Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Louis Theroux
Louis Theroux has been making documentaries since 1994. He started by following around minor celebrities and American eccentrics and gradually moved into territory that required considerably more courage: maximum-security prisons, dementia wards, families dealing with autism, the American opioid crisis, far-right militias, the Church of Scientology. His method has always been the same: be genuinely curious, ask the question nobody else will ask, resist the urge to judge before you understand. What he does on screen is harder to replicate in print than it looks — the version of Louis Theroux that exists in a book has to work without the long silences, the slightly awkward smile, the ability to just sit there until someone says something true. He has written three books. All three are extensions of the same project: trying to understand why people do what they do, and being honest about the limits of that understanding.
By Lisanne Swart · 3 books · Journalism · Memoir · Non-Fiction · Updated May 2026
The Call of the Weird: Travels in American Subcultures
Theroux’s first book, based on a trip he made to revisit some of the most memorable subjects from his early Weird Weekends documentary series — the American extremists, true believers, and social outliers he had first encountered in the late 1990s. He returns to a former white supremacist, a UFO cult survivor, a rapper who never made it, a survivalist, an ex-porn star, and others, asking what happened to them and how their beliefs and choices had developed in the years since filming. The book moves between short profiles and longer personal essays about what he had learned from the encounters.
The Call of the Weird is most interesting as a document of Theroux working out what his documentary method actually means — what it costs the subjects, what it costs him, and whether the comfortable distance of the camera protects both parties or just him. He is more honest in print than the documentaries sometimes allow, and the self-examination is sharper and less comfortable than his television persona suggests. For readers who have only encountered him on screen, this is the book that shows the thinking underneath.
→ Best investigative journalism books — more in this tradition
Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television
Theroux’s memoir — the account of his career from its unlikely beginnings as a researcher on Michael Moore’s TV Nation in the mid-1990s through his years of Weird Weekends, his shift into darker documentary territory, and his ongoing attempt to understand why certain subjects draw him and what the work costs. The book covers his family — he is the son of travel writer Paul Theroux and nephew of novelist Alexander Theroux, a literary lineage he is both grateful for and slightly crushed by — his marriage, his children, and the specific anxiety of being someone who is professionally fascinated by other people’s lives while being somewhat opaque about his own. It became a Sunday Times bestseller.
This is where to start. Gotta Get Theroux This is the most complete and most readable of his three books — propelled by narrative in a way the others aren’t, and honest about failure and self-doubt in ways that his television work rarely is. The chapters on his early career are funny; the chapters on the darker documentaries — the ones about addiction, dementia, death row — are something else entirely. He writes about what it means to be present at moments of extreme human experience as someone whose job is to observe rather than to intervene, and the discomfort of that position is where the best material in the book lives.
→ Best memoirs & biographies — more books in this tradition
Theroux the Keyhole: When the World Went Weird (and So Did I)
A diary of the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021, written in real time and published in 2022. With his documentaries halted and travel impossible, Theroux found himself confined to home with his family — and turned the experience into the subject of the book. He writes about home-schooling, about his drinking, about the anxiety of inactivity, about what it means to be a person whose professional identity is built around going to extreme places and talking to extreme people when he can do neither. Woven through the lockdown material are accounts of the work he did manage: the Grounded podcast series, a trip to the US to make a documentary about Tiger King’s Joe Exotic, and following up with militia members and conspiracy theorists for his Life on the Edge series.
Theroux the Keyhole is the most personal and the most vulnerable of the three books, and also the most mixed in quality. The lockdown diary sections are strongest when he is being honest about the specific discomforts of his situation — the drinking, the restlessness, the difficulty of being present in a domestic life that his professional life had always allowed him to escape. The sections about the documentaries he managed to make are less integrated but rewarding for readers who want to understand his process. Best read after Gotta Get Theroux This rather than as a standalone.
Where to start with Louis Theroux’s books
If you have never read him
→ Start with Gotta Get Theroux This. It is his memoir — the most complete account of his life and career, the most narratively driven, and the most honest about the anxiety and self-doubt behind the public persona. It also works perfectly well without any prior knowledge of his documentaries, though it will send you back to watch them.
If you want to understand the method before the memoir
→ The Call of the Weird first. It is where Theroux works out on the page what his documentary practice actually means — what it costs him and his subjects — and reading it alongside or before the memoir shows the development of his thinking across fifteen years.
If you want the most personal and most recent book
→ Theroux the Keyhole. Read it after Gotta Get Theroux This — it is a sequel in spirit, and the vulnerability in the lockdown sections lands differently once you know the professional life he is describing being stripped away.
If the investigative journalism angle draws you — the method of getting inside closed worlds and reporting honestly from there
→ My best investigative journalism books list has the writers who belong in the same tradition. Also: Bad Blood by John Carreyrou — the same commitment to understanding a closed world from the inside, applied to Silicon Valley rather than American subcultures.
If it is the memoir quality that resonates — the honest account of a professional life and what it cost
→ My best memoirs and biographies list and best celebrity memoirs list take that further. Working by Studs Terkel sits in a related tradition — a journalist spending his career listening to people talk about what their lives are actually like, and what that reveals about America.
Frequently asked questions about Louis Theroux’s books
From the bookshelf
“The best questions are the ones you already know the answer to.” — Louis Theroux
More books from journalists who refuse to look away on my personal bookshelf — hand-picked for readers who want books that stay with them long after the last page.
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