Reading List
The Best Memoirists to Read
A young gossip columnist in a taxi in New York looks out of the window and sees her mother rooting through a dumpster. A girl from a survivalist family in Idaho sits in a classroom for the first time at seventeen. A writer in Manhattan is sitting down to dinner when her husband slumps at the table and dies, and she spends the next year waiting for him to come back. Jeannette Walls, Tara Westover and Joan Didion turned these moments into books, and the twelve writers below show what memoir can do: not just tell a life, but make sense of it.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 books · Memoir & autobiography · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
Start with Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club or Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle if you want a childhood memoir that reads like a novel, or Joan Didion if you are grieving. Annie Ernaux and Karl Ove Knausgård are the great European memoirists, and Vivian Gornick wrote the best book on mothers and daughters. For each of the twelve there is a short introduction and the book to read first.
The list at a glance
- 01Mary Karr Mary Karr
- 02Jeannette Walls Jeannette Walls
- 03Tara Westover Tara Westover
- 04Maya Angelou Maya Angelou
- 05Frank McCourt Frank McCourt
- 06Joan Didion Joan Didion
- 07Vivian Gornick Vivian Gornick
- 08Annie Ernaux Annie Ernaux
- 09Karl Ove Knausgård Karl Ove Knausgård
- 10Cheryl Strayed Cheryl Strayed
- 11Kiese Laymon Kiese Laymon
- 12Patti Smith Patti Smith
Twelve memoirists, and where to start
Mary Karr
A poet who grew up in an oil-refinery town in East Texas with a volatile, hard-drinking mother and a storytelling father. Her first memoir helped start the memoir boom of the 1990s, and she later wrote a guide to the form itself.
Where to startStart with The Liars’ Club (1995). For readers who like dark material told with a lot of humour.
Jeannette Walls
A journalist who grew up moving from town to town with a brilliant, alcoholic father and an artist mother who did not want to look after her children. She kept her past secret for years while working as a gossip columnist in New York.
Where to startStart with The Glass Castle (2005). For readers who want to understand why people love parents who fail them.
Tara Westover
Raised in the mountains of Idaho by survivalist parents, she had no formal schooling until she went to Brigham Young University at seventeen, and went on to a PhD at Cambridge. Her parents have disputed her account of her childhood, and her mother later published her own version.
Where to startStart with Educated (2018). For anyone who has had to choose between loyalty to family and becoming themselves.
Maya Angelou
A poet, performer and civil rights activist who told her life in seven volumes of autobiography. The first covers her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, and St. Louis, including the rape she suffered as a young girl and the years of silence that followed.
Where to startStart with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969). The book that showed a Black woman’s childhood could be told without softening.
Frank McCourt
Born in Brooklyn and raised in poverty in Limerick, he became a teacher in New York and published his first book at sixty-six. It won the Pulitzer Prize, though some people in Limerick disputed his picture of the city and its people.
Where to startStart with Angela’s Ashes (1996). For readers who can take misery when it comes with this much wit.
Joan Didion
An essayist and novelist from California whose cool, exact prose defined a generation of non-fiction. Late in life she wrote about the sudden death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and then about the death of their daughter.
Where to startStart with The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which won the National Book Award. For anyone who is grieving, or wants to understand someone who is.
Vivian Gornick
A New York critic and journalist who grew up in the Bronx. Her best-known book interweaves long walks through Manhattan with her elderly mother and memories of the tenement where she grew up, and the arguments never stop.
Where to startStart with Fierce Attachments (1987). The book for any daughter with a complicated mother.
Annie Ernaux
The daughter of shopkeepers in Normandy, she has written for fifty years about her parents, class, abortion, desire and shame in short, plain books she calls neither novel nor memoir. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.
Where to startStart with The Years (2008), her collective autobiography of post-war France. For readers who want to see how one life fits into the history of its time.
Karl Ove Knausgård
A Norwegian novelist whose six-volume My Struggle describes his own life, from his father’s death to his marriage and children, in enormous everyday detail. Members of his father’s family objected to how they were portrayed.
Where to startStart with A Death in the Family, the first volume. For patient readers who like being completely inside someone else’s head.
Cheryl Strayed
After her mother’s death and the end of her marriage, she walked more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone, with little hiking experience. She also wrote the advice column Dear Sugar.
Where to startStart with Wild (2012). For readers who need to believe you can walk your way out of a broken life.
Kiese Laymon
A writer and professor from Jackson, Mississippi. His memoir is written to his mother and is about weight, violence, gambling, lying and love in a Black Southern family.
Where to startStart with Heavy: An American Memoir (2018), which won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. For readers who want a memoir that refuses to tidy things up.
Patti Smith
The singer and poet came to New York in 1967 with almost nothing and met the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Her memoir of their friendship, and of the city when it was cheap enough for artists, won the National Book Award.
Where to startStart with Just Kids (2010). For anyone who has ever had a friend who changed their life.
Not sure where to start?
If you want a childhood memoir that reads like a novel
→ Start with Mary Karr or Jeannette Walls.
If you are grieving
→ Read Joan Didion.
If you have a complicated mother
→ Read Vivian Gornick, then Kiese Laymon.
If you want memoir as literature
→ Read Annie Ernaux.
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Frequently asked questions about memoirists
What is the best memoir to start with?
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls or The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr. Both are childhood memoirs that read like novels.
Who are the greatest memoir writers?
Among the most admired are Maya Angelou, Mary Karr, Joan Didion, Vivian Gornick, Annie Ernaux and Frank McCourt, whose Angela’s Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize.
Is Educated by Tara Westover a true story?
It is Westover’s own account of her childhood. Her parents have disputed it through their lawyer, and her mother later published her own version of events.
What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?
An autobiography usually tells a whole life in order; a memoir focuses on one part of it, such as a childhood, a loss or a relationship.
Which memoirist won the Nobel Prize?
Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022 for books drawn almost entirely from her own life.
Footnotes
- After Educated was published in 2018, a lawyer for Westover’s parents said they disputed her account of the family.
- Angela’s Ashes won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1997.
- Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.
From the bookshelf
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
— Joan Didion, The White Album
More books I keep coming back to are on my personal bookshelf, and every month one of them goes out to the Night Owl Bookclub.
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I update this list as I read. New picks go to my monthly newsletter first.
