Best memoirs and biographies to read in 2025

The Memoir: Part One by Cher

"There was some sniggering" when the news broke that Cherilyn Sarkisian – aka Cher – was going to publish a two-part memoir, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. While a president can get away with such a "power move", it seems less justifiable for a pop star "who once sang 'The Shoop Shoop Song'". Yet it turns out that Cher has led such an eventful life that two volumes may not be enough. She was born in California in 1946, to a heroin-addicted Armenian father and a singer mother who married eight times, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. While much of her childhood was spent in chaotic poverty, there were periods of "wealth and plenty", depending on whom her mother was "married to at the time". Cher met her first husband, Sonny Bono, a songwriter 11 years her senior, in a coffee shop when she was 16. When he walked in, she recalls, "everyone else in the room faded". Having worked together as backing singers, they formed the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and in 1965 hit the big time with their "deathless global smash" "I Got You Babe", which knocked The Beatles' "Help!" off the top of the UK charts.

While Cher and Sonny had a "sizzling chemistry in performance", offstage he was an "old-fashioned, controlling" Svengali, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. A fan of Machiavelli, he worked Cher "like a pack mule" while saddling her with contracts that gave him ownership of 95% of her earnings (the remaining 5% went to lawyers). The pair reinvented themselves as TV stars in the early 1970s, making the hugely successful "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour", but divorced in 1975. Covering the period up to the dawn of Cher's "serious movie career in the early 1980s", "The Memoir: Part One" is a "detailed and characteristically profane" examination of a fascinating and remarkable life.

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Things in Nature Merely Grow

The Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li begins her "quietly devastating" memoir by "laying out the facts", said Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian. "And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering." Li and her husband had two sons, Vincent and James. Vincent died in 2017, aged 16; James died in 2024, aged 19. Both ended their lives by jumping in front of trains not far from the family home in New Jersey. Both were academically gifted, but had very different personalities. Vincent, who "loved baking and knitting", was the more flamboyant and emotional of the two – a boy, Li says, who lived "feelingly". James, by contrast, a "brilliant linguist", was "self-contained, somewhat unreachable", more at home with facts than feelings. If Vincent died because he couldn't cope with his emotions, James, Li suggests, "died from thinking". The story she tells in "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is so terrible that it "can only be conveyed through a restrained and astringent English". Yet the effect of this is not to distance the reader, but to create an "almost unbearable intimacy".

Li, who grew up in Beijing, and began her "prize-winning literary career" after moving to the US in 1996, is fiercely resistant to "platitudes about loss and grief", said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times. "Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process," she writes, "and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone." Instead of grief, she strives for "radical acceptance" – which seems to mean being aware that she is condemned to exist in the "abyss", while also carrying on in the normal world – getting out of bed at the regular time, playing the piano, studying Euclidean geometry. "Life is stubborn," she writes. "So am I."

Li offers some context to her son's deaths by exploring her own past, said Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. We learn that she was "relentlessly belittled and beaten by her mother as a child", and that she suffered bouts of severe depression, and twice attempted suicide when her sons were young. Did this, she asks bluntly, make "death feel like a viable solution to life's problems" for them? In the face of such unanswerable questions, Li "resists anger or regret", opting instead for a "cool-headed clarity". There's something remarkable about her "determination to live with dignity and defiance through this extremity", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. A work of "harsh beauty", her memoir is "unlike any other book I've read".

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The Heart-Shaped Tin

One August day in 2020, the food writer Bee Wilson was in her kitchen when a "vast heart-shaped tin" she had long owned "eerily and inexplicably" clattered to the ground in front of her, said Ceci Browning in The Times. Twenty-three years earlier, Wilson had used the tin to bake her wedding cake – a "dense yet cherry-less fruitcake". Her husband, however, had recently walked out on her, "nonchalantly" telling her he "didn't love her any more". The "rusting tin", which had once stood for "Disneyfied romance", was now a "symbol of the settled life she had lost". In her new book, Wilson draws on this episode to look more widely at kitchen objects and the meanings they acquire. She talks to friends about their cherished old pans, and examines objects from previous eras – such as the "small tin spoon" that Polish Holocaust survivor Jacob Chaim "secretly fashioned for himself while imprisoned in a forced labour camp". Striking a "perfect" balance between memoir and survey, "The Heart-Shaped Tin" is a "thoroughly enjoyable book".

Wilson is an "engaging and often erudite" guide to the "strange potency of everyday things", said Lucy Lethbridge in Literary Review. She considers "objects that were once stalwarts but now seem old-fashioned, such as toast racks and even teapots". She movingly recalls the blunt knife with which her mother – a "brilliant Shakespeare scholar who developed dementia" – would peel her "customary breakfast pear". Not being someone who spends much time in the kitchen, I was surprised by how much I loved this book, said Tanya Gold in The Daily Telegraph. Through a "close reading" of kitchen utensils, Wilson has produced something "wonderful and original": a story of love and loss that somehow feels "even more intimate than a tell-all memoir".

When the Going Was Good

The great magazine editor Graydon Carter has always known what his readers want, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. And in this enjoyable memoir, the 75-year-old "doesn't short-change us". Carter's "swashbuckling career" coincided with the "heyday of magazines": it began in the late 1970s, and culminated in a 25-year stint as editor of Vanity Fair, which ended in 2017. His memoir is full of details that will "make any journalist laugh (bitterly) out loud". At Vanity Fair, "the budget had no ceiling. I could send anybody anywhere for as long as I wanted." One hack racked up $180,000 of expenses for a piece on the collapse of Lloyd's of London – which didn't even run. Unafraid to "dish the dirt", Carter describes Anna Wintour's "awesome bad manners", and the "super-agent" Sue Mengers flying into a rage because a profile described her house as "modest". At times, the book has a "vibe of old lags reliving their glory days"; but mostly, it's a "joyful" read, and proof of Carter's claim that a journalist's life was once "just plain fun".

Born in 1949 in Canada – "where life revolved around skiing and hockey" – Carter always dreamed of living in New York, said Lynn Barber in The Observer. Moving there in 1978, he "landed a job as a floating writer at Time", which was then selling "four million copies a week, with salaries and expenses to match": in five years there he "never switched on his oven". Reassigned to Time's sister title Life, he became bored, and left in 1986 to set up the satirical monthly Spy, which made a name for itself by poking fun at Manhattan's elites. The launch issue carried a list of the "Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers", including "the short-fingered vulgarian Donald Trump". But the magazine never made money, and Carter left in 1990.

Two years later, he was appointed editor of Vanity Fair, on a salary of $600,000, said Roger Lewis in The Daily Telegraph. The lunch bill for one Annie Leibovitz cover shoot cost more than the entire editorial budget for a single issue of Spy. While the job involved endlessly courting celebrities, the magazine wasn't all froth: Carter hired Christopher Hitchens as a columnist, and ran pieces identifying the Watergate scandal's "Deep Throat" and exposing Michael Jackson's alleged sexual abuse. Written with "lovely candour", this is a wonderfully enjoyable autobiography, said Peter York in Literary Review, evoking a "golden age" of journalism that has now "utterly vanished".

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs

"Another Beatles book?" said Simon Schama in the Financial Times. "Honestly, do we need it? Yes we do, when it's as revelatory as Ian Leslie's 'John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs'." Leslie, a journalist, is no "pop hagiographer"; instead, he sets out to "rescue" Lennon and McCartney from the "tone-deaf stereotype" perpetuated in countless biographies, which casts their relationship in terms of "gladiatorial opposition": Lennon as a "take-no-prisoners visionary", McCartney as a "crooning balladeer". Such a view, Leslie contends, was "largely the self-serving fiction" of Lennon during the band's break-up. The reality is more nuanced – Lennon wrote "soft ballads", McCartney could be "tonsil-shreddingly raw" – but in any case, Leslie writes, focusing on their differences means missing the "whole glory of Lennon-McCartney", which lay in their "interconnectedness". His book is an extended hymn to their creative partnership – a "romantic epic of the starlit, star-crossed, outrageously gifted pair, both inseparable and incompatible". At once "poetically exuberant and musically analytical", "John & Paul" is "brilliant".

Leslie opens his story in 1957, with a 15-year-old McCartney "making his way to a summer fête in Woolton to see a skiffle band called The Quarrymen, fronted by a charismatic teenager called John Lennon", said Deborah Levy in The New Statesman. The pair meet, and a friendship develops: soon they are bunking off school and writing songs together at Paul's house. Grief, as well as music, united them: both lost their mothers in their teens.

Much about the "journey from there – via Hamburg, the Cavern Club, London and America" – is familiar, said Alwyn Turner in The Times. Yet there's a "freshness" to Leslie's telling, a "wonder at the sheer implausibility and novelty of it all". Full of psychological insight and "lovely writing", his book is "tremendous" and "fascinating".

Above all, Leslie has a knack for describing Beatles songs in a way that reveals "new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later", said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. "She Loves You", while seeming to cleave to the conventions of a "boy-girl love song", is actually a song "about friendship between boys". In "Strawberry Fields", the "listener is oriented just enough to take pleasure in being lost". "Penny Lane" is McCartney's "toytown diorama". Up to now, I had considered Ian MacDonald's "Revolution in the Head" (1994) to be the "gold standard of Beatles books". With this "enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss", Leslie has, I think, surpassed it.

Source Code by Bill Gates

In the first installment of his planned trilogy of memoirs, Bill Gates remembers his early life growing up in Seattle and journey to co-founding Microsoft at the age of 20. The tech billionaire "offers insight into his family", sketching an "affectionate" portrait of his father and "virtuous, albeit peculiar" mother, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Both parents were worried about their "extremely bright, reclusive" son; Gates recalls struggling with social interactions, preferring instead to read books alone.

The book is filled with "candid" moments from his reflections on being considered "somewhat unlikeable" to his "youthful experiments with LSD". For those interested in how Gates became such an "influential businessman", "Source Code" will make for enjoyable reading. "Fascinating tidbits" give us the "inside view from a hyper-focused young man with a brilliant mind", and I finished the book with a "respect for Gates' intellect" and an "appreciation of why he is such a unique achiever".

It's a "charmingly told" story, and one that completely "immerses" us in Gates' world, added Tom Knowles in The Telegraph. "But the interested reader may be more inclined to wait for the second and third books. That, we can hope, is where the real drama will begin."

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A Second Act by Dr Matt Morgan

Matt Morgan has more than 20 years' experience as an intensive care doctor, "labouring at the extreme margins of life", said Tim Adams in The Observer. As well as witnessing hundreds of deaths, he has treated many patients who, despite their "vital signs" flatlining, "have returned to tell the tale". In "A Second Act" – a sequel to his bestselling memoir "Critical", about his time in intensive care – he focuses on ten such "survivors". They include Ed, who was "fatally" struck by lightning; Luca, who medically died after contracting Covid, only to be "restored by the blood oxygenation technique ECMO"; and Roberto, whose heart stopped for eight hours after being "frozen solid on a mountain ledge in the Dolomites". Such people, Morgan reveals, experience a "kind of double gratitude": for their miraculous "deliverance", and for the "unique knowledge" it brings. Those who have nearly died, he writes, truly understand how precarious (and precious) life is, and are the ones we really should be listening to. His book is an "excellent guide" to what they can teach us.

Not all of their hard-won wisdom is exactly revelatory, said Helen Rumbelow in The Times. We should – apparently – regularly tell the people we care about that we love them. "Do it now," Morgan urges, "because you may not get a second chance." I was also unconvinced by his concept of "self-funeraling" – the idea that people should stage mock funerals, in an effort to glean the insights accessed by those who've nearly died. Still, Morgan has a "knack" for "writing simply and sincerely", in a tone that is pleasingly "chatty". It's no surprise that his previous books were bestsellers; and "A Second Act" is also a thought-provoking and "enjoyable" read.

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Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson

In 1971, Suzi Ronson (then Suzanne Fussey) was a 21-year-old hairdresser at a salon in Beckenham, southeast London, when one of her customers – Mrs Jones – mentioned her "artistic" son David, said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. The next week, Mrs Jones brought in David's wife, Angie, who was so delighted with the "outrageous" haircut Suzi gave her that she took her to meet David himself – "a pale and epicene young man" who had just started calling himself David Bowie. With the help of a German anti-dandruff product, Suzi transformed David's "mousy" hair into a "spiky red feather cut". It was the birth of the "look of Ziggy Stardust".

Suzi, infatuated with the couple and their bohemian world, became Bowie's stylist, and soon after went on the road with him and the Spiders from Mars. Five decades on, she has written an "honest and troubled memoir" of her time as his "hair'n'make-up mascot". It belongs to a niche genre – call it "I-was-Sinatra's-valet" – but her book offers a compelling portrait of Bowie "on the verge of stardom".

Ronson skilfully charts her drab suburban upbringing, so different from Bowie's "countercultural" mileu, said Deborah Levy in Literary Review. With "perfect pitch and tension", she recounts key moments in his early career – from his legendary performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972 to the night a year later when he unexpectedly "retired" Ziggy Stardust.

Her book makes a refreshing change from the hagiographic tone of most Bowie biographies, said John Aizlewood on iNews. Here, "the star emerges as cold": he sacks his drummer on his wedding day, and expects Suzi to procure him an "endless supply of young girls and boys". Suzi herself is soon "cut adrift", at which point she marries the guitarist Mick Ronson, who had also been ditched by Bowie. After that, the book loses its dynamism.

Much Bowie literature consists of "pretentious evaluation" of his lyrics and influences, said Suzanne Moore in The New Statesman. Ronson, by contrast, barely mentions his music, and instead focuses on practical matters – such as sewing the jewels onto Bowie's jockstrap, or worrying "about all the sweat breaking the zips of his costumes". She tells us that she slept with him once, but is "discreet" about the details. It makes for an engaging, often endearing account of the "magical rising of Ziggy, by the woman who put the colour in his hair".

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