Best biographies and memoirs to add to your reading list
Dive into these compelling life stories – from Margaret Atwood to Cher
The best memoirs and biographies blend fascinating anecdotes with deeper meditations that make us reflect on our own lives. From poignant coming-of-age tales to candid confessionals, these are our top picks.
Lifeboat at the End of the World by Dominic Gregory
Dungeness, on the Kentish coast, is an “otherworldly place”, said Alice O’Keeffe in The Times: “a bleak expanse of shingle dominated by the towers of a decommissioned nuclear power station”. After Dominic Gregory moved there in his 30s, he “signed up” with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), which operates a station on Dungeness beach. Like the thousands of other volunteers who work for the RNLI, Gregory was given a nautical training and a pager that could ping “at all hours”. Initially confined to the backroom staff, he eventually became a full crew member who took part in regular rescues – many of which feature in this “powerful” memoir.
Gregory builds his narrative patiently, presenting his story as a “kaleidoscope of impressions”, said Tom Fort in Literary Review. He describes “the ness” in all its seasons, and draws on “local figures of note”, including Derek Jarman, who created his “famous garden at Prospect Cottage” on Dungeness. While most of the early operations Gregory was involved with were undramatic (a broken-down trawler in need of a tow; a kite surfer who refused to be picked up), everything changed when the “first migrants from the French coast” appeared. Soon, his nights were being interrupted by calls to rescue flimsy dinghies crammed with people. “It’s the usual,” the Dungeness coxswain would say as his crew gathered in the boat hall. Inevitably, matters came to a head one freezing December night, when Gregory was called out to a “sinking dinghy helpless in the shipping lanes” – and witnessed several people drown. The tragic episode serves as a denouement to this “terrific and moving book”. “I defy anyone with a heart to read Gregory’s account without wiping away a tear or two.”
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A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot
For ten years, Gisèle Pelicot writes, her sleep was “a kind of execution”. As she lay drugged, her husband Dominique raped her and brought at least 70 other men to do the same. Part of the horror of the case, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph, is the ordinariness of the people involved, and of the domestic setting. One of the men used to say a polite hello in the queue at the boulangerie; the first thing Pelicot did after police revealed what had happened to her was go home and put her husband’s washing on the line. But her courage in waiving her right to anonymity at the subsequent trial was extraordinary. And this book is too, both “for the story it tells and the acuity with which it’s told”. Most people in Pelicot’s position would want to curl up and die; instead, she has chosen life – and has found love again, with a gentle widower. “You wish her every happiness.”
“A Hymn to Life” brims with the kind of detail found in a good novel, said Emma Brockes in The Guardian. Its uniqueness lies in the transformation it chronicles, of a woman “content with my little life” into a figure of astonishing power. The book confronts “a question that lurked in the minds of millions of observers during her husband’s trial: how could she not have known?” Pelicot moves through the 50 years of her marriage, searching for the clues that she had missed. It’s not an easy book to read, and not just because of the crimes. I’ll confess that, initially, I was angry that the loss of a husband seemed to register with Pelicot more than “the violence her actual husband had done to her” – but that’s a mark of the “power and honesty” of the writing.
Leaving Home by Mark Haddon
In 2003, shortly after publishing “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, Mark Haddon told an interviewer that he’d been “an anxious and depressed child”. The comment deeply offended his parents, but if anything it understated the problem, said James Riding in The Times. Now, in this unconventional memoir – a “scattered assortment of anecdotes and reminiscences” combined with photos, drawings and “doodles” – the novelist “finally squares up to his unhappy childhood and lets rip at his late parents”. Haddon’s father, who died in 2018, was a rugby-playing architect “with a short fuse” who took his son’s vegetarianism as a “personal insult”. His mother, who died in 2022, had “an inexhaustible capacity for barbed remarks and grudge-keeping”. While there are comic interludes – Haddon recalls the “risqué photos” sent in to the photo-processing plant he worked at one summer – the book’s overall tone is one of misery. We even have “painful descriptions” of his parents’ decline in old age. “A touch more light could have balanced out the dark.”
I found Haddon’s account of a “childhood endured without love or understanding” both vivid and moving, said Catherine Taylor in The Observer. While he and his sister “wanted for little” materially, emotionally there was a “distressing abyss”, which had long-term consequences: as an adult, Haddon experienced “extreme phobias, mental and physical health issues, and self- harm”. He reveals that he still sometimes cuts himself. Yet he does find sources of joy, said Alex Clark in The Guardian – in writing and painting, personal relationships, and in hobbies such as running. A “horrifying and exhilarating record” of how to “live beside” pain, “Leaving Home” is a “blistering memoir”.
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Troublemaker by Carla Kaplan
“Courage of a steely, smiling and peculiarly English kind was a quality the six Mitford sisters possessed in spades,” said Miranda Seymour in the Financial Times. And as Carla Kaplan demonstrates in her “well-researched” biography, none was “pluckier” than Jessica (or “Decca”) Mitford – the “witty, subversive fifth sister” who devoted her life to left-wing causes. In 1937, aged 19, Decca eloped to Spain with her “handsome cousin” Esmond Romilly to support the Republicans. The couple married, and moved to America, but Esmond died in 1941, while serving in the Canadian Air Force. “In the wake of his death, Decca joined the Communist Party”, and soon after married the “brilliant” Jewish lawyer Bob Treuhaft, said Anne Chisholm in The Spectator. They settled in Oakland, California, and became ardent civil rights campaigners. Decca also started writing: a “surprisingly successful” pamphlet skewering left- wing jargon was followed by her 1964 “masterpiece”, “The American Way of Death”, “exposing the funeral racket”. Kaplan, a distinguished American cultural historian, sets out to chart Decca’s transformation “from aristocrat to activist”. Her “impressive” biography confirms that Decca was “surely the only one of all the Mitfords worth taking seriously”.
Not that her sisters took this view, said Kathryn Hughes in The Times. One of the revelations of this book is “just how bitchy” about her they were: “their letters are stuffed with nasty remarks about her Jewish husband, black son-in- law and middle-aged spread”. Kaplan’s own agenda, refreshingly, is to present Decca as a pioneer of “social justice”. “The result is a book that is light on the usual beats of Mitfordia – the pranks, the frocks, the casual antisemitism – and pays Decca the real compliment of treating her as a public intellectual.”
Book of Lives by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is a “reproach to lazy authors”, said Nilanjana Roy in the Financial Times. Now 86, Canada’s pre-eminent author has produced “a treasure hoard of more than 50 books” – not just novels such as “The Handmaid’s Tale” (1985) and “Alias Grace” (1996), but short stories, poetry, essays and children’s fiction. Now comes “another outsize gift: a big fat juicy memoir, as compulsively readable as her best fiction”. “Book of Lives” is “not a slice of life but the whole works”, said Blake Morrison in The Guardian. Atwood admits to fearing it might be boring (“I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book...”), but there is much to enjoy besides the details of her writing life. She shares her formative experiences, as when a group of girl friends turned on her in 1949. She also shares her “wackier side” (she is fascinated by horoscopes and palm reading) and dispenses domestic wisdom (“what I don’t know about toilet-cleaning isn’t worth knowing”). The result is “sharp, funny and engaging”.
Her personal life is touchingly evoked, said Edmund Gordon in The New Statesman. Her public life, less so. Atwood never “paints herself in a bad light”, and writes “wildly flattering things other people have said about her”, without “a flicker of irony”. She also rewrites “matters of public record” to her own credit – as when she claims that when “The Handmaid’s Tale” was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize, “it was rare for a woman to be nominated”. (It wasn’t.) But she seems to have perfect recall of all slights against her. Despite now being, as she says, “screamingly famous”, she never shies away from settling the pettiest of scores with poets who died 30 years ago, or journalists who once wrote disobliging reviews. “There are police databases that it’s easier to get your name expunged from than Atwood’s shit-list.”
Fly, Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Few non-fiction books have had as much impact as Jung Chang’s 1991 memoir “Wild Swans”, said Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Intertwining Chang’s childhood with the stories of her mother (pictured) and grandmother, it sold more than 13 million copies (despite never being published in China) and gave many Western readers their first glimpse of life under Chinese communism. Now, more than three decades on, Chang has written a “magnificent sequel”, which picks up where “Wild Swans” left off: with her move to England, aged 26, in 1978. Chang describes revelling in Western freedoms, including sex (a “dirty word” in China), and charts her development as a writer. Less happily, she also describes the deterioration of her relationship with her homeland. She used to go there regularly, but this became more difficult following her “devastatingly critical” 2005 biography of Mao Zedong (co-written with her husband Jon Halliday), and her last visit was in 2018. She dedicates this book to “my mother, whose deathbed I am unable to visit”.
Chang’s early life in Britain, on a “study scholarship”, was closely monitored by the Chinese state, said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. She was required to wear a “lumpy Mao suit” and was told never to venture into a pub, because it would be “full of naked women gyrating”. But Chang was a quick learner. She got a PhD in linguistics; then came “Wild Swans”, and a “Cinderella-like transformation”. By the mid-1990s, she was living in “swanky Notting Hill”, and was “chums with Martin Amis”. In these pages, she has again used “intimate experience” to make sense of larger events. It’s a method that “works as triumphantly today” as when “Wild Swans” “burst onto the scene”. This book feels in places like an “uneasy hybrid”, said Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times. Parts of it “revisit in an abbreviated version” stories first told in “Wild Swans” – such as her Manchurian grandmother’s experiences of foot-binding. New readers might want first to encounter such material in the original. As a memoir, though, it’s very “engaging”, said Rana Mitter in Literary Review. Chang is “thoughtful without being sentimental”, and writes illuminatingly of her life both in England and China. Overall, it provides a timely insight into “the complexities of processing” history, family and personal identity, while dealing with a regime that insists on defining history, and keeping it “firmly in the past”.
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.
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.
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".