Top 100 Memoir Books

📘 Tuesdays with Morrie

Tuesdays with Morrie is a memoir by American author Mitch Albom about a series of visits Albom made to his former sociology professor Morrie Schwartz, as Schwartz gradually dies of ALS.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Born a Crime

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Shoe Dog

"In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company's early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world's most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 When Breath Becomes Air

When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and illness, battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Everything I Know About Love

The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world—where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she). One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Just Mercy

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption is a memoir by Bryan Stevenson that documents his career as a lawyer for disadvantaged clients.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 Girl, interrupted

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Crying in H Mart

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The Diary of a Young Girl- Anne Frank

Anne Frank's diary, a powerful testimony of the Holocaust and the human spirit's resilience.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Educated

*Educated* is a 2018 memoir by the American author Tara Westover. Westover recounts overcoming her survivalist Mormon family in order to go to college, and emphasizes the importance of education in enlarging her world.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Between the World and Me

Between the World and Me is a 2015 nonfiction book written by American author Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by Spiegel & Grau. It is written as a letter to the author's teenage son about the feelings, symbolism, and realities associated with being Black in the United States.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Angela's Ashes

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Just kids

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 When I was Puerto Rican

Esmeralda Santiago's story begins in rural Puerto Rico, where her childhood was full of both tenderness and domestic strife, tropical sounds and sights as well as poverty.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 El hombre en busca de sentido

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 My life with a criminal

The late 1690 and early 70s may be remembered as the years of the great bank and other armed robberies in Kenya. This is the true story of one of the participants in some of those robberies, John Kiriamiti.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Finding Me

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Beautiful Boy

What had happened to my beautiful boy? To our family? What did I do wrong? Those are the wrenching questions that haunted every moment of David Sheff’s journey through his son Nic’s addiction to drugs and tentative steps toward recovery.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 How to Be an Antiracist

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 To Selena, with love

Chris Perez tells the story of his relationship with music superstar Selena in this heartfelt tribute. One of the most compelling and adored superstars in Latin music history, Selena was nothing short of a phenomenon who shared all of herself with her millions of devoted fans.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 A Piece of Cake

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The heart-wrenching, uplifting tale about a woman named Cupcake “[Cupcake] Brown’s confessional . . . memoir is one you can’t easily put down. Her life is nothing short of a miracle.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Fear no evil

The prison memoirs of the Soviet dissident and Jewish activist relate the harrowing events of his nine years in KGB custody, from interrogation to release.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The color of water

James McBride grew up one of twelve siblings in the all-black housing projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn, the son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 Down and Out in Paris and London

'You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them.' George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Prozac nation

xxxv, 338 pages ; 21 cm

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Let me hear your voice

She was a beautiful doelike child, with an intense, graceful fragility. In her first year, she picked up words, smiled and laughed, and learned to walk. But then Anne-Marie began to turn inward.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 Twelve years a slave

A chilling memoir detailing Solomon Northup's harrowing experience as a captive on a Louisiana plantation for twelve years, from 1841 to 1853.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 If You Tell

After more than a decade, when sisters Nikki, Sami, and Tori Knotek hear the word mom, it claws like an eagle’s talons, triggering memories that have been their secret since childhood. Until now.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Travels with Charley

A quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to California's Monterey Peninsula To hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the tress, to see the colors and the light—these were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Travel Memoir

📘 Revelaciones / Revelations

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 走ることについて語るときに僕の語ること

In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Murakami began running to keep fit.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Talvez Voce Deva Conversar Com Alguem - Uma terapeuta o terapeuta dela e a vida de todos nos

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Mémoires

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 First They Killed My Father

From a childhood survivor of the Camdodian genocide under the regime of Pol Pot, this is a riveting narrative of war crimes and desperate actions, the unnerving strength of a small girl and her family, and their triumph of spirit.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Know My Name

She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford’s campus.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Man's search for meaning

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Fate Is the Hunter

Ernest K. Gann’s classic memoir is an up-close and thrilling account of the treacherous early days of commercial aviation. In his inimitable style, Gann brings you right into the cockpit, recounting both the triumphs and terrors of pilots who flew when flying was anything but routine.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 Dispatches

Written on the front lines in Vietnam, *Dispatches* became an immediate classic of war reportage when it was published in 1977.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Beyond the Wand

From the magical moments on set as Draco Malfoy to the challenges of growing up in the spotlight, get a backstage pass into Tom Felton's life on and off the big screen. Tom Felton's adolescence was anything but ordinary.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Running with Scissors

"Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 All Boys Aren't Blue

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Have a little faith

What if our beliefs were not what divided us, but what pulled us together? In Have a Little Faith, Mitch Albom offers a beautifully written story of a remarkable eight-year journey between two worlds-two men, two faiths, two communities-that will inspire readers everywhere.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Diarios de Motocicleta

The young Che Guevara’s lively and highly entertaining travel diary, now a popular movie and a New York Times bestseller.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Travel Memoir

📘 A Muslim Woman's Diary

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 And I don't want to live this life

For most of us, it was just another horrible headline. But for Deborah Spungen, the mother of Nancy, who was stabbed to death at the Chelsea Hotel, it was both a relief and a tragedy.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 The Hut Six Story

The men and women of Bletchley Park, who repeatedly broke German military cyphers throughout the Second World War, made an incalculable contribution to the allied success. This book, written by one of the code-breakers provides a fascinating insight into the process.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 THE KAOBOYS OF R&AW Down Memory Lane

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 The Liars' Club

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 Lean In

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women's voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Freedom Writers' Diary

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Lab Girl

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 The surrender experiment

Shares stories from the author's pursuit of enlightenment, from his years as a hippie introvert and successes as a computer engineer through his work in humanitarian efforts, counseling readers on how to navigate confusing aspects in the spiritual journey.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 From Here to Eternity

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Travel Memoir

📘 Chinese Cinderella

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 Yes Please

Part memoir, part 'missive-from-the-middle', Yes Please is a hilarious collection of stories, thoughts, ideas, haikus and words-to-live-by drawn from the life and mind of acclaimed actress, writer and comedian Amy Poehler.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 10% Happier

Nightline anchor Dan Harris embarks on an unexpected, hilarious, and deeply skeptical odyssey through the strange worlds of spirituality and self-help, and discovers a way to get happier that is truly achievable. After having a nationally televised panic attack on Good Morning America, Dan Harris knew he had to make some changes.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 In Search of Our Mother's Garden

In Search of Our Mother's Garden: A Collection of Nonfiction Essays by Alice Walker

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Mommie Dearest

Mommie Dearest (1981) Based on the book about Joan Crawford, one of the great Hollywood actresses of our time, written by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford. Joan decides to adopt children of her own to fill a void in her life.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Visage volé

Poignant first-hand account of life for a young Afghani woman under the TalibanLatifa was born into an educated middle-class Afghan family in Kabul in 1980. She dreamed of one day becoming a journalist and was interested in fashion, movies and friends. Then in September 1996, Taliban soldiers seized power in Kabul.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The saddest girl in the world

Tells the true story of Donna, who came into foster care at age ten, having been abused, victimised and rejected by her family.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 A place to stand

"Jimmy Santiago Baca, winner of the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award, has been called an heir to Pablo Neruda and one the best poets in America today. At the age of twenty-one, however, he was illiterate and facing five to ten years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Kitne Ghazi Aaye, Kitne Ghazi Gaye

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 If I die in a combat zone box me up and ship me home

A candid view of the American military establishment and the Vietnam conflict as witnessed by a foot soldier in the late sixties.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 One L

See https://openlibrary.org/works/OL26908W/One_L

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 Rabbit-proof fence

Author's 'real' name: Nugi Garimara From Google books: "In Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence Pilkington recalls with a searing irony one of the more farcical projects of land management in the newly federated states of Australia.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Three thousand stitches

the live of the sex workers or devadasis, her determination to make them self-sustainable, and to get rid of the label of dishonor that was attached to them.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Down the rabbit hole

A spontaneous decision at age twenty-one transformed small-town Oregon girl Holly Sue Cullen into Holly Madison, Hugh Hefner's #1 girlfriend.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Everything Happens for a Reason

Kate Bowler is a professor at Duke Divinity School with a modest Christian upbringing, but she specializes in the study of the prosperity gospel, a creed that sees fortune as a blessing from God and misfortune as a mark of God's disapproval. At thirty-five, everything in her life seems to point toward "blessing.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Extreme Ownership

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 No Disrespect

In No Disrespect, Sister Souljah, America's most notorious hip-hop rebel, offers a stunningly candid book about how young black girls can grow up with their integrity intact in a very tough world.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Grandma Ellen and me

Stories of growing up at Elmshaven Imagine having a grandma who lived in a big, beautiful house in the country, wrote books for God, talked with angels, and--most of all--loved children! Mabel had a great grandma just like this, and her name was Ellen White.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Family Memoir

📘 Always Running

A memoir recounting Luis J. Rodriguez's experiences as a member of a street gang in Los Angeles.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Smoke gets in your eyes

The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 A Mother's Reckoning

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. In a matter of minutes, they killed twelve students and a teacher and wounded twenty-four others before taking their own lives.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Catch and Kill

In this newly updated edition of the “meticulous and devastating” (Associated Press) account of violence and espionage that spent months on the New York Times Bestsellers list, Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost – from Hollywood to Washington and beyond.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 El Diario de Ana Frank

A diary chronicling the life of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl who hid in an attic during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Klan-Destine Relationships

"After 129 years of nothing but violence and hatred, it's time we get to know one another on a social basis, not under a cover of darkness, " explains Grammy Award winning pianist Daryl Davis of his extraordinary journey into the heart of one of America's most fanatical institutions - the Ku Klux Klan.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Communion

Strieber candidly describes the series of elaborate personal encounters he and his family have had with intelligent non-human beings in his isolated cabin in upstate New York.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The Cancer Journals

A powerful and poetic account of breast cancer survivor Audre Lorde's experience and transformation.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Notas de Liberdade (Em Portugues do Brasil)

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Furiously Happy

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of “autotheory” offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Hunger

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Spare

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Memoirs of a Beatnik

Long regarded as an underground classic for its gritty and unabashedly erotic portrayal of the Beat years, *Memoirs of a Beatnik* is a moving account of a powerful woman artist coming of age sensually and intellectually in a movement dominated by a small confederacy of men, many of whom she lived with and loved.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Heavy

"Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about the physical manifestations of violence, grief, trauma, and abuse on his own body. He writes of his own eating disorder and gambling addiction as well as similar issues that run throughout his family.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Dirty Blonde

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Damaged

Soul shattering

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 The journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962

"Published in their entirety for the first time, Sylvia Plath's journals provide a portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the twentieth century.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Slow days, fast company

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 A rumor of war

The author recounts his experiences during the sixteen months he spent as a Marine infantry officer in the Vietnam war.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 This Boy's Life

A candid account of a young boy's life in 1950s America and his coming of age process in the face of adversity and growth through experiences like paper routes, whiskey, scouting, fistfights, and betrayal.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 H Is for Hawk

When Helen Macdonald's father died suddenly on a London street, she was devastated. An experienced falconer, Helen had never before been tempted to train one of the most vicious predators, the goshawk, but in her grief, she saw that the goshawk's fierce and feral temperament mirrored her own.

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Whether she is contemplating the history of walking as a cultural and political experience over the past two hundred years (Wanderlust), or using the life of photographer Eadweard Muybridge as a lens to discuss the transformations of space and time in late nineteenth-century America (River of Shadows), Rebecca Solnit has emerged as an inventive and...

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Stolen Innocence

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Back to the Batcave

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Professional Memoir

📘 Lucky

In this memoir, Alice Sebold reveals how her life was transformed when at age 18 she was raped and beaten in a park near her college campus

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Personal Memoir

📘 Come, tell me how you live

Agatha Christie was already a celebrated writer of mysteries in 1930 when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan. She enthusiastically joined him on archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, providing backgrounds for novels and "everyday doings and happenings".

Genre: Memoir Subgenre: Travel Memoir