Best Memoir Books

Styron's memoir of his severe depression in 1985 — the illness he calls 'darkness visible' after a phrase in Milton — is the best literary account of clinical depression ever written: precise about its physical manifestations, honest about its irrationality, and clear-eyed about the inadequacy of the language available to describe it.

Seventeen chapters, each structured around a different near-death experience — from childhood illness to encounters with violent strangers to medical emergencies — that together form a fragmentary, non-chronological memoir of a life lived in proximity to death.

Nabokov's autobiography covers his aristocratic Russian childhood, his family's flight after the Revolution, and his years as an émigré writer in Europe — in prose of such concentrated beauty that it reads as much as poetry as memoir.

Beloved writer Anne Lamott offers funny, compassionate advice on the writing life — from dealing with the blank page to navigating publication — grounded in her personal experience as a novelist and teacher.

Atul Gawande's debut collection of essays explores the uncertainties, errors, and imperfections inherent in the practice of medicine — written from inside the operating room by a resident surgeon learning on real patients.

Saint-Exupéry's memoir-essay blends his experiences flying mail routes over Africa and South America with meditations on human dignity, solidarity, and what makes a life worth living — winner of the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française.

David Chang's memoir and cookbook tells the story of how a Korean-American chef opened a ramen shop with almost no money and built one of the most influential restaurant empires in American culinary history.

Anne Lamott's spiritual memoir traces her journey from alcoholism and despair to faith, motherhood, and community — a funny, honest, and fiercely unsentimental account of finding grace in the most ordinary places.

Ernaux's account of her mother — a woman who left the rural working class through running a café-grocery in Normandy, who was proud but not educated, who developed Alzheimer's late in life. Written after her mother's death, it is also a reckoning with class, ambition, and the distance that education creates.

Journalist David Sheff chronicles his son Nic's methamphetamine addiction from the first terrifying signs through years of recovery attempts, relapse, and survival — a memoir that examines addiction from the parent's perspective with unflinching honesty and reportorial rigor.

The second volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy continues the story of the Durrell family's years on the Greek island. With the same warmth and comic genius as the first, it introduces more extraordinary animals and eccentric characters.

Actor Ewan McGregor and his friend Charley Boorman ride motorcycles east from London through Europe, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Siberia, and Alaska to New York — 31,000 miles through some of the most extreme terrain on earth.

Anne Lamott's follow-up to Traveling Mercies — personal essays on faith, doubt, aging, the Iraq War, her son's adolescence, and the ongoing attempt to live with grace when plan A has clearly failed.

Kazantzakis's spiritual autobiography — addressed to his Cretan ancestor El Greco — tracing his intellectual and spiritual journey from Crete through Athens, Paris, Mount Athos, Russia, and across the battlefields of ideas of the 20th century.

Pasternak's autobiographical prose combines memoir of his own development as a writer with extended meditations on Scriabin, Rilke, and Mayakovsky — the three presences that shaped his aesthetic. The book ends with Mayakovsky's suicide, rendered with grief that is also a kind of self-examination: the poet who chose visibility and the poet who chose obscurity, and what each choice costs.

The third and final volume of Gerald Durrell's Corfu trilogy, completing the story of the family's years on the Greek island before the outbreak of World War II drove them back to England.

Gerald Durrell's account of his third Cameroon expedition, during which he collected animals specifically to found his own zoo on the island of Jersey — the origin of what became the Jersey Zoo and Wildlife Preservation Trust.

George Orwell's first book: a memoir of destitution — months spent penniless in Paris, working as a plongeur in restaurant kitchens, and then weeks tramping between workhouses in England — written with the observational precision that would define everything that followed.

Hurston's autobiography — the most unreliable and most revealing of the Harlem Renaissance — traces her childhood in Eatonville, Florida, her years studying under Franz Boas, her folk research in the South and Caribbean, and her life as a writer. Hurston revises, omits, and invents throughout; the book is most honest about what it refuses to say.

Anthony Doerr and his wife win the Rome Prize and spend a year at the American Academy in Rome with their newborn twin sons. A memoir about learning to see in a city built from layers of history, trying to write with two newborns, and what the death of John Paul II looks like from inside Rome.

The second volume of Maya Angelou's autobiography, covering her late teens in post-war California — working as a cook, a dancer, a madam, and eventually a prostitute, while raising her young son alone.

Bourdain's follow-up to Kitchen Confidential — a decade later, more famous, more conflicted, and harder on the food world and on himself.

Paul Auster's first major work in two parts: A Portrait of an Invisible Man, written after his father's sudden death, an attempt to understand a man he never truly knew; and The Book of Memory, an autobiographical meditation on solitude, fatherhood, memory, and the act of writing.

Gerald Durrell's first book, an account of his animal-collecting expedition to the Cameroons in 1947-48. The book that launched his career and established his voice as one of the finest natural history writers in English.