Genre

The best Memoir books

A specific life told from inside. The right memoir refuses the redemption arc and respects what survival actually looks like.

12 reviews in this genre.

Highest-rated memoir on the shelf

I Am, I Am, I Am

by Maggie O'Farrell

I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O'Farrell 2018 review. A memoir told through seventeen brushes with death. O'Farrell's structural pre-Hamnet memoir and one of the canonical contemporary British memoirs.

Between the World and Me

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates 2015 review. A book-length letter to his fifteen-year-old son about race in America. National Book Award winner.

Just Mercy

by Bryan Stevenson

Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson 2014 review. The Equal Justice Initiative founder's memoir of his Alabama capital-case work. Carnegie Medal winner and the basis for the 2019 film.

The Choice

by Edith Eger

The Choice by Edith Eger 2017 review. A Hungarian ballerina survives Auschwitz at sixteen and becomes a California clinical psychologist. Canonical contemporary American Holocaust memoir.

The Return

by Hisham Matar

The Return by Hisham Matar 2016 review. Matar returns to Libya in 2012 to investigate the 1990 disappearance of his father, the opposition leader Jaballa Matar. Pulitzer Prize.

A Promised Land by Barack Obama 2020 review. The first volume of Barack Obama's presidential memoirs, covering his early political life through the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011. The most thoroughly written contemporary presidential memoir in modern American letters.

Becoming

by Michelle Obama

Becoming by Michelle Obama 2018 review. Michelle Obama's memoir, from her South Side Chicago childhood through the Obama White House. The political memoir that sold seventeen million copies, and the one that genuinely earns its bestseller status.

Educated

by Tara Westover

Educated by Tara Westover 2018 review. The memoir of growing up in a survivalist Idaho family that kept her out of school until age seventeen, and her subsequent education through Brigham Young University and Cambridge. The PEN/Bingham winner and one of the canonical contemporary memoirs.