Best biographies and memoirs to read in 2025

John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs – a 'revelatory' book

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The Memoir: Part One by Cher
When the Going Was Good
John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Source Code by Bill Gates
The Loves of My Life by Edmund White
Letters by Oliver Sacks (edited by Kate Edgar)
A Second Act by Dr Matt Morgan
Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson

last updated 16 April 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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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".

"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.

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.

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".

The American novelist and memoirist Edmund White "has lived through (and chronicled) much of modern gay history", said Charles Arrowsmith in The Times. The "covert but fluid sexual economy of the 1950s"; the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s; the Aids epidemic of the 1980s; the arrival of gay marriage in the 21st century: White has "seen it all". Now aged 85, he has written "The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir" – a book that "does exactly what it says on the tin". White writes that he has had "thousands" of partners, and while not all of them feature here, the memoir pulsates with sex – from "sneaking shags at boarding school" to "florid descriptions of bathhouses and saunas", to recollections of White in his 70s "visiting chubby-chaser clubs in Madrid with his jealous Spanish lover". The sheer amount of sex becomes monotonous at times, and not all the material is original: "numerous incidents" have featured in White's previous memoirs. But "at his best he remains a superior anatomist of erotic obsession, and there are many beautifully written passages here".

In addition to being a "pointillistic canvas of gay desire and male sexuality", the memoir is a "rumination" on the craft of writing, said Ralf Webb in The Guardian. White reflects on his own creative journey – from "experimental books" to "transparently realistic" fiction – and asks "deeper questions around novelists' enduring obsession with writing about love" (it may be, he suggests, because love is, "like paranoia, a way of tying all the disparate events together"). White is an "amiable", self-deprecating narrator – and this acts as a counterpoint to the more scandalous material. "Switching between coquetry and high seriousness", the book is a compelling "erotic almanac".

The neurologist Oliver Sacks – who died, aged 82, in 2015 – "was a compulsive letter-writer", said Lynn Barber in The Daily Telegraph. From 1985, the year his international bestseller "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat" appeared, "he received about 5,000 letters a year and tried to reply to all of them". Sacks made carbon copies of the letters he wrote – the files ran to 200,000 pages – and these have now been whittled down to 700 pages by his long-time editor Kate Edgar. While he is sometimes given to "extravagance and self-pity", the letters also show the "extraordinary breadth" of his scholarship and his "genius for describing people".

Sacks, who grew up in north London, the son of two doctors, had a "traumatic childhood", said Gavin Francis in The Observer. During the War, he was evacuated to a "sadistic residential school". His homosexuality caused further emotional pain: when he came out in his late teens, his mother described him as an "abomination". After qualifying in medicine in Britain, he moved permanently to America – spending four years in California before settling in New York. His first book, "Migraine" – based on his experiences working at a headache clinic – appeared in 1970; three years later, he published the "groundbreaking" "Awakenings", about his success treating patients with a rare disorder known as "sleeping sickness".

As a young man, Sacks was an avid weightlifter and motorcyclist, and imbibed huge quantities of drugs, said Ralf Webb in The Guardian. Later, "workaholism" displaced substance abuse. For much of his life, he was a lonely figure – he was celibate for "30-odd years" – but found love in his final decade, with the writer Bill Hayes. These letters – "inquisitive, often funny, never obtuse" – reveal a "brilliant and vivid mind".

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.

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".

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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