In our new memoirs and autobiographies section, we keep track of some of the new books coming out by Five Books interviewees and frequently recommended authors.
Finding Me: A Memoir
by Viola Davis
***Winner of the 2023 Grammy for Best Audiobook, Narration, and Storytelling***
In Finding Me, Viola Davis shares her struggles with poverty, abuse, and racism, as well as her triumphs and the lessons she has learned on her journey to becoming a celebrated actor.
“A Stranger in Your Own City by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad is a beautiful book which tells that story from the point of view of a local resident, an architect, who later ended up working for foreign media, first as a fixer and then as a photographer and writer. The book opens with a chapter on “My First War”—about the Iran-Iraq war, talks about the years of sanctions, and then goes through everything that happened from 2003 up to the present. I couldn’t put it down. It’s like having a friend telling you what they lived through and finally being able to understand what happened and why things went so wrong.” Read more...
Notable Nonfiction of Early 2023
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“This is about a family that is divided. One sister spends most of her life in Taiwan and the other spends most of her life on the mainland. It’s a very personal story. It’s a memoir and family history, driven by the author’s interest in figuring out the things that the family didn’t talk about. There’s a bit of the historian-as-detective in this book, as she tries to work out what was going on when her aunts were young…The women in the story are special and they’re not just passive agents. But there is a high degree of luck, which is something that also figures in this. The author herself, in some ways, was lucky. She benefited from having a relative who could help her get connected to the outside world, even though at an earlier point, you would have said, ‘How unfortunate to have a family whose members were disconnected that way.’ That captures something important about China and the China story.” Read more...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
“It is a devastating story. It’s a memoir of her marriage and the death of her husband by assisted suicide. Listening to the audio version embodies why author memoirs are so popular and so powerful as audiobooks. You hear her telling this story. It’s an intensely personal story. She’s a professional in the way that she holds herself together as she tells this story, but as the listener, you hear—she can’t help but have in her voice—the emotion and the many feelings that she had as she went through this incredible experience with her husband.” Read more...
Robin Whitten, Journalist
The Raven's Nest
by Sarah Thomas
Sarah Thomas's debut memoir, set in a remote, starkly beautiful region of Iceland, is moving meditation on landscape and identity.
The Light We Carry: Overcoming in Uncertain Times
by Michelle Obama
Michelle Obama's new book, The Light We Carry, is part self help and part memoir. It reflects a trend in celebrity memoirs where personal life stories are told partly to give advice to others who might be facing similar challenges—and we are certainly all living in "uncertain times." The publisher has revealed little about the book, but if her previous memoir, Becoming, is anything to go by, The Light We Carry will hopefully be insightful, engagingly written and funny. As with Becoming, Obama has narrated the audiobook herself.
“***WINNER of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best autobiography***
It has a real freshness to it. She talks about being Asian American in a way we haven’t quite heard before. She digs into the personal to get to her political points, and that keeps it really lively. She is so honest and clear, and not afraid to be self-deprecating. There’s plenty of autobiography in the mix here, so I was really glad it made it to our final five” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Marion Winik, Journalist
Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing
by Horatio Clare
Memoirist and bestselling travel writer Horatio Clare tells his story of what it was like to go mad, in what looks to be a heartbreaking, funny and invaluable look at what it's like to live with manic depression.
The Soul of a Woman
by Isabel Allende
It's hard not to be excited about a new memoir (she's already written a couple) from Chilean literary legend Isabel Allende. Now close to 80, she remains exuberant about life and a staunch feminist. Isabel Allende's father was the cousin of Salvador Allende, the Chilean president who was overthrown in the military coup of 1973 that brought Augusto Pinochet to power. It would turn into one of the bloodiest episodes in political history, and Allende herself ended up in exile in Venezuela. But it was there that she started writing her first and probably still most famous book, The House of Spirits.
Thin Places
by Kerri ní Dochartaigh
The Irish writer Kerri ní Dochartaigh's debut work of memoir is a deeply moving account of a traumatic childhood in a Northern Ireland riven by sectarian violence—and the sanctuary she found in the natural world.
Acid for the Children: A Memoir
by Flea
Nominated for the 2021 Grammy Awards, Acid for the Children, written and read by Flea, the bassist for the band Red Hot Chili Peppers, is hard-earned wisdom from a sweet soul. Flea might have flamed out as tragically like as many of his Los Angeles rock world contemporaries if not for reading. Throughout, Flea recounts the importance of books in his life in keeping him grounded and balanced.
Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation
by C.M.Butzer, Edward O. Wilson & Jim Ottaviani
This book is a wonderful graphic adaptation of biologist EO Wilson's memoirs. It's touching and enlightening and leaves you feeling excited about the natural world. It's also interesting for the light it sheds on what makes someone a great scientist. Wilson, born in 1929, won two Pulitzer Prizes for nonfiction for his books, one in 1979 for On Human Nature, and one in 1991 for The Ants, co-authored with German biologist Bert Hölldobler. EO Wilson's books—he wrote many—have also been frequently recommended on Five Books.
A Promised Land
by Barack Obama
Barack Obama is an experienced—and talented—audiobook narrator so it’s no surprise he’s the one reading aloud his presidential memoir. This is only the first volume and it’s already more than 29 hours, so it’s quite a commitment, but also a unique opportunity to be told, firsthand, what it’s actually like to be President of the United States (POTUS). Hint: you’re dealing with a lot of complicated things, like healthcare reform.
Narrator: Barack Obama
Length: 29hr 10mins
Twilight of Democracy
by Anne Applebaum
Anne Applebaum's latest book, Twilight of Democracy, is part polemic, part memoir, and tracks how and why so many people she knew (eg Viktor Orban, who has been prime minister of Hungary for the past decade) abandoned liberal democracy and became far right populists. Applebaum was a foreign correspondent in eastern Europe at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall and continued to cover the region for many years.
We interviewed Anne Applebaum on the best Memoirs of Communism.
Know My Name: A Memoir
by Chanel Miller
***Winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle’s Award for autobiography***
In Know My Name the survivor of the Stanford sexual assault case tells her story.
“Act Like You Got Some Sense is a guide to parenting, told through stories that impart lessons Foxx learned about parenting, often by failing as a parent. I would especially recommend this book to mothers, who in my experience hold themselves to (or are held to) much higher standards than fathers. They know it’s impossible to be perfect, yet they still always feel like they’re failing. The main message of this book is that you’re inevitably going to fail, but it’s okay: the most important thing you can do as a parent is show up and be present. If you do that, your children will ultimately forgive your screw-ups. Foxx takes a jokey approach.” Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
“Many of the short chapters are addressed to Strong’s young cousin, Owen, who dies of brain cancer just as COVID starts spreading in New York City…This Will All Be Over Soon is a short book by a highly emotional person who often provides a blow-by-blow account of her feelings. Strong describes having a lot of anxiety and depression which make it difficult for her to get perspective on her emotions.” Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
“Reading This Much Is True is like hanging out with an aunt who’s had a little too much to drink and is letting it all hang out. I thought it was fantastic. At one point, she says, apropos of nothing, ‘I’ve always felt that smoked salmon was an essential ingredient of any social occasion. But it must, like a woman, be moist.'” Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
“Burke is the activist and community organizer who coined the phrase ‘Me Too’ while working with Black women and girls to heal from sexual assault. Her book tells the story of how she came to the key insight of that work: you can’t empathize with others unless you empathize with yourself. “ Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
“What I liked most about Will was Smith’s self-awareness and self-analysis. He’s very upfront about how his emotional limitations motivated him to become a celebrity. He foregrounds his growth and change as a person, even recounting some of his therapy sessions. He shares insights about what made him a celebrity and kept him a celebrity.” Read more...
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs
Sharon Marcus, Literary Scholar
“Volz’s mother was the main vendor of pot brownies in San Francisco in the 1970s, and into the ‘80s. She literally pushed Alia around in a stroller, delivering pot brownies to all the artists and restaurants around the city and at Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a major business. There’s another level of the book that’s a social and political history of San Francisco, including the assassination of Harvey Milk, the beginning of Aids, etc. It turns out that these pot brownie vendors were some of the first people to explore the medical uses of marijuana. They were forces in the decriminalisation process as well.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Marion Winik, Journalist
“This is Moore’s debut memoir—her previous book was a novel with elements of magical realism. She doesn’t let categories of literature bother her. That’s a good thing. The whole first part of the book is in written in what I would call a voice of innocence: it’s her five-year-old self explaining the civil war in the terms she saw it at the time. She thought that the bad men were dragons, the giant is her father. She perceived the situation in these mythic terms. You’ve got, like, 100 pages of this stuff. Then you turn the page and it’s like, boom, she’s on Tinder in Brooklyn trying to get a date. It’s just so unexpected. I love that. So it’s not just about the heartbreak of war, it’s also about heartbreak of romance.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Marion Winik, Journalist
“Lehrer has such a great voice on the page, it’s so engaging and witty. Her memoir is a cousin of Lucy Grealy’s classic Autobiography of a Face. But there are not too many laugh lines in Autobiography of a Face, and this has more of a sense of humour—which is good when you’re in a situation where everything is just so unbelievably painful.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Marion Winik, Journalist
“This is a really edgy book. Lawson says things that may get on people’s nerves… and she really doesn’t care. She gets into the whole woke scenario in a really interesting way, both in real life and on social media, which is as you know a big vehicle for wokeness and social justice warrior-ing.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
Marion Winik, Journalist
-
1
Will
by Will Smith and Mark Manson -
2
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement
by Tarana Burke -
3
This Much Is True
by Miriam Margolyes -
4
This Will All Be Over Soon: A Memoir
by Cecily Strong -
5
Act Like You Got Some Sense: And Other Things My Daughters Taught Me
by Jamie Foxx and Nick Chiles
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs, recommended by Sharon Marcus
The Best New Celebrity Memoirs, recommended by Sharon Marcus
While it’s easy to dismiss celebrity memoirs as offering cheap, voyeuristic thrills into the lives of famous people we like the look of, when they’re done well, they can give insight into challenges we all grapple with as human beings. They can also be very funny. Sharon Marcus, professor of literature at Columbia University and author of The Drama of Celebrity, recommends the best new celebrity memoirs.
-
1
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
by Cathy Park Hong -
2
This is Major: On Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope
by Shayla Lawson -
3
Golem Girl: A Memoir
by Riva Lehrer -
4
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women: A Memoir
by Wayétu Moore -
5
Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco
by Alia Volz
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist, recommended by Marion Winik
The Best Memoirs: The 2021 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist, recommended by Marion Winik
From fleeing the Liberian civil war to selling pot brownies in San Francisco, the finalists for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle award for the best autobiography offer five vivid life stories, told expertly. Critic, broadcaster and author Marion Winik talks us through the brilliant memoirs that made the 2021 shortlist.
