Best Memoir Books

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

Restaurateur Danny Meyer's part-memoir, part-business book on the power of hospitality. Drawing on the success of Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack, Meyer lays out his philosophy of 'enlightened hospitality' — putting people first — as a guide to building any business worth caring about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Martin Amis's final novel blurs autobiography and fiction — following a character named Martin through decades of friendship with Christopher Hitchens, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and other literary giants, interwoven with craft lessons on how to write fiction, in what the author calls 'a novelised autobiography or an autobiographical novel.'

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

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

Mary Karr's landmark memoir of a turbulent Texas childhood. With ferocious honesty, dark humor, and dazzling prose, Karr recounts growing up in a gritty oil town with a hard-drinking father, a brilliant, volatile, much-married mother, and family secrets that threaten to destroy them all.

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

Frances Mayes, a poet and university professor, buys a ruined villa in the Tuscan hills, restores it with her partner Ed, and discovers the rhythms of Italian rural life — its food, its seasons, its ancient craftsmanship, and its unhurried beauty.

Naipaul's account of his first visit to India — the ancestral homeland he had carried as an idea throughout his Trinidadian childhood. What he found was a place of overwhelming complexity, poverty, and social denial that he could neither embrace as home nor dismiss as foreign. A devastating and controversial travel memoir.

Ibram X. Kendi argues that there is no neutral position on racism — only racist and antiracist policies and ideas — and weaves this argument through memoir, examining his own history of internalized racism and the process of thinking himself out of it.

Barnes meditates on death — his own, his family's, his writers' — with the clarity and wit that characterize his fiction. Not quite memoir, not quite philosophy, the book is a sustained confrontation with what it means to live knowing the end is coming.

Gerald Durrell's account of his second animal-collecting expedition to the British Cameroons in 1949, and his extraordinary friendship with the Fon of Bafut — a remarkable ruler with a taste for whisky and dancing.

Georges Perec's haunting, formally daring memoir-novel. Alternating chapters braid Perec's fragmentary memories of a childhood shadowed by the Holocaust with a chilling fictional allegory of an island society obsessed with sport — two narratives that converge on the unspeakable horror at the heart of his lost family.

Murakami has run at least one marathon a year for over twenty-five years. This memoir — written during training for the 2005 New York City Marathon — is about running, but also about writing, ageing, and the relationship between physical and mental endurance. The most personal and direct thing he has published: a self-portrait through the discipline of long-distance running.

Thomas Bernhard's part-memoir, part-fiction account of a friendship. While confined to a hospital, the narrator reflects on his bond with Paul Wittgenstein — nephew of the philosopher — a brilliant, doomed man given to madness, in a mordant, obsessive meditation on illness, friendship, genius, and Austrian society.

The continuation of Cecilia Klein's story from The Tattooist of Auschwitz — after liberation, Cilka is convicted by the Soviets of collaboration and sent to a Siberian labour camp, where she must survive again.

Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux's raw, unfiltered diary of obsessive love. Kept during an all-consuming affair with a younger, married Russian diplomat, Getting Lost records desire, waiting, and self-abandonment with a candor that strips passion to its rawest reality — the unmediated source behind her novel Simple Passion.

Paul Theroux's classic travelogue of a journey by train from Boston to the tip of South America. Riding the rails through the Americas to the remote Patagonian express, Theroux observes landscapes, fellow passengers, and his own restlessness with the sharp eye and acerbic wit that made him a master of travel writing.