Best Memoir Books

Nike founder Phil Knight's memoir of building one of the world's most iconic brands — from $50 borrowed from his father and a handshake deal for Japanese running shoes to a multi-billion dollar empire. Brutally honest and compulsively readable.

A neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at 36 confronts the questions he spent his career preparing to face — and writes a book about mortality, meaning, and what makes a life worth living.

Tara Westover's memoir of growing up in the mountains of Idaho without formal education, in a survivalist family, and her journey to Cambridge and Harvard.

Anthony Bourdain's legendary memoir of twenty-five years in professional kitchens — the drug use, the violence, the camaraderie, and the obsessive craft of restaurant cooking.

Krakauer's firsthand account of the 1996 Mount Everest disaster, in which eight climbers died during a single storm. One of the greatest adventure narratives ever written.

Bill Bryson returns to America after twenty years in England and decides to hike the Appalachian Trail — 2,200 miles from Georgia to Maine — with his out-of-shape friend Stephen Katz. They complete a memorable portion of it.

Tobias Wolff's memoir of his childhood in the late 1950s in Chinook, Washington, with his mother and her brutal second husband Dwight. He lies compulsively, reinvents himself repeatedly, and eventually escapes to a Connecticut boarding school on fraudulently obtained recommendations. One of the great American coming-of-age memoirs — about the self as a thing to be constructed rather than discovered.

Hemingway's memoir of his years in 1920s Paris: the cafés where he wrote, the poverty and pleasure of expatriate life, F. Scott Fitzgerald's insecurities, Gertrude Stein's salon, Ezra Pound's generosity, and the first wife he would lose by leaving her. Published posthumously, it remains one of the most beautiful books about writing and Paris ever written.

Part memoir, part urban history, Pamuk's portrait of Istanbul through his own childhood and adolescence explores the concept of hüzün—the melancholy that permeates the city's self-understanding after the fall of the Ottoman Empire—through family photographs, street scenes, and the Western writers who tried to capture Istanbul from the outside.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl's harrowing account of surviving Auschwitz forms the foundation of logotherapy — the idea that the primary human drive is not pleasure but the pursuit of meaning. One of the most important psychological texts of the 20th century.

Andre Agassi's remarkably candid memoir about a sporting career built on hating the sport that made him famous — written with J.R. Moehringer.

Beryl Markham's memoir of growing up in Kenya in the early twentieth century, training horses, becoming the first person to fly solo non-stop from England to North America west to east, and living a life that defied every category available to women of her era.

George Orwell's first-person account of fighting for the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War — the trenches outside Huesca, the revolutionary Barcelona of 1936, the May Days street fighting, the Stalinist suppression of the independent left, and his narrow escape from arrest and execution.

Young Gerald Durrell's account of five years living on Corfu with his eccentric family in the 1930s — a childhood paradise of wildlife, sunshine, and complete freedom to roam.

Peter Matthiessen and zoologist George Schaller trek 250 miles into the Himalayas to study the bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) and their predator, the nearly mythical snow leopard — a physical journey that becomes a meditation on grief, Zen Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.

A selection of Cheryl Strayed's advice columns written under the pseudonym 'Sugar' for The Rumpus. Honest to the point of pain, these essays — part advice, part memoir — have become one of the most loved pieces of American non-fiction writing of recent decades.

Soyinka's memoir of his childhood in the Yoruba town of Aké in colonial Nigeria—the parsonage compound where he grew up, his early encounter with spirits and schooling, his mother's role in a women's tax revolt, his father's dignity as a colonial schoolteacher. The most beautifully written African memoir.

New Yorker editor Bill Buford quits his job to apprentice in Mario Batali's chaotic Babbo kitchen, then traces Italian cooking to its source — apprenticing with a Tuscan butcher and a pasta master in Emilia-Romagna.

Bruce Chatwin's account of travelling through Patagonia — the vast, wind-scoured southern cone of South America — in search of a piece of skin he remembered from his grandmother's cabinet, which turned out to belong to a mylodon.

Before moving back to America after twenty years in Britain, Bill Bryson makes a farewell tour of the country that adopted him — by bus, train, and foot, from Dover to the Highlands — in search of what makes Britain lovably, infuriatingly, irreducibly itself.

Matt Haig recounts his collapse into panic disorder and depression at twenty-four and how, over years of struggle, he rebuilt his life. Funny, honest, and never falsely hopeful, it became a word-of-mouth sensation and one of the most-recommended mental health memoirs of its era.