs are there too—like his 50-year marriage to actress Joanne Woodward—as well as the mysteries of making art, and the “imponderable of being a human being.” All told, the memoir is an extraordinary act of resurrection and reimagination.

Bad Sex, by Nona Willis Aronowitz

When Teen Vogue ’s sex columnist decided to end her marriage at 32 years old, chief among her complaints was “bad sex.” Newly divorced, Aronowitz went in search of good sex, but along the way, she discovered thorny truths about “the problem that has no name”—that despite the advances of feminism and the sexual revolution, true sexual freedom remains out of reach. Cultural criticism, memoir, and social history collide in Aronowitz’s no-nonsense investigation of all that ails young lovers, like questions about desire, consent, and patriarchy. It’s a revealing read bound to expand your thinking.

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanley Robinson

A titan of science fiction masters a new form in this winsome love letter to California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range. Constructed from an impassioned blend of memoir, history, and science writing, The High Sierra chronicles Robinson’s 100-plus trips to his beloved mountains, from his LSD-laced first encounter in 1973 to the dozens of ​​“rambling and scrambling” days to follow. From descriptions of the region’s multitudinous flora and fauna to practical advice about when and where to hike, this is as comprehensive a guidebook as any, complete with all the lucid ecstasy of nature writing greats like John Muir and Annie Dillard.

Year of the Tiger, by Alice Wong

In this mixed media memoir, disability activist Alice Wong outlines her journey as an advocate and educator. Wong was born with a form of progressive muscular dystrophy; as a young woman, she attended her dream college, but had to drop out when changes to Medicaid prevented her from retaining the aides she needed on an inaccessible campus. In one standout essay, Wong recounts her struggle to access Covid-19 vaccines as a high-risk individual. The author's rage about moving through an ableist world is palpable, but so too is her joy and delight about Lunar New Year, cats, family, and so much more. Innovative and informative, Year of the Tiger is a multidimensional portrait of a powerful thinker.

My Pinup, by Hilton Als

Has any book ever roved so far and wide in just 48 pages as My Pinup ? In this slim and brilliant memoir, Als explores race, power, and desire through the lens of Prince. Styling the legendary musician in the image of his lovers and himself, Als explores injustice on multiple levels, from racist record labels to the world's hostility to gay Black boys. “There was so much love between us,” the author muses. “Why didn’t anyone want us to share it?” These 48 meandering pages are difficult to describe, but trust us: My Pinup is a heady cocktail you won’t soon forget.

Novelist as a Vocation, by Haruki Murakami

In this winsome volume, one of our greatest novelists invites readers into his creative process. The result is a revealing self-portrait that answers many burning questions about its reclusive subject, like: where do Murakami’s strange and surreal ideas come from? When and how did he start writing? How does he view the role of novels in contemporary society? Novelist as a Vocation is a rare and welcome peek behind the curtain of a singular mind.

Bloomsbury Publishing Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional, by Isaac Fitzgerald

In this bleeding heart memoir, Fitzgerald peels back the layers of his extraordinary life. Dirtbag, Massachusetts opens with his hardscrabble childhood in a dysfunctional Catholic family, then spins out into the decades of jobs and identities that followed. From bartending at a biker bar to smuggling medical supplies to starring in porn films, it’s all led him to here and now: he’s still a work in progress, but gradually, he’s arriving at profound realizations about masculinity, family, and selfhood. Dirtbag, Massachusetts is the best of what memoir can accomplish. It's blisteringly honest and vulnerable, pulling no punches on the path to truth, but it always finds the capacity for grace and joy. “To any young men out there who aren’t too far gone,” Fitzgerald writes, “I say you’re not done becoming yourself.”

Pretty Baby, by Chris Belcher

As a financially strapped PhD student in Los Angeles, Belcher fell into an unusual side hustle: she began working as a pro-domme, fulfilling the fantasies of male clients aroused by feelings of shame and weakness. Belcher found unique power in the work as a queer woman, writing, “My clientele wanted a woman who would never want them in return, and at that, I excelled." But as she illuminates in this discerning memoir, the work had its drawbacks—namely, the brutality and blackmail of men. In a lucid examination of power, sexuality, and class, Belcher tells a gripping story about the performance of identity, inside and outside of the dungeon.

Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me, by Ada Calhoun

When Calhoun once went looking for a childhood toy, she stumbled upon a far greater treasure: dusty cassette tapes of interviews recorded by her father, art critic Peter Schjeldahl, who started but never completed a biography of the gone-too-soon poet Frank O’Hara. As a lifelong O’Hara fan, Calhoun gleefully committed to finishing what Schjeldahl started, but the task proved to be anything but easy. Like her father before her, Calhoun was stonewalled by Maureen O’Hara, the poet’s prickly sister and executor; the project also revealed the faultlines in her complicated bond with Schjeldahl, whom she longs to impress. In this heartfelt memoir, Calhoun recounts how going in search of O’Hara revealed so much more—like the painful complexities of parents, children, art, and ambition.

Because Our Fathers Lied, by Craig McNamara

How do we reckon with the sins of our parents? That’s the thorny question at the center of this moving and courageous memoir authored by the son of Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy’s architect of the Vietnam War. In this conflicted son’s telling, a complicated man comes into intimate view, as does the “mixture of love and rage” at the heart of their relationship. At once a loving and neglectful parent, the elder McNamara’s controversial lies about the war ultimately estranged him from his son, who hung Viet Cong flags in his childhood bedroom as a protest. The pursuit of a life unlike his father’s saw the younger McNamara drop out of Stanford and travel through South America on a motorcycle, leading him to ultimately become a sustainable walnut farmer. Through his own personal story of disappointment and disillusionment, McNamara captures an intergenerational conflict and a journey of moral identity.

The Unwritten Book, by Samantha Hunt

One of our most gifted practitioners of the short story makes her first foray into nonfiction with this shapeshifting volume. Hunt’s many-feathered subject is the things that haunt: art, the dead, the forest, things left unfinished. Her investigation centers on an unfinished novel written by her late father, a Reader's Digest editor; “the dead leave clues, and life is a puzzle of trying to read and understand these mysterious hints before the game is over,” she writes. As she considers the novel, she sifts through her relationship with her father, characterized as it was by his alcoholism and their shared love of story. Eerie, profound, and daring, this is a book only the inimitable Hunt could write.

Roc Lit 101 Shine Bright, by Danyel Smith

Memoir, criticism, and cultural history meet in this masterful study of the brilliant Black women who shaped American pop music, enriched by the author's own experiences and memories. Some of the figures here will be familiar, like Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston, while others are long overdue for the reckoning Smith provides, from the Dixie Cups, a gone-too-soon sixties girl group, to the enslaved poet Phyllis Wheatley, who cleared a path for generations of descendants by singing her poems. In this soulful, enriching portrait of these extraordinary artists’ struggles and triumphs, Smith widens the canon to usher in new luminaries.

Lost & Found, by Kathryn Schultz

Eighteen months before Schultz’s father died after a long battle with cancer, she met the love of her life. It’s this painful dichotomy that sets the foundation for Lost & Found , a poignant memoir about how love and loss often coexist. Braiding her personal experiences together with psychological, philosophical and scientific insight, Schultz weaves a taxonomy of our losses, which can “encompass both the trivial as well as the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone.” But so too does she celebrate the act of discovery, from finding what we’ve mislaid to lucking into lasting love. Penetrating and profound, Lost & Found captures the extraordinary joys and sorrows of ordinary life.

Ecco Press South to America, by Imani Perry

The American South is often cast as a backwater cousin out of step with American ideals. In this vital cultural history, Perry argues otherwise, insisting the South is, in fact, the foundational heartland of America, an undeniable fulcrum around which our wealth and politics have always turned. Fusing memoir, reportage, and travelogue, Perry imparts Southern history alongside high-spirited interviews with modern-day Southerners from all walks of life. At once a love letter to “a land of big dreams and bigger lies” and a clarion call for change, South to America will change how you understand America’s past, present, and future.

Admissions, by Kendra James

When James enrolled at Connecticut’s prestigious Taft School at fifteen years old, she had no idea that, as the predominantly white boarding school’s first “Black American legacy student to graduate since 1891,” she would become its involuntary poster child for diversity. James’ hopes for a positive high school experience were dashed by “a swamp of microaggressions,” ranging from a student who accused her of stealing $20 to an article in the student newspaper blaming students of color for the segregation of campus. Determined that students after her wouldn’t suffer the same fate, she became an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment, but soon felt that she was “selling a lie for a living.” Frank and devastating in its candor, as well as incisive in its critique of elite academia, Admissions is a poignant coming-of-age memoir.

The Invisible Kingdom, by Meghan O'Rourke

“I got sick the way Hemingway says you go broke: ‘gradually and then suddenly,’” O’Rourke writes in The Invisible Kingdom , describing the beginning of her decades-long struggle with chronic autoimmune disease. In the late nineties, O’Rourke began suffering symptoms ranging from rashes to crushing fatigue; when she sought treatment, she became an unwilling citizen of a shadow world, where chronic illness sufferers are dismissed by doctors and alienated from their lives. In this elegant fusion of memoir, reporting, and cultural history, O’Rourke traces the development of modern Western medicine and takes aim at its limitations, advocating for a community-centric healthcare model that treats patients as people, not parts. At once a rigorous work of scholarship and a radical act of empathy, The Invisible Kingdom has the power to move mountains.

Read an exclusive interview with O'Rourkre here at Esquire.

Ancestor Trouble, by Maud Newton

Who are our ancestors to us, and what can they tell us about ourselves? In this riveting memoir, Newton goes in search of the answers to these questions, spelunking exhaustively through her frustrating and fascinating family tree. From an accused witch to a thirteen times-married man, her family tree abounds with stories that absorb and appall, but taxonomizing her family history doesn’t satisfy Newton’s hunger for meaning. Just what do the facts of a life tell us about who we are or where we come from, and what can our personal histories tell us about our national past? Carefully blending memoir and cultural criticism, Newton explores the cultural, scientific, and spiritual dimensions of ancestry, arguing for the transformational power of grappling with our inheritances.

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, by Heather Havrilesky

No one writes about the agony and ecstasy of relationships with as much gutsy grace as Havrilesky, who has long counseled troubled lovers under the guise of Ask Polly . In Foreverland , Havrilesky turns the microscope on her own relationship, illuminating the joys and exasperations of her fifteen-year marriage. From parenting to quarantining together to bristling at her husband’s every loud sneeze, Havrilesky proves that forever is hard, wonderful work.

Read Havrilesky’s column about her husband here at Esquire.

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The Best Reviewed Memoirs and Biographies of 2022

Featuring buster keaton, jean rhys, bernardine evaristo, kate beaton, and more.

We’ve come to the end of another bountiful literary year, and for all of us review rabbits here at Book Marks, that can mean only one thing: basic math, and lots of it.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be calculating and revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2022, in the categories of (deep breath): Fiction ; Nonfiction ; Memoir and Biography; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror; Short Story Collections; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature ; and Literature in Translation .

Today’s installment: Memoir and Biography .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole (Liveright) 17 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed • 1 Pan

“One of the many triumphs of Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves is that he manages to find a form that accommodates the spectacular changes that have occurred in Ireland over the past six decades, which happens to be his life span … it is not a memoir, nor is it an absolute history, nor is it entirely a personal reflection or a crepuscular credo. It is, in fact, all of these things helixed together: his life, his country, his thoughts, his misgivings, his anger, his pride, his doubt, all of them belonging, eventually, to us … O’Toole, an agile cultural commentator, considers himself to be a representative of the blank slate on which the experiment of change was undertaken, but it’s a tribute to him that he maintains his humility, his sharpness and his enlightened distrust …

O’Toole writes brilliantly and compellingly of the dark times, but he is graceful enough to know that there is humor and light in the cracks. There is a touch of Eduardo Galeano in the way he can settle on a telling phrase … But the real accomplishment of this book is that it achieves a conscious form of history-telling, a personal hybrid that feels distinctly honest and humble at the same time. O’Toole has not invented the form, but he comes close to perfecting it. He embraces the contradictions and the confusion. In the process, he weaves the flag rather than waving it.”

–Colum McCann ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri Ní Dochartaigh (Milkweed)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 2 Mixed

“Assured and affecting … A powerful and bracing memoir … This is a book that will make you see the world differently: it asks you to reconsider the animals and insects we often view as pests – the rat, for example, and the moth. It asks you to look at the sea and the sky and the trees anew; to wonder, when you are somewhere beautiful, whether you might be in a thin place, and what your responsibilities are to your location.It asks you to show compassion for people you think are difficult, to cultivate empathy, to try to understand the trauma that made them the way they are.”

–Lynn Enright ( The Irish Times )

3. Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (Drawn & Quarterly)

14 Rave • 4 Positive

“It could hardly be more different in tone from [Beaton’s] popular larky strip Hark! A Vagrant … Yes, it’s funny at moments; Beaton’s low-key wryness is present and correct, and her drawings of people are as charming and as expressive as ever. But its mood overall is deeply melancholic. Her story, which runs to more than 400 pages, encompasses not only such thorny matters as social class and environmental destruction; it may be the best book I have ever read about sexual harassment …

There are some gorgeous drawings in Ducks of the snow and the starry sky at night. But the human terrain, in her hands, is never only black and white … And it’s this that gives her story not only its richness and depth, but also its astonishing grace. Life is complex, she tell us, quietly, and we are all in it together; each one of us is only trying to survive. What a difficult, gorgeous and abidingly humane book. It really does deserve to win all the prizes.”

–Rachel Cooke ( The Guardian )

4. Stay True by Hua Hsu (Doubleday)

14 Rave • 3 Positive

“… quietly wrenching … To say that this book is about grief or coming-of-age doesn’t quite do it justice; nor is it mainly about being Asian American, even though there are glimmers of that too. Hsu captures the past by conveying both its mood and specificity … This is a memoir that gathers power through accretion—all those moments and gestures that constitute experience, the bits and pieces that coalesce into a life … Hsu is a subtle writer, not a showy one; the joy of Stay True sneaks up on you, and the wry jokes are threaded seamlessly throughout.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

5.  Manifesto: On Never Giving Up by Bernardine Evaristo (Grove)

13 Rave • 4 Positive

“Part coming-of-age story and part how-to manual, the book is, above all, one of the most down-to-earth and least self-aggrandizing works of self-reflection you could hope to read. Evaristo’s guilelessness is refreshing, even unsettling … With ribald humour and admirable candour, Evaristo takes us on a tour of her sexual history … Characterized by the resilience of its author, it is replete with stories about the communities and connections Evaristo has cultivated over forty years … Invigoratingly disruptive as an artist, Evaristo is a bridge-builder as a human being.”

–Emily Bernard ( The Times Literary Supplement )

1. Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

14 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Rundell is right that Donne…must never be forgotten, and she is the ideal person to evangelise him for our age. She shares his linguistic dexterity, his pleasure in what TS Eliot called ‘felt thought’, his ability to bestow physicality on the abstract … It’s a biography filled with gaps and Rundell brings a zest for imaginative speculation to these. We know so little about Donne’s wife, but Rundell brings her alive as never before … Rundell confronts the difficult issue of Donne’s misogyny head-on … This is a determinedly deft book, and I would have liked it to billow a little more, making room for more extensive readings of the poems and larger arguments about the Renaissance. But if there is an overarching argument, then it’s about Donne as an ‘infinity merchant’ … To read Donne is to grapple with a vision of the eternal that is startlingly reinvented in the here and now, and Rundell captures this vision alive in all its power, eloquence and strangeness”

–Laura Feigel ( The Guardian )

2. The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (Harper)

12 Rave • 3 Positive

“Compelling … We know about Auschwitz. We know what happened there. But Freedland, with his strong, clear prose and vivid details, makes us feel it, and the first half of this book is not an easy read. The chillingly efficient mass murder of thousands of people is harrowing enough, but Freedland tells us stories of individual evils as well that are almost harder to take … His matter-of-fact tone makes it bearable for us to continue to read … The Escape Artist is riveting history, eloquently written and scrupulously researched. Rosenberg’s brilliance, courage and fortitude are nothing short of amazing.”

–Laurie Hertzel ( The Star Tribune )

3. I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys by Miranda Seymour (W. W. Norton & Company)

11 Rave • 4 Positive • 1 Pan

“…illuminating and meticulously researched … paints a deft portrait of a flawed, complex, yet endlessly fascinating woman who, though repeatedly bowed, refused to be broken … Following dismal reviews of her fourth novel, Rhys drifted into obscurity. Ms. Seymour’s book could have lost momentum here. Instead, it compellingly charts turbulent, drink-fueled years of wild moods and reckless acts before building to a cathartic climax with Rhys’s rescue, renewed lease on life and late-career triumph … is at its most powerful when Ms. Seymour, clear-eyed but also with empathy, elaborates on Rhys’s woes …

Ms. Seymour is less convincing with her bold claim that Rhys was ‘perhaps the finest English woman novelist of the twentieth century.’ However, she does expertly demonstrate that Rhys led a challenging yet remarkable life and that her slim but substantial novels about beleaguered women were ahead of their time … This insightful biography brilliantly shows how her many battles were lost and won.”

–Malcolm Forbes ( The Wall Street Journal )

4. The Facemaker: A Visionary Surgeon’s Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I by Lindsey Fitzharris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

9 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Grisly yet inspiring … Fitzharris depicts her hero as irrepressibly dedicated and unfailingly likable. The suspense of her narrative comes not from any interpersonal drama but from the formidable challenges posed by the physical world … The Facemaker is mostly a story of medical progress and extraordinary achievement, but as Gillies himself well knew—grappling daily with the unbearable suffering that people willingly inflicted on one another—failure was never far behind.”

5. Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life by James Curtis (Knopf)

8 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed

“Keaton fans have often complained that nearly all biographies of him suffer from a questionable slant or a cursory treatment of key events. With Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life —at more than 800 pages dense with research and facts—Mr. Curtis rectifies that situation, and how. He digs deep into Keaton’s process and shows how something like the brilliant two-reeler Cops went from a storyline conceived from necessity—construction on the movie lot encouraged shooting outdoors—to a masterpiece … This will doubtless be the primary reference on Keaton’s life for a long time to come … the worse Keaton’s life gets, the more engrossing Mr. Curtis’s book becomes.”

–Farran Smith Nehme ( The Wall Street Journal )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Best of the Year: The 15 Best Bios and Memoirs of 2022

From ruminations on addiction and recovery to genre-bending blends of biography and cultural criticism, these are 2022's best memoirs.

This list is part of our Best of the Year collection, an obsessively curated selection of our editors' and listeners' favorite audio in 2022. Check out The Best of 2022 to see our top picks in every category.

There are few stories more compelling or more intimately told than those soul-baring memoirs that seek not just to recount the experiences of one's own life but to draw some greater commentary on the big existential questions. What does it mean to be human? What is our purpose in being here? How much of who we are is purely self-determined? How much is an amalgamation of all those who have left an impact on us? Like all great autobiographies, the very best memoirs of 2022 muse on those questions, contemplating everything from the impact of art and culture on identity to navigating the labyrinthine worlds of grief and illness, addiction and recovery. Exceptional in both their prose and narration, these listens represent a few of the year's best memoirs.

Save this list to your Library Collections now.

Constructing a Nervous System

Audible's Memoir of the Year, 2022 To call Margo Jefferson’s exquisite Constructing a Nervous System a memoir is a bit of a misnomer. After all, this skillfully crafted autobiography dances between genres so fluidly, leaping from the personal to deft cultural analysis in a dazzling display of narrative choreography. Jefferson constructs this stunner of a memoir through a literary lens, one that all but embodies the artists she riffs off of and analyzes, developing a story of the self through the creations, personalities, and perspectives of other artists. In a totally unique style that splinters the form of memoir altogether and frequently sees the text in dialogue with itself, this sharp listen illuminates that so much of who we are is built upon what we love and the things we encounter—be it the lasting presence of a late family member or a voice rising from a turntable. — Alanna M.

Told through the perspective of his nine-year-old self, Javier Zamora’s Solito is a moving account of his perilous, exhausting solo journey from El Salvador to the United States, where his parents awaited him. Zamora was entirely reliant on the support and compassion of his fellow migrants to survive—a story that is both his own and shared by many. Zamora is a poet first, and his delivery is pitch-perfect, lending a lyrical cadence and a well of emotion to an already beautifully crafted memoir. His voice, at times quivering, small, or uncertain, much like his young self, is wielded as an instrument of the story, not an appendix, reminding the listener of the human beings behind the statistics and political platforms. — A.M.

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?

There are some sounds I consider synonymous with my Irish heritage: the slap of ghillies and the clack of reel shoes, the melodic jaunt of lilting or swell of an accordion, and the entrancing lull of a good story. The latter is embodied in Séamas O’Reilly’s tender retrospective on grief, family, and childhood, all amidst the din of the Troubles. However, a dry tearjerker this is not. Instead, whether musing on his father’s unmatched haggling abilities or offering asides on the oddities of death’s theatrics, O’Reilly brings so much joy and soul into his story that it’s impossible not to smile along. There is simply so much love, life, and heart in this rich memoir that you can almost hear it breathing. — A.M.

The Invisible Kingdom

In this deeply researched and insightful memoir, author Meghan O’Rourke illuminates how chronic illness has become the defining medical mystery of our times, and the source of a painful dissonance between the promises of modern medicine and the lived experiences of so many. Drawing on her own health issues as well as her background as a poet, O’Rourke weaves insights from doctors, patients, researchers, and other experts into a captivating and lyrical narrative. The current spotlight that long COVID has thrown on autoimmune and other “invisible” conditions is a central focus of the memoir, and many people will feel seen—and hopefully heard—by the eloquent voice O’Rourke gives to a monumental challenge. — Kat J.

Lost & Found

I’ve always found something peculiar about “loss” as a euphemism for death. Even still, it feels so apt—that sense that something is missing, at first an acute awareness and in time, an understanding of that absence’s permanence. Kathryn Schulz pulls on this thread in her gorgeous memoir Lost & Found , an account of the universality and ubiquity of those two most human experiences—love and death—as filtered through the loss of her father and the life she built with her wife. As someone muddling through a similar grief journey while trying to nurture a relationship of my own, I found a resonant comfort and hope in Schulz’s thoughts on bereavement and all the life there is still left to lead. — A.M.

What My Bones Know

As someone with a mood disorder, I find solace in listens that take new avenues for exploring the complicated and often isolating side effects of mental health conditions. Reconstructing her experiences with guided meditation and using recordings from real therapy sessions, Stephanie Foo takes a highly journalistic approach to dissecting her CPTSD diagnosis in this vulnerable and intelligent memoir. Unpacking how and why her trauma affects her the way it does, What My Bones Know is not only uniquely suited for audio but constructs a creative audio experience that challenged me as a listener in unexpected and illuminating ways. — Haley H.

Quite the Contrary

This juicy and culturally significant listen, which happens to be the memoir of one of my Audible colleagues, is one of the best I’ve had the pleasure of gulping down. In Quite the Contrary, Yvonne Durant gradually unfurls the mother of all cocktail-party stories—the intimate account of her love affair with jazz legend Miles Davis—against her equally compelling career trajectory as a rare Black woman making waves in advertising’s competitive heyday. Witty, poignant, and funny, Durant lets us into secret spaces of celebrity, culture, and bygone New York, unforgettably brought to life by narrator Allyson Johnson. — K.J.

His Name Is George Floyd (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

This landmark biography from Washington Post reporters Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa is built on more than 400 interviews conducted in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, offering the most complete portrait of Floyd’s life and legacy to date. Star narrator Dion Graham pairs with the authors to create a powerhouse performance that moves from Floyd’s ancestral roots in the tobacco fields of North Carolina to the housing projects of Houston and his death at the hands of Minneapolis police, paying homage to his life while revealing its deep intersections with America’s history of racism and inequality. — H.H.

To fans of Brandon Stanton's street photography project and bestselling book Humans of New York, Stephanie Johnson—better known as Tanqueray—is nothing short of a superstar. So, to finally hear the septuagenarian share more unfiltered, incredible stories about being a burlesque dancer in 1970s New York City—and many other necessary reinventions to survive life's ups and downs—in her own feisty, raunchy, badass way is a milestone storytelling event that is at times hilarious as well as heartbreaking. Millions fell in love with her indomitable spirit by reading about her life on social media, but listening to this legendary lady is unforgettable. As she says: "Make room for Tanqueray, because here I come." — Jerry P.

The Book of Baraka

Told in collaboration with renowned journalist Jelani Cobb, The Book of Baraka combines poetry and prose with the history that helped to shape Ras Baraka, the current mayor of Newark, New Jersey, into the man he is today. It’s the story of a young Black boy’s coming of age as the son of one of the most influential and controversial poets and revolutionaries of the era but also of how that boy would later shape his city—first as a poet, then as an educator, and now, as mayor. As a former resident of Newark myself, I have nothing but praise for Baraka’s accomplishments. But don’t just take it from me. His is a story you definitely don’t want to miss out on, and it should be heard from the mayor himself. — Michael C.

Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for any story involving animals, particularly when those little critters are of the motley variety. Needless to say, I was drawn to Laurie Zaleski’s Funny Farm immediately. An account of running a rescue for beasties ranging from cats to horses? That ridiculously cute cover? Sign me up. What I didn’t expect, however, was a truly affecting memoir that extended far beyond barnyard antics, exploring the depths of Zaleski’s difficult childhood, her mother’s remarkable strength, and carrying on a mission inherited. So sure, come for the adorable furry and feathered friends, but stay for the author’s graceful, heartrending tribute to her late mother and a testament to the redemptive power of caring for others, four-legged or otherwise. — A.M.

Fatty Fatty Boom Boom

If you’re a fan of true crime podcasts, you probably already know Rabia Chaudry’s euphonic voice—as host of both Undisclosed and Rabia and Ellyn Solve the Case , her skills behind the microphone are well documented. Chaudry's gifts for performance and storytelling shine the clearer in her deeply personal debut memoir. So named in reference to Chaudry’s childhood nickname, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is an immensely relatable listen for anyone who has ever battled body image issues, a rumination on those most complicated relationships (with both food and family), and a love letter to Pakistani cuisine. — A.M.

Also a Poet

A true blend of biography and memoir, Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet is a fascinating gem of a listen. Calhoun, the author behind nonfiction listens like Why We Can’t Sleep and St. Marks Is Dead , turns her eye toward a subject matter far closer to home. In examining her strained, complicated relationship with her father, the acclaimed art critic Peter Schjeldahl, Calhoun comes across an unexpected connection between them: the late bohemian poet Frank O’Hara. Twisting in its exploration of family, legacy, and art, this Audible Original—which features exclusive archival audio of artistic giants—is an evocative act of catharsis. — A.M.

Corrections in Ink

Journalist Keri Blakinger has dedicated much of her career to shining a light on the stark realities of criminal justice in America. Her ongoing work with nonprofit news collective The Marshall Project aims to provide a better quality of life for prisoners, with Blakinger advocating for inmate safety and well-being while underscoring their oft-disregarded humanity. But Blakinger’s focus isn’t merely academic—as detailed in Corrections in Ink , she’s lived through the prison system herself. Employing well-crafted, blazing prose and narration marked by an uncommon frankness, she recounts her battle with addiction and subsequent incarceration. Listening to her story is sometimes difficult, painful even, but that’s part of its power—this is a courageous, contemplative memoir poised to change the conversation. — A.M.

Dirtbag, Massachusetts

Kidlit author Isaac Fitzgerald rocketed into the capital-L literary landscape with this astounding memoir-in-essays, its instantly iconic title matched by an unforgettable voice. With his origins firmly in Massachusetts, Fitzgerald grew up with a love of literature and a bohemian sensibility that transcended his rough-and-tumble background and its narrow presentation of masculinity. That foundation serves him well in this fiercely honest, vulnerable, and rowdy collection of reminiscences that range from Boston to Burma (now Myanmar), connecting the dots from Fitzgerald’s former lives as an altar boy, fat kid, and small-time criminal to lightning-bolt musings on religion, race, body image, and family. Both literally and literarily speaking, his voice is one to savor. — K.J.

Best of the Year: The 14 Best Celebrity Memoirs of 2022

Despite the glitz and glamour, these celebrity memoirs take us through the highs and lows of the human experience.

Editors Select: April 2024

14 editors, 14 new listens—from fiction to memoirs to thrillers, check out our most anticipated listens of the month.

The birth of "Quite the Contrary"

Debut memoirist and Audible editor Yvonne Durant goes behind the scenes of how the true story of her great love and pioneering career came to life as an Audible Original.

• Best of 2022
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Best Biographies of 2022

OCT. 18, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

by Jon Meacham

An essential, eminently readable volume for anyone interested in Lincoln and his era. Full review >

OCT. 25, 2022

by John A. Farrell

An exemplary study of a life of public service with more than its share of tragedies and controversies. Full review >

AUG. 30, 2022

by Michael Broers

An outstanding addition to the groaning bookshelves on one of the world’s most recognizable leaders. Full review >

NOV. 8, 2022

by Kerri K. Greenidge

A sweeping, insightful, richly detailed family and American history. Full review >

FEB. 1, 2022

by Dan Charnas

A wide-ranging biography that fully captures the subject’s ingenuity, originality, and musical genius. Full review >

JULY 26, 2022

by Philip Short

Required reading for anyone interested in global affairs. Full review >

NOV. 15, 2022

by Brigitta Olubas

An absorbing, well-crafted profile of a supremely gifted writer. Full review >

SEPT. 6, 2022

by Katherine Rundell

Written with verve and panache, this sparkling biography is enjoyable from start to finish. Full review >

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Best Book Lists, Award Aggregation, & Book Data

The Best Biography And Memoir Books of 2022 (A Year-End List Aggregation)

“What are the best Biography And Memoir books released in 2022?” We looked at 227 of the top Biography And Memoir books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 42 books, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Biography And Memoir” book lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 150+ titles, as well as the sources we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

Our other Best Of 2022 Articles:

• The Best Art, Photography, And Coffee Table Books
• The Best AudioBooks
• The Best Biography And Memoir Books
• The Best Graphic Novels And Comics
• The Best Cookbooks
• The Best Fiction Books
• The Best Books (All Catergories)
• The Best History Books
• The Best Kids, Children, and Youth Books
• The Best Mystery, Horror, and Thriller Books
• The Best Nonfiction Books
• The Best Picture Books
• The Best Poetry Books
• The Best Science And Nature Books
• The Best Science Fiction And Fantasy Books
• The Best Young Adult Books

Previous Years: 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 , 2016 , 2015

Happy Scrolling!

Top 42 Best Biography And Memoir Books From 2022

42.) a visible man: a memoir written by edward enninful.

Lists It Appears On:

• Book Depository
• Waterstones

From one of our culture’s most important changemakers, a memoir of breaking barriers. When Edward Enninful became the first Black editor-in-chief of B…

41.) Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me written by Ada Calhoun

A staggering memoir from New York Times-bestselling author Ada Calhoun tracing her fraught relationship with her father and their shared obsession wit…

40.) America Made Me a Black Man: A Memoir written by Boyah J Farah

A searing memoir of American racism from a Somalian-American who survived hardships in his birth country only to experience firsthand the dehumanizati…

39.) Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation written by Maud Newton

“Extraordinary and wide-ranging . . . a literary feat that simultaneously builds and excavates identity.”–The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Ch…

38.) Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure, and an Unfinished Revolution written by Nona Willis Aronowitz

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Bustle, Esquire, Nylon, and The Millions “Intimate, thoughtful, and accessible to anyone struggling with the persiste…

37.) Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century written by Dana Stevens

Named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and Publishers Weekly In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate place…

36.) Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises written by A. N. Wilson

• The Telegraph

Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, hi…

35.) Diary of a Misfit: A Memoir and a Mystery written by Casey Parks

Part memoir, part sweeping journalistic saga: As Casey Parks follows the mystery of a stranger’s past, she is forced to reckon with her own sexuality,…

34.) Dilla Time: The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm written by Dan Charnas

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER “This book is a must for everyone interested in illuminating the idea of unexplainable genius.” –QUESTLOVE Equal parts b…

33.) Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands written by Kate Beaton

“An exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.”–Carmen Maria Machado Before there was Kate Beaton, New York Times bestsellin…

32.) Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth written by Keiron Pim

The mercurial, self-mythologizing novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, author of the 20th-century masterpiece The Radetzky March, was the finest obser…

31.) Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing: A Memoir written by Matthew Perry

The BELOVED STAR OF FRIENDS takes us behind the scenes of the hit sitcom and his struggles with addiction in this “CANDID, DARKLY FUNNY…POIGNANT” me…

30.) Imagine a City: A Pilot’s Journey Across the Urban World written by Mark Vanhoenacker

This love letter to the cities of the world–from the airline pilot-author of Skyfaring–is a journey around both the author’s mind and the planet’s g…

29.) Just Sayin’ My Life In Words written by Malorie Blackman

Malorie charts her life not in a succinct order of events, but against the principles which have motivated her journey and reasons for becoming a writ…

28.) Life’s Work: A Memoir written by David Milch

The creator of Deadwood and NYPD Blue reflects on his tumultuous life, driven by a nearly insatiable creative energy and a matching penchant for self-…

27.) Lost & Found: A Memoir written by Kathryn Schulz

One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazz…

26.) Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self written by Andrea Wulf

From the best-selling author of The Invention of Nature comes an exhilarating story about a remarkable group of young rebels–poets, novelists, philos…

25.) Manifesto: On Never Giving Up written by Bernardine Evaristo

From the bestselling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifest…

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American pop music is arguably this country’s greatest cultural contribution to the world, and its singular voice and virtuosity were created by a shi…

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A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK – From the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and th…

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7.) Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman written by Alan Rickman

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The 150+ Additional Best Biography And Memoir Books Released In 2022

13 best biography and memoir book sources/lists, related posts.

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Best Biographies

Award winning biographies of 2022, recommended by sophie roell.

Five Books Expert Recommendations

In telling stories of lives that are often very different from our own and yet connected to us by our common humanity, biographies are some of the most compelling nonfiction books around. Five Books editor Sophie Roell rounds up some of the biographies that have won or been shortlisted for prizes in 2022.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III by Andrew Roberts

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane by Paul Auster

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist's Memoir of the Jim Crow South by Winfred Rembert

1 All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner

2 the last king of america: the misunderstood reign of george iii by andrew roberts, 3 burning boy: the life and work of stephen crane by paul auster, 4 the escape artist: the man who broke out of auschwitz to warn the world by jonathan freedland, 5 super-infinite: the transformations of john donne by katherine rundell, 6 chasing me to my grave: an artist's memoir of the jim crow south by winfred rembert.

The National Book Critics Circle award for biography and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

The Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography

The LA Times book prize for biography

Biographies Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction

The Pulitzer Prize for Biography

The 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Biography (which also includes works of autobiography) went to Chasing Me to My Grave: An Artist’s Memoir of the Jim Crow South by the late Winfred Rembert (1945-2021) . Rembert was from a family of field labourers in Cuthbert, Georgia and taught himself to paint at the age of 51 using leather tooling skills he learned in prison. In the preface, he writes that he had been scared to draw attention to what happened to him in Cuthbert during his lifetime, and so he only composed his memoir as he was dying. It’s a wrenching tale told in a very direct and touching way. The book also includes pictures of his paintings—of cotton fields, of his mother giving him away as a baby.

December 17, 2022

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Sophie Roell

Sophie Roell is editor and one of the founders of Five Books.

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The 10 Best Books of 2022

The staff of The New York Times Book Review choose the year’s standout fiction and nonfiction.

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By The New York Times Books Staff

• Published Nov. 29, 2022 Updated Nov. 30, 2022

The Candy House, by Jennifer Egan

You don’t need to have read Egan’s Pulitzer-winning “ A Visit From the Goon Squad ” to jump feet first into this much-anticipated sequel. But for lovers of the 2010 book’s prematurely nostalgic New Yorkers, cerebral beauty and laser-sharp take on modernity, “The Candy House” is like coming home — albeit to dystopia. This time around, Egan’s characters are variously the creators and prisoners of a universe in which, through the wonders of technology, people can access their entire memory banks and use the contents as social media currency. The result is a glorious, hideous fun house that feels more familiar than sci-fi, all rendered with Egan’s signature inventive confidence and — perhaps most impressive of all — heart. “The Candy House” is of its moment, with all that implies.

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Checkout 19, by Claire-Louise Bennett

Bennett, a British writer who makes her home in Ireland, first leaped onto the scene with her 2015 debut novel, “ Pond .” Her second book contains all of the first’s linguistic artistry and dark wit, but it is even more exhilarating. “Checkout 19,” ostensibly the story of a young woman falling in love with language in a working-class town outside London, has an unusual setting: the human mind — a brilliant, surprising, weird and very funny one. All the words one might use to describe this book — experimental, autofictional, surrealist — fail to convey the sheer pleasure of “Checkout 19.” You’ll come away dazed, delighted, reminded of just how much fun reading can be, eager to share it with people in your lives. It’s a love letter to books, and an argument for them, too.

Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver’s powerful new novel, a close retelling of Charles Dickens’s “David Copperfield” set in contemporary Appalachia, gallops through issues including childhood poverty, opioid addiction and rural dispossession even as its larger focus remains squarely on the question of how an artist’s consciousness is formed. Like Dickens, Kingsolver is unblushingly political and works on a sprawling scale, animating her pages with an abundance of charm and the presence of seemingly every creeping thing that has ever crept upon the earth.

The Furrows, by Namwali Serpell

After losing her brother when she was 12, one of the narrators of Serpell ’s second novel keeps coming across men who resemble him as she works through her trauma long into adulthood. She enters an intimate relationship with one of them, who’s also haunted by his past. This richly layered book explores the nature of grief, how it can stretch or compress time, reshape memories and make us dream up alternate realities. “I don’t want to tell you what happened,” the narrator says. “I want to tell you how it felt.”

Trust, by Hernan Diaz

Diaz uncovers the secrets of an American fortune in the early 20th century, detailing the dizzying rise of a New York financier and the enigmatic talents of his wife. Each of the novel’s four parts, which are told from different perspectives, redirects the narrative (and upends readers’ expectations) while paying tribute to literary titans from Henry James to Jorge Luis Borges. Whose version of events can we trust? Diaz’s spotlight on stories behind stories seeks out the dark workings behind capitalism, as well as the uncredited figures behind the so-called Great Men of history. It’s an exhilarating pursuit.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, by Ed Yong

Yong certainly gave himself a formidable task with this book — getting humans to step outside their “sensory bubble” and consider how nonhuman animals experience the world. But the enormous difficulty of making sense of senses we do not have is a reminder that each one of us has a purchase on only a sliver of reality. Yong is a terrific storyteller, and there are plenty of surprising animal facts to keep this book moving toward its profound conclusion: The breadth of this immense world should make us recognize how small we really are.

Stay True: A Memoir, by Hua Hsu

In this quietly wrenching memoir, Hsu recalls starting out at Berkeley in the mid-1990s as a watchful music snob, fastidiously curating his tastes and mercilessly judging the tastes of others. Then he met Ken, a Japanese American frat boy. Their friendship was intense, but brief. Less than three years later, Ken would be killed in a carjacking. Hsu traces the course of their relationship — one that seemed improbable at first but eventually became a fixture in his life, a trellis along which both young men could stretch and grow.

Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, by Rachel Aviv

In this rich and nuanced book, Aviv writes about people in extreme mental distress, beginning with her own experience of being told she had anorexia when she was 6 years old. That personal history made her especially attuned to how stories can clarify as well as distort what a person is going through. This isn’t an anti-psychiatry book — Aviv is too aware of the specifics of any situation to succumb to anything so sweeping. What she does is hold space for empathy and uncertainty, exploring a multiplicity of stories instead of jumping at the impulse to explain them away.

Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation, by Linda Villarosa

Through case histories as well as independent reporting, Villarosa’s remarkable third book elegantly traces the effects of the legacy of slavery — and the doctrine of anti-Blackness that sprang up to philosophically justify it — on Black health: reproductive, environmental, mental and more. Beginning with a long personal history of her awakening to these structural inequalities, the journalist repositions various narratives about race and medicine — the soaring Black maternal mortality rates; the rise of heart disease and hypertension; the oft-repeated dictum that Black people reject psychological therapy — as evidence not of Black inferiority, but of racism in the health care system.

We Don’t Know Ourselves, by Fintan O’Toole

O’Toole, a prolific essayist and critic, calls this inventive narrative “a personal history of modern Ireland” — an ambitious project, but one he pulls off with élan. Charting six decades of Irish history against his own life, O’Toole manages to both deftly illustrate a country in drastic flux, and include a sly, self-deprecating biography that infuses his sociology with humor and pathos. You’ll be educated, yes — about increasing secularism, the Celtic tiger, human rights — but you’ll also be wildly, uproariously entertained by a gifted raconteur at the height of his powers.

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24 best autobiographies you have to read in 2024

Whether you're a long-time lover of non-fiction or you're new to the world of autobiographies, this is our list of the 24 best autobiographies you've got to read in 2024.

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Are you dreaming of a summer holiday? Perhaps you're fantasising of afternoons spent lying on the beach or by the pool — chilly January days just a mere memory... And there's nothing that says holiday quite like a new book.

Autobiographical writing is a skill that is hard to master. Done well, it can give you a behind the scenes peek into the world of your favourite star, or give you an insight into historical events and cultural context that would otherwise be near impossible to understand.

While books can make some of the best gifts for others they also can be a great gift for yourself — especially if you're looking to take a break from the screens that surround us in modern life. We love the experience of going into a bookshop, looking at all the covers and picking out a few new titles. But life can get busy, and it can be tricky to find the time to continue to support your local bookshop. Shopping from a site like Bookshop.org also lets you support independent bookshops from home.

Having said that, reading a physical book isn't the only way to enjoy these amazing stories.

Getting a Kindle can be a great way to carry lots of books round with you if you're travelling, and you can often download books for a much lower cost. Listening to audiobooks is also a great way to stay on top of your reading when you're on the go. Amazon Audible lets you download books onto your phone and listen as you go, and it's also running a 30-day UK free trial right now.

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Here's our list of the best autobiographies that you should read in your lifetime.

Looking for better ways to experience your favourite audiobook? Check out guides to the best wireless earbuds , best AirPod alternatives , and the best smart speakers . For more on audio, take a look at the best DAB radios .

Best autobiographies at a glance:

• Open, Andre Agassi | £10.99
• Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton | £10.99
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou | from £4.99
• Wild Swans, Jung Chang | from £4.49
• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion | from £6.99
• The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher | £10.99
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank | from £9.49
• All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot | from £9.49
• This is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay | from £5.99
• Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela | from £6.99
• I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy | from £11.99
• Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama | £9.99
• Becoming, Michelle Obama | from £7.99
• Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman | from £7.50
• Just Kids, Patti Smith | £12.34
• Wild, Cheryl Strayed | £8.99
• Taste, Stanley Tucci | from £1.99
• Educated, Tara Westover | £10.99
• I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai | from £8.54
• Crying In H Mart, Michelle Zauner | £9.99
• Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry | £20.99
• The Woman in Me, Britney Spears | £12.50
• Love, Pamela, Pamela Anderson | from £10.99
• Finding Me, Viola Davis | from £5.99

Best autobiographies to read in 2024

Open, andre agassi.

Written in 2009, this is the autobiography of the American former World No.1 tennis player, Andre Agassi. Written in collaboration with JR Moehringer from a collection of hundreds of hours of tapes, this memoir gives top insight into the life of a professional sportsperson.

Agassi's was a career of fierce rivalries and it's fascinating to hear these from the perspective of an insider. Like many high-performing careers, in sport children are singled out for their talent at a young age, and Agassi describes the intensity of training for himself and his fellow tennis players in their collective pursuit of excellence.

This book would make a great present for any tennis fan, and gives an interesting insight into the man behind the nickname 'The Punisher'.

Buy Open by Andre Agassi for £10.99 at Waterstones

Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton

Everything I Know About Love follows Times columnist Dolly Alderton through her early life and 20s. It tackles themes of dating, love, friendship as Alderton comes of age and grows into herself. Dispersed with recipes in the style of Nora Ephron's Heartburn, the book gained a cult following since it was published in 2018 and won a National Book Award (UK) for best autobiography of the year.

Alderton's memoir has also now been turned into a BBC TV show which follows a fictionalised version of Alderton and her friends as they navigate life in London.

Buy Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton for £10.99 at Foyles

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings is the first of seven autobiographies Angelou wrote about her life. It follows her childhood, beginning when she's just three years old and spanning to when she is 16 — from her time as a child to when she had a child herself. The book follows the young Maya as she and her brother Bailey are moved between family members following the separation of her parents.

Discussing themes of racism, sexual assault and displacement, the expertly crafted narrative is widely taught in schools here and in the US. Written in the aftermath of the death of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings became an instant classic and is a must-read.

Buy I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou from £4.99 at Amazon

Wild Swans, Jung Chang

Slightly different from traditional first person autobiographies, in this book Jung Chang tells the stories of three generations of women in her own family — her grandmother, her mother and herself. At a time when China is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, this book provides vital context into the 20th century history of the country.

Through the stories of her grandmother who was given to a warlord as a concubine, and her mother who was a young idealist during the rise of Communism, she captures moments of bravery, fear, and ultimately survival.

The book, which is banned in China, has sold more than 13 million copies worldwide and is as beautifully written as it is educationally fascinating.

Buy Wild Swans by Jung Chang from £4.49 at Amazon

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Published in 2005 when it went on to win Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, this book follows Didion in the year after her the death of her husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. In this harrowing depiction of grief, love and loss, Didion turns her personal experience into one that is universally relatable.

Didion and Donne's adopted daughter Quintana fell ill days before his death and was still in hospital when he died. Didion recounts her experience caring for her throughout the book, all while going through her own grief.

While not an easy read, this is an incredibly powerful one.

Buy The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion from £6.99 at Amazon

The Princess Diarist, Carrie Fisher

This might be an obvious choice for any Star Wars fan, but we think the appeal of this book stretches far beyond just that. Made up of the diaries Fisher wrote when she was 19 years old and first started playing Princess Leia, the book was released shortly before her death in 2016.

Any peak behind the scenes of such a well-known franchise is bound to be popular, and this examines her experience as a young adult thrust into the world of fame and sex. Unlike her deeply person earlier memoir Wishful Drinking, in which Fisher described her struggles with mental illness, The Princess Diarist is full of bombshell revelations and funny punchlines, making for an enjoyable read.

Buy The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher for £10.99 at Foyles

The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank

The title of this book is clever because in so many ways, Anne Frank's diary is just that — the diary of a young girl. But it is also a vital account of history.

Starting on her 13th birthday, Anne writes about her life with her family living in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. Alongside other Jews, Anne and her family go into hiding to escape persecution from the Nazis. She deals with all the feeling teenagers experience growing up, but also grapples with her isolation, lack of freedom, and trying to understand what is happening in the world around her.

Important reading for young people and adults alike, Anne's writing brings home the realities of human suffering levelled upon the Jewish people by the Nazis. Anne's father Otto Frank was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, and he published his daughter's diary in line with her wishes.

Buy The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank from £9.49 at Bookshop.org

All Creatures Great and Small, James Herriot

This book would make a great gift for the animal lover in your life, or any fan of the great outdoors. In it, James Herriot recounts his experiences as a newly qualified vet working in the Yorkshire Dales in the 1930s.

The first in his series of memoirs, All Creatures Great and Small finds Herriot in situations where there are high stakes, and more often than not some hilarity (think escaped pigs!). In the years since their first publication, the books have become classics.

If you want more of All Creatures Great and Small, there is also a TV adaptation to get stuck into.

Buy All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot from £8.54 at Bookshop.org

This is Going to Hurt, Adam Kay

This autobiography follows Adam Kay through his years as a junior doctor specialising in obstetrics and gynaecology and working within the NHS. It will have you crying of laughter and sorrow as the young doctor finds himself helping people from all walks of life, all while his own personal life falls into disarray.

Kay's debut publication was the bestselling non-fiction title of 2018 in the UK and stayed at the top of the charts for weeks.

This is Going to Hurt was adapted into a limited drama series by the BBC earlier this year starring Ben Whishaw, which used elements of the book to explore wider themes around health and the NHS.

Buy This is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay from £5.99 at Amazon

Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela

This autobiography hardly needs an introduction. It tells the life story of former South African President and antiapartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela, covering his childhood, education and the 27 years he spent in prison.

Mandela is internationally praised for overcoming enormous persecution and struggle, rebuilding South Africa's society as President. The film adaptation of his autobiography stars Idris Elba as Mandela, and was released shortly after his death.

The Kindle edition and paperback copy of this book starts from just £6.99.

Buy Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela from 99p at Amazon

I'm Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy

Jennette McCurdy's memoir has been one of the most talked about books of 2022. A former child star best know for her role on Nickelodeon's iCarly in the USA, McCurdy's memoir describes her experience growing up in the limelight with an abusive parent.

The book's title has, unsurprisingly, been a big talking point, but it addresses an issue faced by many who write about their life experiences — how do you write about your true experience without damaging your relationships? In this frank and often funny book, McCurdy describes the emotional complexity of receiving abuse from someone you love.

Buy I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy from £11.99 at Amazon

Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

Published nearly 15 years before he became President of the United States, Barack Obama's first memoir is a deep exploration into identity and belonging. In this book which begins with him learning about his father's death, Obama explores his own relationship with race as the son of a Black Kenyan father and a white American mother.

Written with his recognisable voice, Obama travels back to Kansas where his mother's family is from (they later moved to Hawaii where Obama spent most of his childhood) before making the journey to Kenya.

This makes an interesting read not only to learn more about the background of a man who holds such an important place in America's history, but also in shedding light on how we all relate to our own parentage and what makes us who we are.

Buy Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama for £9.99 at Waterstones

Becoming, Michelle Obama

America's former First Lady Michelle Obama recounts experiences of her life in this record breaking autobiography, from growing up on the south side of Chicago with her parents and brother, to attending Princeton University and Harvard Law School before returning to Chicago as a qualified lawyer. It was whilst working at a law firm in the city that she met her husband Barack Obama.

Obama uses her elegant story telling to take us along on the incredible journey she went on, as an accomplished lawyer, daughter, wife and mother to becoming First Lady. This is an autobiography that lets you see history from the insider's perspective and is definitely a must read.

Buy Becoming by Michelle Obama from £7.99 at Amazon

Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman, Alan Rickman

Alan Rickman was much loved for his roles in fan favourite films, such as Hans Gruber in Die Hard and Professor Severus Snape in the Harry Potter series. This collection of diary entries, written with the intention of being made public and published after his death, give his witty insights into his day-to-day life but also his take on world events.

The book is filled not only with delightful showbiz gossip, but also with snippets of hidden moments — from his disbelief and grief at the sudden death of actor and friend Natasha Richardson, to the relief he feels that the costume for Severus Snape still fits.

Buy Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman by Alan Rickman from £7.79 at Amazon

Just Kids, Patti Smith

On its release in 2010, Patti Smith's memoir won the US National Book Award for Nonfiction. In many ways it is a love letter to her life long friend, the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. In Just Kids, she recounts their meeting, romance and how they continued to inspire and encourage each other in their artistic pursuits for the rest of their lives.

This story which so vividly depicts life is, however, overshadowed by Mapplethorpe's death. Read for a vivid description of the New York art scene in the late '60s.

Buy Just Kids by Patti Smith for £12.34 at Bookshop.org

Wild, Cheryl Strayed

In this autobiography, Cheryl Strayed writes about hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, from the Mojave Desert in California to Washington State in the Pacific North West. In total, Strayed walks over a thousand miles on her own and in the process, she walked back to herself.

This memoir is beautifully written, moving between stories from the trail to those about Strayed's childhood, her struggles with heroin use and the sudden death of her mother — the main motivation for her walk. Full of suspense, warmth and humour, this book will make you think about your life and your family, and probably make you want to go on a walk.

Wild was adapted into a film in 2014, produced by and starring Reese Witherspoon.

Buy Wild by Cheryl Strayed for £8.99 at Waterstones

Taste, Stanley Tucci

Stanley Tucci has long been beloved for his nuanced and charming acting performances, but in the last few years has gained popularity for his true love — food. Between his CNN series Searching for Italy making us all cross eyed with food envy, and his cookbook The Tucci Table written with wife Felicity Blunt, there's no getting away from the fact that Stanley Tucci is giving Italian food an even better name than it had already.

But there's a good reason for Tucci's renewed love of food and his devotion to these passion projects. He was diagnosed with oral cancer in 2018 which left him unable to eat for several months, and even after he was able to eat again, his sense of taste was changed. In this memoir, he recounts his early relationship with food in his grandparent's kitchen and at his parent's table, and how his relationship with food has shaped all the loves of his life.

We recommend having a bowl of pasta in front of you while you read this!

Buy Taste by Stanley Tucci from £6.99 at Amazon

Calling all bookworms, take a look at the best Kindle deals and the best Audible deals for this month.

Educated, Tara Westover

This is a frankly astonishing memoir in which Tara Westover recounts how she came from a Mormon fundamentalist background without a birth certificate or any schooling, and ended up studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge.

Westover gives readers a peak behind the curtain into the lifestyle of a group who do everything they can to stay away from the outside world. She recounts the experience of herself and her siblings as they grew up in an environment where they were often injured and didn't have access to medical help.

The juxtaposition of loving her family and yet needing to escape is acutely described, and she writes so cleverly about the complex subject matter, often admitting that her version of events may not be the correct one. Westover expertly uses her own story to examine themes of religion, love and above all education - and we promise you won't be able to put it down.

Buy Educated by Tara Westover for £10.99 at Foyles

I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai's story is undeniably an incredible one. After the Taliban took over in Swat Valley in Pakistan where she was born, Yousafzai was prevented from going to school. Despite being just a child herself, she became outspoken on girls' right to learn and in 2012, she was shot in the head by a masked gunman while on the bus to school.

After the attack Yousafzai moved to the UK with her family. In this autobiography, she describes the importance of female education, starting the Malala Fund, and receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. This book will leave you inspired.

Buy I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai from £8.54 at Bookshop.org

Crying In H Mart, Michelle Zauner

Michelle Zauner is an Asian-American singer-songwriter and guitarist best known as lead of the band Japanese Breakfast. In this memoir, Zauner explores her relationship with her Korean heritage and how her mother's death forced her to reckon with the side of herself she had all but lost.

At the heart of this book about love, loss and grief is food. It acts as a constant dialogue between Zauner and her mother, as well as an enduring connection with her Korean heritage. This makes for a highly emotional and thought-provoking read.

Buy Crying In H Mart by Michelle Zauner for £9.99 at Waterstones

Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Matthew Perry

Last year, we were saddened by the news that Friends actor Matthew Perry had sadly passed away, his autobiography, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing had become a bestseller the year before.

In Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry takes the reader behind the scenes of the most successful sitcom of all time (Friends), and he opens up about his private struggles with addiction. The book is honest and moving, with plenty of Perry's trademark humour, too.

Buy Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing by Matthew Perry for £20.99 at Waterstones

The Woman in Me, Britney Spears

If the reviews of Britney Spears's autobiography are anything to go by — "The easiest 5 stars I've given" — The Woman in Me is sure to be a hit with Spears fans.

For the first time in a book, Spears is sharing her truth with the world: The Woman in Me tackles themes of fame, motherhood, survival and freedom, and Spears doesn't shy away from speaking about her journey as one of the world's biggest pop stars.

Buy The Woman in Me by Britney Spears for £12.50 at Waterstones

Love, Pamela, Pamela Anderson

We might think we know Pamela Anderson as the bombshell in Baywatch, Playboy's favourite cover girl, and, more recently, making makeup-free appearances on red carpets – looking beautiful as she does so; she's an icon and an activist, and now we can read all about her in her own words for the first time.

Anderson uses a mixture of poetry and prose to speak about her childhood, career, and how she lost control of her own narrative.

Buy Love, Pamela by Pamela Anderson from £10.99 at Amazon

Finding Me, Viola Davis

Naturally, we're big Viola Davis fans over on RadioTimes.com — we've loved her in everything from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes to The Woman King and The Help, so her autobiography Finding Me is right up our street.

In this book, we meet Davis when she's a little girl in an apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and we journey with her to her stage career in New York City and beyond.

Buy Finding Me by Viola Davis from £5.99 at Amazon

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The Atlantic 10

The books that made us think the most this year

End-of-year lists are by nature subjective, and selecting books in this way can be particularly hard. Tens of thousands of titles are published annually in the U.S., and a reader’s time is finite. We can digest only so much. Every publication, every jury making such judgments, has a filter. So this time around, we asked ourselves, as well as our colleagues: What were the books that had particular valence for us at The Atlantic ? We looked for those that impressed us with their force of ideas, that drew us in not because of some platonic ideal of greatness, but because they got our brains working and presented fresh angles on the world. In a phrase, they were good to think with.

And so we arrived at The Atlantic 10.

Between the covers of these books, readers will find an enormously diverse set of subjects and an array of writerly moods, from the whimsical to the deadly serious. These are stories that plunge into the intimate world of farmworkers in Central California, the unlikely friendship between two Asian American college students, and the machinations of modern-day authoritarians. The questions these titles pose are varied and generative. How has Ireland evolved over the past several decades? What kind of art form is the video game? What role does racism have in the health and wellness of Black people? But what binds these books to one another is that, in 2022, they were the ones that gave us a new way of looking, that forced us to stop and consider—that, once the last page was turned, dropped us back into our lives as smarter people. — Gal Beckerman , Ann Hulbert , J ane Yong Kim

G-Man , by Beverly Gage

Beverly Gage’s tautly written, meticulously researched biography of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s longest-serving director, could not be better timed: For six years now, the bureau has managed to confound Americans—infuriating and then winning over Democrats, gratifying and then enraging Republicans. Gage’s chronicle delivers yet more surprises, as well as rich historical context that helps put these revelations into perspective. Vilified over the past half-century as the persecutor of 1960s activists and an abuser of surveillance powers, Hoover was widely admired in his dapper younger days. He cultivated the image of a New Deal professional and, backed by a midcentury political consensus, he carefully sustained the FBI’s public reputation for nonpartisan vigilance. But the fracturing of that consensus, and the exposure of Hoover’s excesses, spelled the end of his reign. Filling in the context of the FBI’s original quest for apolitical clout, Gage supplies insights into the bureau’s quandary in our polarized times.

Spin Dictators , by Daniel Treisman and Sergei Guriev

Dictators have gotten smarter. The blunt tools of a Stalin or a Mao—shutting down the avenues of free expression, quashing any sign of protest, imprisoning or killing dissidents—have ceded some ground to more sophisticated means of control. This new “low-intensity coercion” is the subject of Guriev and Treisman’s timely and indispensable Spin Dictators . The world’s emboldened authoritarian leaders, in Russia and Turkey and Venezuela, are not looking to rule primarily through fear; rather, they manipulate the information ecosystem of their country, using tactics such as armies of bots and snarky memes. These new dictators work to undermine nominally democratic systems from within, even allowing some opposition to exist as they rig the processes that would allow anyone to contend with them for power. Guriev and Treisman are focused outside the United States, but their book also offers an important warning to Americans: The progress of such authoritarianism is creeping, cumulative, and sometimes hard to detect, so we would do well to keep an eye out for it at home.

Stay True , by Hua Hsu

Hsu’s memoir is powerful because in many ways, his story is unremarkable. Stay True imbues familiar experiences with beauty and meaning: It is both an introspective coming-of-age story and a tale of an unlikely friendship. While an undergrad at UC Berkeley in the late ’90s, Hsu was an introverted music obsessive deeply concerned with coolness and taste. Then he met Ken, a charming and confident frat bro. The son of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsu at first regarded Ken, who came from a Japanese American family with deep roots in the U.S., with skepticism and envy. Over three years, however, the two forged a bond during balcony smoke breaks, late-night drives, and extended pop-culture debates—a bond tragically cut short by Ken’s murder the summer before their senior year. Stay True summons Hsu’s memories of Ken—how he looked taking a drag of a cigarette, how it felt to see his handwriting after he died—along with references to Jacques Derrida, the Beach Boys, and Marcel Mauss as the author attempts to make sense of the senseless ending of one of the most consequential friendships of his life. The result is funny and wise, an elegiac work of self-forgiveness. What a gift it is, Hsu concludes, to remember the people you loved, and who loved you, while you were busy becoming yourself.

The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories , by Jamil Jan Kochai

In his collection of short stories set in Afghanistan and America, Kochai forces his readers to look the violence associated with the War on Terror squarely in the face, and shows how these two countries are forever intertwined. Employing elements of the surreal, the absurd, and the magical, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak asks what war does to those who see it firsthand—and how this witnessing reverberates to their descendants. He experiments, deploying flash fiction, shifting perspectives dramatically, and, in one story, confining his narrative to a single, long sentence. But these expressions never feel distracting; each form virtuosically fits its purpose. Most of all, his method is unexpected. Kochai’s work is far too sophisticated to reduce these fraught tales to a matter of victims and perpetrators. In the collection’s final, titular entry,  someone—presumably an FBI agent—is spying on an Afghan American family in California. This person reports the most intimate, private details of the family’s life, but his tone almost borders on tenderness. Through it all, the reader senses the looming possibility that the spying will escalate into something violent. Kochai instead ends the story surprisingly: with an act of care, almost of love.

The Consequences , by Manuel Muñoz

The stories in The Consequences , Muñoz’s first book in more than a decade, are hauntingly simple. His language is powerful and layered; it doesn’t perform for readers or try to impress. The pared-down style gracefully highlights the collection’s steady focus on the lives and families of Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers in Central California. In these surprising, vivid stories, worries are deeply felt but not often spoken aloud, and obligation to kin and the need to survive outweigh much else. The disappearance of a husband triggers a dark financial misadventure; a fraught bus ride forges a temporary alliance; a boozy housewarming party unearths pent-up class tensions. Muñoz’s characters narrate their experiences—the constant threat of the migra , the cumulative effects of deportation, the brisk logistics of picking fruit—with a wry candor. “It’s easy but hard at the same time,” one character tells another about working in the fields. “Anyone can do it. It’s just that no one really wants to.”

We Don’t Know Ourselves , by Fintan O’Toole

In a book that is at once intimate and deeply reported —sharp in its judgments and its humor—Ireland’s finest journalist chronicles his country’s painful emergence into the modern world . Stand-alone chapters (on emigration, schools, television, contraception) form a coherent arc: from O’Toole’s childhood in working-class, tradition-bound Dublin to his reporting on Ireland’s overwhelming embrace of same-sex marriage by referendum. Two figures illustrate what Ireland has had to overcome. One is Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, the fastidious, imperious prelate who controlled Catholic life from the 1940s up to the early 1970s. McQuaid turned a blind eye to the abuse of young children by priests (and was himself later accused of abuse), epitomizing a Church that, O’Toole writes, had “successfully disabled a society’s capacity to think for itself about right and wrong.” The other is Charles Haughey, the three-time taoiseach, or prime minister, first elected in the late 1970s. Deeply corrupt, loyal to his own hypocrisy, Haughey lived like “an Ascendancy squire” while pressing to maintain bans on abortion and divorce. Central to We Don’t Know Ourselves is the uneasy coexistence of opposites: of an inward-looking past and an outward-looking present, of knowledge and denial.

My Phantoms , by Gwendoline Riley

On the second page of Riley’s novel My Phantoms , Bridget, the narrator, describes a set of old family photos: “My grandfather had been the photographer, but the perspective was a shared one.” Our family’s narratives—about love and loss—can hover, shape, and sometimes haunt our own experience of the world. Riley cannily understands this , and her formally daring, indelible novel depicts the many ways in which Bridget’s own story can be crowded out by those of her parents, namely that of her mother, Helen. For most of Bridget’s life, Helen has been emotionally opaque, reluctant to reveal her vulnerabilities, yet the book follows Bridget as she attempts to circumvent this resistance. She wants to better understand her mother’s sadness in order to find out how their family ended up fractured. As their stories compete, one perspective must dominate in Bridget’s search for the truth.

The Books of Jacob , by Olga Tokarczuk

In her exuberant retelling of the incredible but largely true story of Jacob Frank, a false Jewish messiah in 18th-century Poland, the Nobel Prize–winning novelist Tokarczuk sets up a battle between two philosophies on how to approach existence. The first might be called the apocalyptic: In their millenarian frenzy, Frank and his followers set out to “annihilate the old world order” by overthrowing all established rules and norms. The other doctrine is harder to see, because it’s everywhere—it’s the gospel of the everyday. Its rituals ensure the maintenance of life and the renewal of the generations; its prophets are Hayah, Jacob’s cousin, who has magical healing powers, and Asher Rubin, a compassionate doctor. But its disciples are ordinary women, toiling stoically in the background. Moving fast and breaking things versus tikkun olam , Hebrew for “repairing the world”: That's the struggle for our souls that plays out in Tokarczuk’s novel (translated by Jennifer Croft), without—fittingly—a clear resolution.

Under the Skin , by Linda Villarosa

Villarosa, a veteran journalist who has covered Black health and wellness for decades, begins her forceful exposure of racism’s toxic effect on the U.S.’s health system by recounting her own personal awakening. She had to learn, she explains, to see health disparities in her own community as resulting from something more than just poverty. That “ something is racism,” not lack of education, poor diet, or bad individual choices. She exhaustively explains how implicit bias on the part of physicians, centuries of entrenched discrimination, and the toll of encountering and fighting daily aggression can translate to high rates of kidney disease and HIV/AIDS, as well as disproportionately elevated infant and maternal mortality. Through sensitive reporting and straightforward science, Villarosa builds to a searing call to action. The issue is not the fault of Black patients, is not what they do or don’t do; it is “the American problem in need of an American solution,” and it requires an urgent remedy.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow , by Gabrielle Zevin

Many refer to Zevin’s novel as a book about friendship , but it isn’t so simple. The two main characters—Sam and Sadie, video-game designers whom we follow over 30 years—have a dynamic that’s hard to define: They’re collaborators in awe of each other’s minds, but they’re also resentful and competitive. They love each other, but much of the time, they don’t like each other. They’re like the rest of us—capable of caring for people fiercely and still failing them, again and again. If that sounds bleak, know that the book is also hopeful and tender. It takes its title from Macbeth , in which the title character essentially laments that we live our stupid little lives, week after week, just to die and be forgotten. Zevin, though, makes this human limitation feel beautiful. Real life isn’t like a video game; it doesn’t go on forever . But within a brief existence, redemption is possible—and precious.

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The Best Books of 2024

Your new favorite read is right this way

Sugar, Baby

Living at home and cleaning houses for a living, 21-year-old Agnes feels like her life is going nowhere. That changes when she meets her client’s daughter, Emily, who works as a sugar baby. Enraptured, Agnes follows Emily into her line of work, thereby estranging herself from her religious mother and setting out on a dark path of self-discovery.

The Fetishist

When Kyoko’s mother Emi dies by suicide, Kyoko blames washed-up musician Daniel Karmody—the man who seduced and then abandoned Emi. Now in her twenties, Kyoko is ready to take her revenge. Armed with a knife, she sets out to kidnap and murder Karmody, only for her plans to swiftly go awry.

Cyrus Shams—the Iranian-American protagonist of accomplished poet Akbar’s first novel—may be several years sober, but that doesn’t mean he’s not self-destructive in other ways. Haunted by the deaths of his mother (when he was a child) and father (after his first year of college), Cyrus is nearing 30 and still loitering around his old college town when he decides to try and make sense of his parents’ passing the only way he can think of: by writing a book of poetry about martyrs through history. When he learns of an Iranian artist who has been diagnosed with cancer and has decided to turn her final days into a work of performance art, he sets off across the country to meet her.

Come and Get It

In her sophomore effort, the much-lauded scribe of 2019’s Such A Fun Age takes clever aim at the social stratifications and warped value systems of academia. When a white visiting professor named Agatha offers Black college senior and resident assistant Millie an opportunity to make some money arranging interviews with students for a book Agatha is writing, Millie sees the job as an easy way to make some extra cash. But the enterprise quickly spirals out of hand as the two become wrapped up in the messy lives of three female suitemates living in Agatha’s dorm.

Good Material

The beloved author of Ghosts and Everything I Know About Love is back with her fourth book and second novel in less than six years. In the wake of a devastating breakup, aspiring standup comedian Andy is left to sift through the wreckage of his most recent relationship. If he can figure out why Jen fell out of love with him, he figures, maybe he can win her back. But every relationship has two sides, and Andy is about to learn Jen’s version of the story.

Greta and Valdin

This laugh-out-loud-funny debut novel follows the titular gay children of a Maori mother and Russian immigrant father living in Auckland, New Zealand. (They also have an older brother, Casper, but he’s straight and therefore less interesting.) Gre and Val navigate love, family, and career angst as they make their way through their twenties, all amid a cast of friends and family just as colorful as they are.

Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story

Coming as it does from an author known for writing essays that braid together personal narrative with meticulous research, Splinters marks a departure for Leslie Jamison: though she’s written herself into prior books, this one is her first straightforward, unadulterated memoir. Chronicling the birth of her child and attendant breakdown of her marriage, Jamison captures the magic of simultaneous love and loss as only she can.

Great Expectations

Naming your debut novel after the ubiquitous Charles Dickens classic is a bold move, but it pays dividends in the case of Cunningham’s sweeping tale of a young, Black single dad who finds work as an aide on a young, Black politician’s historic presidential campaign. Clearly inspired by the author’s own experiences as a staffer on Obama’s campaign (and then in the White House), this formidable debut ultimately digresses into a reality all its own.

After winning widespread acclaim for Night of the Living Rez , his debut collection of short stories, Talty is back with a first novel that cements his status as a writer to watch. When his twentysomething-year-old neighbor Elizabeth goes missing, Penobscot tribal member Charles Lamosway grows worried—not least because of the secret Charles has been keeping for Elizabeth’s entire life: Elizabeth is Charles’s daughter.

Wandering Stars

The long-awaited follow-up to Orange’s lauded debut novel— There There , released in 2018—is sort of a prequel, sort of a sequel, and yet ultimately something entirely independent and original. Following the descendants of a single Cheyenne survivor of the Sand Creek massacre, Wandering Stars stirringly spans the 160 years between the 1864 tragedy and the present day before ultimately depositing us neatly in the aftermath of the events of Orange’s first book.

Memory Piece

In her decades-spanning latest novel, Lisa Ko probes the distances that accumulate between ambition and reality. As teenagers in the 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are united by their shared worldview and sense of alienation. As adults, all three women—now a performance artist, a coder, and a community activist, respectively—their dreams have grown more complicated, and so have their conflicting definitions of success.

Anita de Monte Laughs Last

As a first-generation art history student living in New York City, Raquel is used to feeling like an outsider. But when a chance encounter flings her into the public eye of the art world, she finds herself increasingly fascinated by—and connected to—the story of Anita de Monte, a once-rising artist whose burgeoning career was cut short by her tragic death in 1985. (Author Gonzalez took inspiration for de Monte’s fictional life story from that of real-life conceptual artist Ana Mendieta, who passed away that same year.)

Mariner Books Annie Bot

If there’s one thing artists are going to do to sort out our feelings about autonomy and free will in the age of artificial intelligence, it’s imagining how robots and humans would have sex. Such is the case in Greer’s darkly clever new novel about the titular Annie Bot, an artificial intelligence created to be the perfect companion for her human owner, Doug. But as Annie learns how to better mimic a “real woman,” she begins to wonder whether she can ever lay claim to any humanness of her own.

Described by its publisher as “ Frances Ha meets No One Is Talking About This ,” Tanner’s Brooklyn-set debut novel about two sisters’ coming-of-anxiety is both riotously funny and wryly existential. It’s 2019, and 28-year-old Jules Gold is reeling from a breakup when her younger sister Poppy—relatively fresh off of a suicide attempt that no one except Jules knows about—invites herself to move into Jules’s apartment. Together, over the course of the year leading up to the global covid pandemic, the Gold sisters scramble to find their footing and figure out their respective futures.

Who's Afraid of Gender?

Arriving at a time when LGBTQ+ rights in states across the U.S. are increasingly under attack, this new treatise by legendary gender theorist Judith Butler is a much-needed balm to counter the right wing’s ever-escalating wave trans panic. In this incisive and vital new volume, Butler traces the current anti-trans movement to its roots in xenophobia, fascism, and misogyny.

The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality

After tackling our relationship with the English language, the bestselling author of Cultish and Wordslut is ready to challenge the uniquely 21st-century cognitive biases that rule us all. In Magical Overthinking , Montell dives into a slew of topics, from our hero worship of celebrities to the stranglehold that the “sunk cost fallacy” has on our dating lives, all with her trademark flavor of incisive wit.

A prolific genre-hopper, Akwaeke Emezi has already conquered the genres of literary fiction, romance, memoir, and YA fantasy. Now, Emezi turns their sharp, lyrical eye to noir with a novel spanning the seedy underbelly of New Lagos, Nigeria. When Kalu attends his friend Ahmed’s exclusive sex party, hoping to get his mind off his devastating breakup with ex-girlfriend Aima, Kalu makes an impulsive decision that will irrevocably alter the lives of everyone around him.

July’s new novel marks the author, artist and filmmaker’s first new novel in almost a decade, since the January 2015 release of her acclaimed debut The First Bad Man . In July’s sophomore novel, a semi-famous artist leaves her husband and child at home in L.A. to drive across the country to New York City—only to almost immediately go rogue from her own plan and embark on a different sort of journey altogether.

Living in the Bay Area with her college sweetheart Philip, photographer Jin Han is young, brilliant, and married. But is she happy? She’s never thought to question it—until she attends a party in the well-moneyed hills just outside of San Francisco, where she meets ballet dancer Lidija Jung. In her latest novel since 2018’s acclaimed The Incendiaries , Kwon once again holds nothing back.

Ambition Monster: A Memoir

At the top of her game, Jennifer Romolini had it all: a “girlboss” dream job, a total catch of a husband, and a beautiful child. So why was she so unhappy? And when did it all fall apart? These are the questions Romolini seeks to answer in her intimate, intensely resonant memoir about workaholism, unresolved trauma, and the “addictive nature of ambition.”

Keely Weiss is a writer and filmmaker. She has lived in Los Angeles, New York, and Virginia and has a cat named after Perry Mason.

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