autobiography 2022 uk

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.

• Imogen Hope
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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 best autobiographies to read in 2023

• Nik Rawlinson

Discover the back stories of some of the best-known names in showbiz and politics, in their own words

Read an autobiography, and you’ll feel closer to the subject than you’d ever get in real life. They might not reveal their deepest, darkest secrets, but they will usually wind back the clock and walk you through their childhood and early years, so you can see how they became the person they are today.

The raciest autobiographies are frequently indiscreet, the most engaging may name-drop with wild abandon, and the best stand on the quality of their writing, regardless of the subject matter. Some are ghost-written, granted, but so long as the voice sounds authentic and the contents are true, does that matter?

Here, we’ve picked out six of the best autobiographies you can buy today. Most were published in the past couple of years, although one is considerably older and was re-released in 2018, several decades after it was first published. We’ve included it because of the quality of the writing and the compelling story it tells.

Before that, though, if you’re struggling to choose between them – or any of the dozens of other autobiographies published every year – check out our tips for choosing the best autobiography for you.

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Best autobiographies: At a glance

• Best showbiz autobiography: One of them by Michael Cashman | £9.19
• Best political autobiography: Free by Lea Ypi | £6.99
• Best autobiography for the 90s TV generation: Gotta Get Theroux This by Louis Theroux | £6.99

How to choose the best autobiography for you

They say everyone has at least one story in them. Perhaps that’s why there are so many autobiographies to choose from. The trick is to pick one that appeals to you, and keeps your attention from the first page to the last.

Look for something unfamiliar

The most engrossing book is often one that immerses you in an entirely unknown world, yet evokes it so clearly that the images are vivid and all-encompassing. For most readers, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and Lea Ypi’s Free, each of which features in our selection, fall into these categories. They take the reader into a realm that most will (thankfully) never have experienced. And, in doing so, they demonstrate that a return to those places, times and attitudes is something we must avoid.

Uncover the other side of a story

The biggest-selling autobiographies are those written by the most recognisable names in show business, sport, politics and music, and most of the readers who pick them up are hoping they’ll tell the stories behind the headlines. Gotta Get Theroux This, by Louis Theroux, delivers here, examining not only how Theroux himself came to prominence, but the back stories – and occasional fall-out – of some of his most high-profile encounters. Elton John’s Me is an incredibly honest and revealing chronicle of his life, while Tom Allen’s No Shame is a candid tale of growing up gay in the suburbs – a world away from the glamour of primetime TV.

Don’t forget the audiobook option

Where an autobiography has been written by an actor or other public performer, it’s not uncommon for them to also narrate the audiobook. This is true of Adam Buxton with Ramble Book, Michael Cashman with One of Them, Miriam Margolyes with This Much is True , and Stephen Fry with his various volumes of autobiography, including The Fry Chronicles , More Fool Me  and Moab Is My Washpot . Hearing the author’s words in their own voice brings another dimension to the work, and lets you take them with you wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing.

READ NEXT: Best poetry books to buy

1. One of Them by Michael Cashman: Best showbiz autobiography

Price: £9.19 | Buy now from Amazon

Michael Cashman will be remembered by many as Albert Square’s yuppie graphic designer, Colin. But his time in EastEnders is just a small, if very visible, episode in a varied, high-profile career that took him from the back streets of London’s East End to the benches of the House of Lords. Indeed, performing is, in many ways, a mere side act: this is a book in which, at least in the second half, politics takes centre stage.

Cashman grew up in what could well have been EastEnders’ back yard (if it hadn’t actually been filmed in west London), but his childhood, in which untrustworthy and exploitative strangers loom large, would likely have been too extreme for the soap’s scriptwriters to contemplate. He was perfectly cast, then, as a truly mould-breaking character at a time when gay relationships were rarely portrayed as being equal to their straight equivalents on mainstream TV.

After close to 200 episodes, he left to pursue other interests, and eventually found himself elected to the European Parliament, representing the seat of West Midlands. He was a spokesperson on human rights and, before his time in Brussels drew to a close in 2014, he’d been awarded a CBE for public and political service. Returning to Britain wasn’t the end of his political career, nor of his campaigning, and he took his seat in the House of Lords as a life peer.

From humble beginnings, Cashman has reached great heights in both show business and politics, despite facing significant challenges. There are some shocking episodes in his autobiography, but perhaps none is so heartbreaking as that with which it draws to a close.

Key details – Length: 432 pages; Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing; ISBN: 978-1526612366

One of Them: From Albert Square to Parliament Square

2. free: coming of age at the end of history by lea ypi: best political autobiography.

Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but she grew up in Albania during the years of communist rule. Her grandfather had been prime minister for just over a year in the early 1920s, and was assassinated in December 1940. Those facts – and the detrimental impact the family’s association with the former prime minister would have – were kept from her during her childhood.

To a degree, it’s kept from the reader, too. The book is cleverly structured, with the first part covering Ypi’s life under socialism, and the second venturing into the years of the free market economy and the country’s transition to capitalism. Thus, as Ypi grows and learns, so do we. Through her narrative, we overhear relatives talk of family members who have gone away to “university”, always wondering whether there isn’t more to their back story. Inevitably, there is. This is a curious biography, then – one in which the reader grows with the narrator, and learns through her own experience. Yet there’s no naivete in her description of those early years, and no raised eyebrows or nudge to the reader who, reading from the future, knows better than she did herself.

Neither is there any romanticising of life on either side of that political transition. “Five years after the fall of socialism, episodes of our life back then had become part of the repertoire of amusing family anecdotes,” Ypi writes. “It didn’t matter if the memories were absurd, hilarious or painful, or all of these at once. We would joke about them over meals, like drunken sailors who had survived a shipwreck and relisted showing one another the scars.”

Key details – Length: 336 pages; Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0141995106

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History

3. gotta get theroux this by louis theroux: best autobiography for the 90s tv generation.

Louis Theroux is best known for his calm, persistent profiling of rich, famous or unusual characters. Here, he turns that focus on himself as he recounts a career that, from the outside, he seems almost to have fallen into. On the subject of landing his own series off the back of work on TV Nation, Theorux writes that “from a state of directionless obscurity I had been vaulted into a realm of possibility I hadn’t ever dared imagine. And one part of me saw it this way. But another, greater part was dubious, suspecting that the transformation was not wholly earned and therefore not really mine.”

Earned or not, Theroux has more than proved his right to grace our screens in the years since, through a series of groundbreaking documentaries exploring, and sometimes exposing, the less often represented.

Born in Singapore to travel writer Paul and BBC arts producer Anne, he grew up in London, then went to boarding school, spent summers on Cape Cod, and later moved to the US under his own steam as his journalistic career took off. First came newspapers, then television. “For a year and a half, up the Amazon in a rocket motorboat, in the revolutionary hills of Mexican Chiapas, among religious crazies in Jerusalem and good old boys in the backroads of the Deep South, and occasionally amid the almost-as-alien milieu of a well-funded workplace with ambitions to change American television and society, I worked at TV Nation. But it was all a salutary apprenticeship – I was learning, without realising it, skills and techniques that I would rely on throughout the course of my TV career.”

Many of his career highs are well known, but here their background and aftermath are explored in detail. He looks back on his encounter with Jimmy Savile, the resulting broadcast, and the investigation that followed Savile’s death, at which Theroux was called to speak. And he describes the fall-out from an ill-advised tweet, and how it made him feel (“my lawyer advised me to instruct a high-powered QC… I would brood about my own stupidity at sending the tweet and the likelihood of its having catastrophic consequences… I wondered inwardly whether I’d be remortgaging the house, and should I just apologise, or did that, as the lawyers claimed, lay me open to massive damages…”).

It’s easy to imagine that investigative presenters like Theroux simply swoop in, do their jobs and move on to the next subject, the next programme or the next big thing with barely a thought for the one they’re leaving behind. This autobiography proves that not to be the case at all. Not only are there real people behind the stories; there are real people presenting them, too.

Key details – Length: 416 pages; Publisher: Pan; ISBN: 978-1509880393

Gotta Get Theroux This: My life and strange times in television

4. ramble book by adam buxton: best autobiography for kids and teens of the 80s.

It wasn’t his first TV appearance, but Adam Buxton hit the big time in 1996, with Channel 4’s The Adam and Joe Show. Since then, he’s been a regular on BBC3, Xfm, the Edinburgh Festival, films and Eight out of Ten Cats Does Countdown’s dictionary corner. To many, he’ll be best known for his long-running podcast, with a simple formula – an unhurried, rambling chat – that attracts guests of impressive calibre. You don’t need to scroll far through the archive to come across Joe Lycett, Robbie Williams, Zadie Smith, Derren Brown, David Sedaris, Michael Palin, Frank Skinner, and skaters Torvill and Dean. The mix is as eclectic as it is entertaining.

But it’s also not surprising that they feature. The aptly named Ramble Book is a roll-call of the great and the good, with whom Buxton’s diverse media career has brought him into contact. He was at school with documentary maker Louis Theroux – and the “Joe” of The Adam and Joe Show is their mutual friend, filmmaker Joe Cornish. Buxton’s father was the Sunday Telegraph travel editor, as a result of which Buxton junior visited such diverse destinations as Brabadon, China and “all over America” during his childhood.

Yet it’s not a showy book. It’s underpinned by a humbleness, frequently diverts into introspection or random thoughts, and finds Buxton in situations familiar to us all, like the times we’ve made fools of ourselves objecting to what we consider somebody else’s bad behaviour – and the discomfort we often feel afterwards.

There’s a humanity to Ramble Book, a familiarity, and a reminder that famous people are just like the rest of us – just a bit better known.

Key details – Length: 368 pages; Publisher: Mudlark; ISBN: 978-0008293338

Ramble Book: Musings on Childhood, Friendship, Family and 80s Pop Culture

5. conundrum by jan morris: best trans and gender dysphoria autobiography.

Jan Morris was born James Humphry Morris in Somerset in 1926, and died in Wales in 2020. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1972, after travelling to Morocco for the procedure. Two years later, she wrote Conundrum, in which she told the story of her transition. It was re-released in 2018.

Morris is best known as a travel writer, and that career took her to Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, to Fiji, to Suez during the crisis and, memorably, to Italy. Her work on Venice is of particular note. But Conundrum is something else entirely. It’s an internal journey – a journey home in many respects – that sets out its stall at the very beginning.

“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” she writes. “I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” What follows is a highly evocative sentence, that hints at the beauty of the writing to come: “I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave.”

Morris was far from alone in her conviction that she’d been born into the wrong body, but Britain was not a society in which she was free to undertake the necessary transition on her own terms and, “for forty years… a sexual purpose dominated, distracted and tormented my life: the tragic and irrational ambition, instinctively formulated but deliberately pursued, to escape from maleness into womanhood… each year my longing to live as a woman grew more urgent, as my male body seemed to grow harder around me”.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with Morris’ style. That her subject matter is one so rarely discussed makes this short autobiography all the more engaging.

Key details – Length: 160 pages; Publisher: Faber & Faber; ISBN: 978-0571341139

6. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: Best race history autobiography

“I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car.” She was saving his life. Noah was born in apartheid South Africa, to a black mother and white father, at a time when inter-racial relationships were illegal. It was a world and a time “where violence was always lurking and waiting to erupt… Had I lived a different life, getting thrown out of a speeding minibus might have fazed me. I’d have stood there like an idiot… but there was none of that. Mom said ‘run’ and I ran. Like the gazelle runs from the lion, I ran.”

It’s a story that will thankfully be unfamiliar to a large part of its audience. For a white reader with no experience of the political system under which he came into the world, it’s difficult to comprehend Noah’s need to remain hidden and so often confined to the house. Apartheid came to an end when Noah was still a child, but even in the wake of that momentous event the fall out was unequal and extreme.

“What I do remember, what I will never forget,” he writes, “is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.”

Today, as the host of The Daily Show, Noah has been named as one of the most powerful people in New York media. To have reached such heights after so difficult a start in life makes this story all the more remarkable.

For younger readers, there’s also a YA version of this book, at £8.17 .

Key details – Length: 304 pages; Publisher: John Murray; ISBN: 978-1473635302

Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

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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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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.”

• Best books of the year
• Best books 2022
• Biography books
• Autobiography and memoir

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Nonfiction Books » Best Biographies » The Best Memoirs and Autobiographies

The best memoirs: the 2022 nbcc autobiography shortlist, recommended by marion winik.

Gay Bar: Why We Went Out by Jeremy Atherton Lin

Autobiography is evolving; increasingly we find the field dominated by 'genre-fluid' books that plait memoir together with strands of cultural criticism, history, journalism or even poetry. Here, Marion Winik , the memoirist and critic, talks us through the five books that have been shortlisted in the National Book Critic's Circle autobiography category—and describes the face of memoir in 2022.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son's Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha by Rodrigo Garcia

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes by Albert Samaha

1 A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib

2 gay bar: why we went out by jeremy atherton lin, 3 a farewell to gabo and mercedes: a son's memoir of gabriel garcía márquez and mercedes barcha by rodrigo garcia, 4 a ghost in the throat by doireann ní ghríofa, 5 concepcion: an immigrant family’s fortunes by albert samaha.

W hat an exciting shortlist for this year’s National Book Critics Circle autobiography award category. As the chair of the judges, can you give us an overview—what does autobiography and memoir look like in 2022?

Yes, I think ‘a blend of memoir and cultural criticism’ is probably a reasonable way of describing the first book that made the shortlist. This is Hanif Abdurraqib’s A Little Devil in America: Notes In Praise Of Black Performance.

I think I can reveal that this book was considered by more than one committee at the NBCC, because—yes—it is as much cultural criticism as it is autobiography. One of the things that’s important to us is not to let books like that fall through the cracks. We might say, well, it’s not really a memoir, and they might say, well, it’s not really criticism. So we’ve made it our job to embrace those hybrid books. I mean, there was almost a little turf war over this one.

Abdurraqib’s voice is so powerful and personal that even when he’s writing about Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson, it still reads as personal storytelling. It’s certainly not what we ordinarily think of as music criticism. His discussion of each entertainer is very much in terms of his culture and life story.

There was one essay that the committee went crazy for: ‘It Is Safe to Say I Have Lost Many Games of Spades.’ It’s about playing cards in a van with a group of other writers traveling to an event down South. It’s about the different rules and traditions for the game in black communities all over the country. It’s also about friendship. He says that the way each of his friends plays Spades brings out the thing he most loves about each of them. That’s a lovely piece of memoir right there.

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As both a writer and reader of this genre, I’m obsessed with interesting formal constraints and decisions about language. Abdurraqib is a poet, and brings a lyricism and often a sort of incantatory style to his writing. One essay is based on a kind of poem called a ‘crown of sonnets’, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next one. He did that with sections of an essay about Mike Tyson. That enchanted me. He also has five essays with the same title: ‘On Times I Have Forced Myself to Dance.’ And ‘Sixteen Ways of Looking at Blackface’ clearly gets its spinal column from Wallace Stevens.

That makes sense. The second shortlisted title is Jeremy Atherton Lin’s Gay Bar: Why We Went Out . It’s described as “a transatlantic tour of the hangouts that marked his life, with each club, pub and dive revealing itself as a palimpsest of queer history.” What did you admire about this book?

Oh, it’s really good. First of all, it’s very brave and candid. It has a lot of raw sex writing in it, which is attention-grabbing and very well handled. It’s a love story, really; he describes how he met his partner, whom he calls ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ or just ‘Famous’, in a bar when they were really very young. It’s the story of him and Famous, their coming of age, and their sex life over decades, threaded all through the book. So it’s the furthest thing from a dry history of gay bars. It’s very experiential, and takes you inside gay culture in a rare way. He evokes the settings so powerfully. It’s a great way of telling history.

Do you remember the Alia Volz book we talked about last year , Home Baked ? About her mother selling hash brownies in San Francisco?

So the cities featured in this book, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco, come to life in a similar way as in that book. You feel there’s a really vivid capturing of those cultural centers at certain times in their history.

The author came of age in the 1990s, but Aids plays a smaller role in the book than I might have expected or feared. It’s put in its place by all that’s happened before and since. It’s put in a historical context, and that’s kind of liberating I think

I know when people are selling nonfiction books at the moment, publishers often want a personal link to the story. I suppose this is where the trend towards genre fluidity might come in, and I guess it also reflects the way that so-called ‘lived experience’ is increasingly respected and prioritised.

Thanks. The third book is Rodrigo García’s A Farewell To Gabo And Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir. Rodrigo Garcia is Gabriel García Márquez’s son; this is a short but well-formed memoir about the deaths of his parents.

We talked a lot about two aspects of this book. First: is it a handicap that it’s so short? Or is it beautifully compressed, and perfect at this length? Obviously we decided it was the latter. We also talked about whether this book is important because his father was so famous—is that why we liked it?—or was it because it captured something universal about losing both parents? Again, we decided the latter, though Garcia does honor the loss to the world and to his father’s many fans, as well as his own.

Next up, we have Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat . I do love this strange little book. It weaves the story of how she subsumes herself in early motherhood with a parallel story of an Irish noblewoman and poet. Can you tell us a bit more about it?

People really can’t decide what genre this book is in, probably more so than any of the other books. They even tried to say it was fiction! Turf war, part two! I think there’s no doubt it belongs in autobiography. Ní Ghríofa interweaves the earthbound realities of her life as a young mother with her literary obsession with an 18th-century poem. It’s quite remarkable.

She explains that she knew this poem from it being taught to her at school, and then she encountered it at a different time in her life. She had never realised before that the woman poet was a young mom at the time she was widowed; I think she says that this was the detail that pushed her over the edge into obsession. She has a xeroxed copy under her pillow that she pulls out and reads in stolen moments. She researches everything that can be known about this woman’s life (which is both more than you’d think and less than she wants), and she makes her own translation from the Irish, which is included in the book.

“‘Autobiography’ is a pretty old-fashioned word for this category. I think it’s closer to what people now call ‘creative nonfiction’”

The poem itself is almost kind of goth in its details. She drinks her dead husband’s blood, she takes his dead horse’s skull and buries it in her fireplace. It’s also unbelievably romantic, quite in contrast to the diaper pails and floor-mopping and everything else she has going on. But the thing is that she embraces both. She is not downtrodden by her duties as a mother.

There’s an interesting discussion over whether this is a feminist book, because she does kind of love her dishwashing and breast-pumping and such. It has been more traditional in feminism to package up domestic duties as part of female oppression. That’s not really Ní Ghríofa’s approach at all. She finds a beauty in the duties of care. She’s a romantic in the traditional sense. She finds an intensity and romance in her own life.

It has this echoing refrain: “This is a female text.” She applies it to real texts, like the book itself and the poem that she translates, but also to other less obvious tasks. She talks about the idea of the fruits of female labour disappearing, or undoing themselves as fast as you do them—the clean becoming unclean, and so on. I felt this book very powerfully, although I find it hard to sum up the thrust of its ‘argument’.

You know how there was a turn in feminist thinking about sex? Instead of being exploited or ashamed or whatever, you could be  ‘sex positive’ and proud of it. This book is, like, housework positive.

I love that. There’s a bit about how she donates her breast milk until she’s too ill to continue. She’s sapping herself dry for a baby she’s never met. It’s a very pure image of femininity as self-abnegation.

Maybe that brings us to the final book on the shortlist: Albert Samaha’s Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes. It’s the story of the author’s Filipino-American family, and it traces his ancestry back through Filipino history.

There’s a lot we admired about this book. It’s an undertold story. Someone on the committee described it as a collective memoir, shared by unheard people from this background. In addition to the complicated history of the islands starting with Magellan, he includes several wonderful personal stories.  His uncle Spanky who was literally a rock star in the Philippines became a baggage handler at the airport in California. His mother who darts in and out of the story, is a Trumper and a QAnon follower. She gets catfished by a guy from an online dating site. So all these different narrative threads energize each other, and benefit from the contrast.

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In some ways it’s like Gay Bar , in that it is a long cultural history mixed with a personal story. And it succeeds because the writing is so personal and powerful and vivid. It’s part of a more general flowering of Filipino writers right now.

How would you characterise his literary style?

I’d say he writes in a very accomplished narrative nonfiction style—longform journalism laced with personal storytelling—including moments of high irony and humor. He’s not as lyrical as the poets Abdurraqib and Ní Ghríofa, but the task he sets himself makes that an asset. There’s a lot of actual information and education delivered by this book, more like what you’d expect from a title on the nonfiction list—and there’s that hybrid thing again, the leitmotif of this list.

Fantastic. What happens next?

So now the members of all six NBCC committees are reading all the shortlisted books from every category. Then we will meet on Zoom, and at that point it’s all about hearing the voices of the people who weren’t involved in the shortlisting process. As the chair of the autobiography committee, I’m very interested to see how the five books are going to roll with the larger group. Those final discussions are so interesting and important. The best part of being on the NBCC, really. Then we will vote on the winners, and the ceremony will be on the 17 March , preceded by a finalists reading where we will hear two minutes each of all 37 books! I’m particularly excited about that.

February 18, 2022

Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]

Marion Winik

University of Baltimore professor Marion Winik  is the author of The Big Book of the Dead and winner of the 2019 Towson Prize for Literature. Among her ten other books are First Comes Love and Above Us Only Sky . Her essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine and The Sun . A board member of the National Book Critics Circle, she writes book reviews for People, Newsday, The Washington Post , and Kirkus Reviews . She was a commentator on NPR for fifteen years; her honours include an NEA Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction.

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• Range Rover

New Range Rover D350 Autobiography 2022 review

We drive a new range rover mild-hybrid diesel model in the uk to see if the iconic luxury 4x4 is still just as impressive as ever.

4.5 out of 5

A UK drive in the high-spec Autobiography trim reveals a few chinks in the 2022 Range Rover’s armour, but it remains an incredibly convincing luxury car overall, with a vast breadth of abilities. 

The original Range Rover kick-started a whole new genre of vehicles when it was launched over 50 years ago. The automotive world has changed considerably since then, of course, and the SUV segment is now a dominant force. As such, the originator has to cut it in a more crowded marketplace than ever.

An all-new version is just what Land Rover needs to stay relevant. Except, for the freshness underneath, including the new ‘MLA-Flex’ architecture, this D350 in the kitted-out Autobiography trim (one step down from the top-of-the-range SV) doesn’t look all that different from the front. Look for the changes, however, and they’re there, including new LED light clusters and a different-shaped (but still modestly-sized by modern standards) grille.

At the back, the deviations are more obvious, the most radical part of the design being what seems to be a complete lack of rear lights. They’re hidden within the black panelling until turned on - a neat touch. From the sides, meanwhile, it’s a remarkably clean, unfussy design, setting itself apart from visually busy cars like the BMW X7 .

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Inside, again, it’s going to feel fairly familiar to anyone who’s been in the outgoing car. This time, though, there’s a noticeable improvement in quality and premium feel. The 13.1-inch ‘Pivi Pro’ navigation system is new, and it’s in a tablet style, but curiously, it still sits fairly low, where it might do if it was still integrated into the dash.

It’s a shame Land Rover hasn’t made the most of the floating arrangement and moved it closer to eye level, but it’s a slick system overall. We prefer having some sort of tactile control for it like BMW’s iDrive rotary dial, but the touchscreen is responsive, and the menu system is clear and easy to navigate. The graphics are really crisp, but we’re not fans of the surprisingly aggressive haptic feedback. 

Thankfully, it’s not difficult to turn this off. Another tech item you might want to disable is the ‘ClearSight’ rear-view mirror display, which takes a feed from the rear parking camera. It may provide a wider field of view than a conventional rear-view mirror since you aren’t having to peer through a pair of C-pillars, but it can be distracting, and the display often looks washed out. 

As on the mid-range HSE, the ClearSight comes as standard here, along with other spec highlights including a sliding panoramic sunroof, 24-way heated and cooled massage front seats plus 'Executive Class' seating in the rear, ‘SV bespoke’ wooden veneers and a Meridian Signature Sound System. 

Although the screen is probably big enough to accommodate digital climate controls, Land Rover has - thankfully - resisted the urge and left a set of buttons and a pair of dials below. As seen in other products from the company, the latter controls the temperature by default but can operate the fan speed if pulled towards you, or the heated seats if pushed. 

On the move, the Range Rover quickly impresses with its smooth, cosseting ride and almost deathly quiet running, but there are limits to the car’s talents in these areas. While great at ironing out most imperfections in the road surface, the Range Rover is curiously vulnerable to high-frequency chatter, particularly at high speeds, transferring the chop into the cabin much more readily when we’d like. 

At lower speeds, meanwhile, larger hits can sometimes transmit a dull but surprisingly loud thud of wheel and tyre noise, even if the suspension does a good job of absorbing the bump itself.

In terms of ride comfort, then, it’s mostly good news. There’s a clear focus on comfort, but it doesn’t come at the expense of how the Range Rover behaves when it reaches a corner. There’s a highly satisfying moment when you reach a bend at a decent pace, expect a hefty dose of body roll, and then react in bemusement at its relative absence. 

There are SUVs that corner flatter, of course, but those have a more sporting nature that comprises general comfort. In the Range Rover, the ride and handling are deftly balanced, making it more fun than you might expect to tackle a good B-road. The steering meanwhile isn’t exactly brimming with feedback, but it’s well-weighted, and although not the fastest rack out there, this suits the nature of the car. 

Helping the Range Rover feel especially agile is a rear-wheel steering system, which angles the rear wheels in the opposite direction to the fronts at lower speeds. This also gives the car a super-low turning circle under 11 metres, helping not just low-speed manoeuvring, but during off-roading too. We’ll get to the latter soon. 

One less successful part of the driving experience is the eight-speed automatic gearbox. Most of the time, it fades into the background, as all good autos should, but there are occasions when it makes itself known for the wrong reasons. 

For instance, the shifts, particularly under high load, can sometimes be quite harsh. It can also be sluggish to kick down at times, even in Dynamic mode. The metal steering-wheel-mounted gear shift paddles are, at least, quality items, in stark contrast to the plasticy items used by many rivals. 

In our test car, said gearbox is hooked up to a D350 3.0-litre mild-hybrid Ingenium inline-six diesel, which puts out 345bhp and 700Nm of torque, making for a 6.1-second 0-62mph time. It's a good figure for such a heavy car, and it translates in the real world to all the straight-line performance you could ever need. 

With a wealth of mid-range punch, you have to question the need for the BMW-sourced 4.4-litre twin-turbo V8 coming later, particularly given the way fuel prices are going and that car’s enormous up-front cost. For a diesel, the D350 unit is also smooth and refined. 

A Range Rover has to perform off-road too, and on a detour via Land Rover’s Eastnor Castle Experience centre, the car proves this with ease. Tackling rough ground is disarmingly easy even on road-biased all-season tyres, not just because of the capable suspension and locking differentials, but also the array of cameras. 

Granted, the festooning of lenses in the front grille might not look the neatest, but the various angles on offer give a huge confidence boost when navigating an off-road course in such an expensive SUV.

Of particular use are the two cameras showing a view of the front wheels - great for showing where the corners of the car are in relation to anything you’d rather not hit. The all-wheel steering also helps when negotiating tight, muddy switch-backs. 

The final string to the Range Rover’s bow is practicality. For the first time ever, you can have it as a seven-seater , and with a decently-sized third-row. As before, you get the famed split tailgate to sit on whenever you need to take a break on your luxury off-road excursion, while in the front, there’s an abundance of large cubby holes, including one neatly ‘hidden’ below the cupholders. 

The Range Rover still has some areas for improvement, and inside, it perhaps ought to feel a touch more special considering the cost - the average price of the 2022 Range Rovers so far in the UK is around £125,000, just above the price of ‘our’ D350 Autobiography, which starts at  £122,375. The V8 mentioned earlier is £157,820, and more people than you might think are spending over £200k on these cars once options and personalisation are taken into account.

Even so, the Range Rover blends luxury, comfort and driver engagement better than anything else out there for the money. A Bentley Bentayga betrays its Audi Q7 links if you look too closely, and we’ve already discussed the looks of the BMW X7 , which also isn’t as nice as the Range Rover on the inside. 

You probably don’t need to spend quite as much as this, though. Impressively specced the Autobiography might be, a £108,775 D350 HSE or the £105,675 D300 in the same trim will tick all boxes for most, and then some.

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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.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links. Here’s how we test products and why you should trust us.

A memoir can be many things: a teacher, a companion, an inspiration. Some memoirs comfort us, reflecting our shared truths, while others challenge us to step outside of our own experiences. All the best books transport us from our lives into someone else’s, but memoirs take on that burden literally, and in doing so, make readers feel less alone. These days, we’re lucky to be living through a golden age of memoir, with the nonfiction form becoming more porous to allow shades of reportage, travelogue, and cultural criticism.

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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14 celebrity autobiography books you won't want to put down

The must-read celebrity memoirs for 2023.

While we love a novel, there's nothing quite like getting stuck into a candid celebrity memoir that reveals the real person behind the persona. From tragic childhood stories to turbulent relationships and their journeys to success, they're sometimes funny, often relatable, and almost always inspire us in some way.

Whether you're interested in the lives of royals like Prince Harry , US celebrities like Britney Spears and Matthew Perry , or  British TV stars like Holly Willoughby , we've found something for everyone.

Trending celebrity autobiographies at a glance

• Britney Spears - The Woman In Me
• Matthew Perry - Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing
• Prince Harry - Spare
• Jada Pinkett Smith - Worthy
• Michelle Obama - Becoming

How we chose the best celebrity autobiographies

• Bestsellers: All of the celebrity memoirs in this edit have been bestsellers on Amazon and many are Amazon Editor's Picks.
• Trending: We've included all of the most talked about celebrity autobiographies right now.
• Reading & listening options:  Each book is available in a range of forms, from paperback to Kindle and Audible.

The best celebrity autobiographies to read now

Scroll on for 14 of the best celebrity memoirs that deserve a place on your bookshelf.

Britney Spears, The Woman In Me

Britney 's highly-anticipated memoir was released on 24 October, and she's finally speaking in her own words about her heartbreaking personal struggles, from her relationships - most notably with Justin Timberlake - her exploitation by the media, and the conservatorship that ruled her life for 13 years.

Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing

Friends star Matthew Perry released his memoir last year, less than 12 months before he tragically died in October 2023. It was an instant New York Times bestseller thanks to his very candid account of his addictions, and revelations about what it was really like behind the scenes on one of the biggest TV shows of all time.

Prince Harry, Spare

Released in January, Prince Harry's debut book was already a bestseller on pre-orders alone. The candid memoir details his life including the death of his mother Princess Diana and meeting his now wife Meghan Markle . All proceeds from the book go to British charities.

Pamela Anderson, Love, Pamela

Following 2022's explosive Pam & Tommy mini-series, Pamela Anderson  set the record straight in her own words with her first memoir. Alternating between storytelling and her own poetry, she reveals all from her childhood to her relationships and life in the Playboy Mansion.

Paris Hilton, Paris: The Memoir

We all know Paris Hilton as a 00s icon - LA's most famous heiress and star of the reality show  The Simple Life,  but as we've since discovered, there's so much more to Hollywood's original It-girl. In her first memoir, Paris details what it was really like for her growing up, from being kidnapped to attend an ‘emotional growth' boarding school and the abuse she suffered there, to how she grew her global empire.

Michelle Obama, Becoming

If you're looking for a truly inspirational read, try  Michelle Obama 's award-winning memoir,  Becoming . Published in 2018 to critical acclaim, it's a deeply personal account of her life growing up in Chicago, her university days and her time spent serving as First Lady of the United States.

Jada Pinkett Smith, Worthy

Actress, singer-songwriter and host of the viral Red Table Talk , Jada Pinkett Smith 's autobiography is as honest and vulnerable as you'd expect. She writes candidly about her childhood in Baltimore, turbulent teen years and unconventional relationship with Will Smith, never shying away from revealing her insecurities or past mistakes.

Reese Witherspoon, Whiskey in a Teacup

Reese Witherspoon pays homage to her southern heritage in this part memoir part lifestyle guide. It's a collection of personal stories, beauty hacks and party hosting tips, with some of her grandmother Dorothea's best recipes thrown in for good measure.

Matthew McConaughey, Greenlights

Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey released Greenlights  as   an honest account of the lessons he's learnt in life. From his tough childhood in Texas to his pursuit of acting, through his old diaries he writes about his failures and successes and what he's taken from them.

Trevor Noah, Born a Crime

Trevor Noah’s bestselling memoir tells the story of his path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show . Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, which was at the time punishable by five years in prison, he was mostly kept hidden for the earliest years of his life. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s white rule, Trevor went on to fully embrace the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle to become the star he is today.

Will Smith, Will

From rap star to A-list Hollywood actor, Will Smith has seen decades of success. Now, with the help of bestselling author Mark Manson, he's written his memoir, which also offers wisdom on how to overcome life's difficulties.

Priyanka Chopra, Unfinished

From growing up in India to winning the global beauty pageants that launched her acting career and becoming one of the most famous women in the world,  Priyanka 's memoir has a lot to pack in. It's honest, funny and a real eye-opener.

Holly Willoughby, Reflections

Holly Willoughby's autobiography book explores how to navigate emotionally challenging situations, from body image to burnout, and how to treat yourself with kindness. The TV Star said she's "sharing her truths" and reveals what works for her when life gets tricky. 

Tina Brown, The Vanity Fair Diaries

If you're interested in celebrity culture and what goes on behind the scenes at a glossy magazine, you'll love this memoir by former  Vanity Fair  editor-in-chief ,  Tina Brown. Based on her personal diaries, she shares everything that went down in New York and Hollywood in the 80s and it's seriously juicy.

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• "A deeply personal tale informed by Mubarak's own experiences"  Naman Ramachandran : Variety
• "[It] is a genuine discovery here, a taut and elegantly staged two-hander that transcends regional politics to make a profound comment on the state of the world today"  Damon Wise : Deadline
• "An impressive feature debut (...) A gripping tale that marks Mubarak as a powerful new voice"  Allan Hunter : Screendaily
• "This plot conceit is just too generic and familiar (...) The imaginative empathy he attempts to create by placing himself in a very different person’s shoes can only go so far"  David Katz : Cineuropa
• "It's a chilling and captivating exploration of Indonesia's recent history through the story of a young man seeking purpose and approval"  Martin Kudlac : Screen Anarchy

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• Department for Business & Trade

27 April 2022: UK-Japan CEPA Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures – joint minutes

Updated 3 May 2024

© Crown copyright 2024

This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or email: [email protected] .

Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.

This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-japan-cepa-documents/9d6adf45-1cd7-464b-bd8a-e53da3a93089

The UK-Japan CEPA

First meeting of the Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary measures

27 April 2022 (virtual meeting)

The first meeting of the Committee on Sanitary and Phytosanitary ( SPS ) measures (the SPS Committee), established under the UK- Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA),took place on 27 April 2022, via videoconference.

The meeting was co-chaired by Nihei Daisuke, Director for International Economy Division, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan (MOFA) and Paul Green, Deputy Director, UK Office for SPS Trade Assurance within the Animal Plant Health & Welfare Directorate, Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), with attendance of participants from Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), the Embassy of Japan in the UK, Department of International Trade (DIT), Food Safety Agency ( FSA ) and the UK Embassy in Japan

Opening remarks

Both sides noted their long-standing relationship and recognised the committee as a forum to continue addressing SPS issues and to facilitate resolutions at a bilateral level.

The UK acknowledged technical dialogue between Japan and the UK on a range of issues, notably trade in bonsai trees, and explained its commitment to animal health, welfare and high food standards

Japan highlighted the close collaboration between Japan and the UK in various fields such as security, defence, culture and trade and recalled their commitment to climate change and digital trade at first meeting of Joint Committee.

Adoption of the agenda

The meeting agenda was adopted.

Adoption of the Rules of Procedure

Both sides confirmed that the Rules of Procedure for Joint Committee would apply mutatis mutandis to the SPS Committee based on mutual understanding.

Information regarding organizational structure and distribution of responsibilities between Competent Authorities in the field of SPS measures

Both sides presented on their organisational structures and points of contact. Japan raised questions on the review of retained EU law and border checks in Northern Ireland. The UK committed to responding to these questions in writing.

Retained Regulation 2016/6 on Importing Food from Japan Following the Fukushima Nuclear Accident

Japan acknowledged the work to remove the UK import measures on products from the Fukushima region. The FSA provided an update on the process for removing the restrictions and the timelines involved. Japan had a variety of follow up questions on timelines for this work. The UK undertook to respond in writing within 24 hours.

Calendar of the SPS committee

Both sides decided that if there were no outstanding issues then there could be flexibility on the frequency of the meetings. Japan indicated that it was happy to host the second meeting of the SPS committee.

Operational conclusions

The UK summarised discussions and both sides would finalise joint minutes in writing after the meeting.

Closing remarks

Both sides thanked all involved for organising the meeting. The co-chairs were thankful for a productive first meeting in establishing a partnership for cooperation.

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