Reading List

Authors Like Virginia Giuffre

She wrote the book with Amy Wallace over four years, and they finished it in the autumn of 2024. In an email that April she asked that it be published whatever happened to her. It came out in October 2025 and won Overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards the following spring — not the true-crime prize, the general one. What that award recognised is worth being precise about: Nobody's Girl is built as much on court documents, depositions and four years of fact-checking as on memory, and more than half of it takes place after the harm, in Australia, in the years of litigation and ordinary life. The writers below did the same thing. Each of them was, for a while, a name in somebody else's story, and then wrote their way back into being the author of it.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Memoir · Testimony · Advocacy · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you read Nobody's Girl, the closest match is Chanel Miller, who was known for years only as Emily Doe and then reclaimed her name and the record in Know My Name. For the Australian half of Giuffre's life, read Grace Tame, who went to court for the right to be named at all. For the same two-part career — a book and then an institution — read Nadia Murad. And for the sharpest account of the people who found it convenient not to look, read Vanessa Springora.

10 authors like Virginia Giuffre

01
Reclaiming the record · Closest match

Chanel Miller

American · Know My Name (2019)

Miller was known publicly for years only as “Emily Doe”, the anonymous complainant in the Stanford assault case whose victim impact statement was read by millions of people who did not know who had written it. The book is her taking the name back. She worked through court transcripts and testimony she had not been allowed to see during the trial, and rebuilt the account on her own terms. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography.

The first book to hand anyone who has finished Nobody's Girl. Both are written by a woman who spent years as a legal exhibit in someone else's narrative, and both are built the same way: by reading the court record against memory until the two make a book. The cover of Miller's is kintsugi — a repair made visible instead of hidden — which is the register both books work in.

— Lisanne

Every book by Chanel Miller →

Authors like Chanel Miller →

02
Australia · The right to be named

Grace Tame

Australian · The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner (2022)

Tame led the #LetHerSpeak campaign against a Tasmanian law that barred survivors of sexual assault from publicly identifying themselves. She won a court order in 2019, the law was amended in 2020, and she was named Australian of the Year in 2021. The memoir is odder and funnier than the subject suggests, running through art, distance running and an autism diagnosis alongside everything else.

The near-exact structural rhyme, and the best route into the Australian half of Giuffre's life. Tame also fought for the legal right to be named and then used the name to build an organisation. Both books are finally about the machinery of silence rather than about the harm itself.

— Lisanne
03
Testimony into an institution

Nadia Murad

Iraqi, Yazidi · The Last Girl (2017, with Jenna Krajeski)

Murad survived the 2014 Yazidi genocide and trafficking by Islamic State, escaped, and chose to testify publicly under her own name rather than anonymously. She became the first UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, and founded Nadia's Initiative for communities affected by genocide.

The other author here who wrote a testimony book with a professional co-writer and then built something permanent around it — the same two-part career Giuffre had with SOAR. Murad also widens the subject from one network of individuals to trafficking as a system, which is the argument Giuffre's own advocacy made.

— Lisanne
04
The people who did not look

Vanessa Springora

French · Consent (2020, English 2021)

Springora is a publisher by profession, later head of Éditions Julliard. Her memoir is a short, tightly controlled account of being groomed at fourteen by the much older and much celebrated writer Gabriel Matzneff, and of the Paris literary world that applauded him in print for decades. The effect was immediate: France moved to set an age of consent, and Matzneff's publishers dropped him.

The strongest book here on enablement. Springora is barely interested in the man himself and entirely interested in the well-mannered people around him who found it convenient not to look — which is the half of Giuffre's book that gets least attention. It is also a masterclass in restraint: an author refusing to hand the reader spectacle.

— Lisanne
Every book by Vanessa Springora →
05
How you build the container

Carmen Maria Machado

American · In the Dream House (2019)

A memoir of an abusive relationship told in short chapters, each one cast as a different genre or narrative trope — Dream House as Romance Novel, Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure — and written largely in the second person. The form carries the argument: it shows how hard it is to narrate abuse that the available stories have no shape for. It won the Folio Prize in 2021.

For the reader who noticed that Nobody's Girl is a constructed book rather than a chronological one — the deliberate jumps forward and back that Amy Wallace built into it. Machado is the most formally ambitious answer to the question both books are solving. It is a hard read, and it does not pretend otherwise.

— Lisanne

Every book by Carmen Maria Machado →

06
Contested memory · A childhood without protection

Tara Westover

American · Educated (2018)

Westover grew up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho with no formal schooling, entered university at seventeen and finished with a doctorate from Cambridge. The book is about what that passage cost. It is unusually honest about the unreliability of its own material, footnoting the places where her siblings remember things differently rather than smoothing them over.

Both books begin in a chaotic, unprotected childhood and are about a young woman assembling, from nothing, the standing to describe her own life. Westover's handling of contested memory is also the best available model for a reader who wants to think about how a memoir earns trust in the first place.

— Lisanne
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07
Where the form comes from

Maya Angelou

American · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969)

Angelou was challenged to write an autobiography that would also be a work of literature, and did it — using dialogue, scene and thematic development that autobiography had previously left to novels. The book covers her life from three to seventeen. It was nominated for the National Book Award in 1970 and is credited with opening new ground for the American memoir.

The origin point of everything else on this list: the book that established that a woman writing about harm done to her in childhood is making literature, not filing a report. It is also the historical case study in how such books get treated — repeatedly challenged and removed from school libraries, which is a version of the same impulse that files Nobody's Girl under scandal instead of under books.

— Lisanne

Every book by Maya Angelou →

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08
The decades afterwards

Roxane Gay

American · Hunger (2017), Bad Feminist (2014)

Gay writes about her body, her appetite and the decades that followed a violent assault in her teens, connecting the two in short, exact sections. She is explicit that this is not a recovery narrative and refuses the arc the genre usually demands of her. It is also, in passing, one of the sharpest things written about a reader's appetite for other people's pain.

For whoever is most struck by the back half of Giuffre's book — the years after, which take up more of it than people expect. Gay is the clearest living writer on the long tail of harm, and the least willing to tidy it into a shape that makes the reader comfortable.

— Lisanne
Every book by Roxane Gay →

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09
The machinery of being believed

Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

American · She Said (2019)

The two New York Times reporters recount their Harvey Weinstein investigation from the first cold calls onward: how sources were found, how settlements and documents were obtained, and what finally persuaded women to go on the record under their own names. The reporting won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Nobody's Girl is partly a book about the mechanics of being believed — lawyers, depositions, documents, press. This is the same machinery seen from the reporters' side, and it takes seriously the question Giuffre lived with for twenty years: what it actually costs a woman to attach her name to an allegation.

— Lisanne
10
Why it stayed quiet

Ronan Farrow

American · Catch and Kill (2019)

Farrow's account of reporting the same story for a different outlet, including the surveillance operation run against him and his sources by a private intelligence firm, and his then employer's reluctance to publish. The piece eventually ran in The New Yorker, which shared the 2018 Pulitzer for Public Service.

The best portrait available of the suppression apparatus — the non-disclosure agreements, the private investigators, the friendly editors, the legal threats — that Giuffre spent two decades pushing against. It answers the question a reader of Nobody's Girl is left holding, which is how any of it stayed quiet for so long.

— Lisanne

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Where to start if you loved Virginia Giuffre

If you read one book after this one, read Chanel Miller.

Know My Name is the same act: a woman who was a court exhibit for years, writing herself back into the centre of her own account.

If you want the Australian side, read Grace Tame.

She went to court for the right to say her own name in public, won, and then built an organisation with it.

If you want the wider picture, read Nadia Murad.

The Last Girl moves the subject from one network of people to trafficking as a system, which is the argument Giuffre's advocacy made.

If what stayed with you was the people around it, read Vanessa Springora.

Consent is barely about the man. It is about the literary establishment that applauded him for thirty years.

If you want to think about how these books are built

Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House and Tara Westover's Educated both make the construction visible — one through form, the other by footnoting its own unreliability.

If you want more non-fiction like this

My non-fiction shelf has the rest of it, including the reporting side.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Virginia Giuffre

Who writes books most like Virginia Giuffre?

Chanel Miller is the closest. Know My Name (2019) was written by a woman who had been publicly known only as “Emily Doe”, and it is built the same way as Nobody's Girl — by reading the court record against memory. Grace Tame's The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner (2022) is the Australian equivalent and the closest match in shape: a survivor who fought in court for the right to be named, then used the name to build an organisation. Nadia Murad's The Last Girl (2017) is the third.

What is Nobody's Girl about?

It is Virginia Giuffre's account of being trafficked as a teenager by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, of escaping at nineteen, and of the twenty years afterwards — building a family in Australia, deciding in 2011 to be publicly identified, and the long civil litigation that followed. More than half the book takes place after the abuse. It was written with the journalist Amy Wallace and is built on court documents and four years of interviews as much as on memory.

Was Nobody's Girl finished before she died?

Yes. Giuffre and her co-writer Amy Wallace completed the manuscript in the autumn of 2024, when Wallace travelled to Giuffre's property outside Perth to finalise it. In an email dated 1 April 2025, weeks before her death that month, Giuffre wrote that it was her wish that the book be published regardless of what happened to her. It was published by Knopf on 21 October 2025. The only editorial change made afterwards was a new foreword by Wallace, agreed with the family, bringing the record up to date.

Did Nobody's Girl win any awards?

It won Overall Book of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2026, as well as Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year. The overall award is the general prize rather than a category for true crime or memoir, which is worth knowing: it was judged as a book, not as a document.

What should I read after Nobody's Girl?

Know My Name by Chanel Miller, then The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner by Grace Tame. If the part that stayed with you was the years afterwards rather than the events themselves, read Roxane Gay's Hunger. If it was the people who stood by and did nothing, read Vanessa Springora's Consent. If it was the question of how it stayed quiet so long, read Catch and Kill and She Said.

Are there books like this by writers outside the US and UK?

Three on this list. Nadia Murad is Yazidi and writes from Iraq. Vanessa Springora is French, and Consent changed French law. Grace Tame is Australian, and her campaign changed Tasmanian law. All three are about legal and institutional structures as much as about what happened to the author, which is the half of this genre that travels least well and matters most.

Are these books hard to read?

Some are harder than others, and it is worth choosing deliberately. Machado's In the Dream House and Gay's Hunger are the most difficult, both because of the subject and because neither offers a recovery arc at the end. Springora is short and controlled. She Said and Catch and Kill are reported books rather than personal accounts and read as investigations. Miller and Tame are both, in places, unexpectedly funny.

Sources

List last reviewed 5 September 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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