While there are many courses and tutorials online, learning from a book is still one of the best ways to greatly improve your skills. Below I have selected top Memoir books.
- The Art of Memoir (2016)
- The Girl in the Treehouse: A Memoir (2018)
- Freckled: A Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii (2019)
- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2018)
- Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2019)
- The Size of Everything: a memoir (2018)
- Saturday’s Child: A Daughter’s Memoir (2019)
- Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel (1999)
- Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain (2019)
- Educated (2018)
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2018)
- The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2006)
- Bettyville: A Memoir (2016)
The Art of Memoir (2016)
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse.
The Girl in the Treehouse: A Memoir (2018)
Imagine … growing up in an unfinished geodesic dome home with no heat or running water, wearing the same clothes to school every day, and eating breakfast cereal with warm goat milk. In this whimsical, poetic, and gripping autobiographical account, Jennifer Asbenson describes her abusive, dysfunctional, and chaotic upbringing, her abduction and escape from a serial killer, her years in and out of mental hospitals, her decision to heal herself, and ultimately, her path to wholeness.
Freckled: A Memoir of Growing up Wild in Hawaii (2019)
We live in a place everyone calls paradise. Sure, Kauai’s beautiful, with empty beaches, drip-castle mountains, and perfect surfbut we’ve been “camping” for six months, eating boiled chicken feed for breakfast, and wearing camouflage clothes so no one sees us trespassing in our jungle hideout.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike (2018)
In this instant and tenacious bestseller, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight “offers a rare and revealing look at the notoriously media-shy man behind the swoosh” (Booklist, starred review), illuminating his company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.Bill Gates named Shoe Dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly hone…
Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2019)
* Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.
The Size of Everything: a memoir (2018)
-W. Bruce Cameron, New York Times Bestselling AuthorAs the face of her eponymous couture bridal business, Erin Cole radiates refined elegance. But the designer’s glamorous lifestyle and sweeping success belie a childhood marked by profound dysfunction. Raised on a steady diet of abuse, alcoholism, poverty, and death, no one would have expected Cole to go on to become a force in the fashion world. As a child, she often had no access to food; other times she was force-fed until she vomited.
Saturday’s Child: A Daughter’s Memoir (2019)
“Devilishly sharp… a masterful balance of psychological excavation and sumptuous description.”―Kirkus ReviewsAn only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother, Dorothy―a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flair that made her the darling of men and women alike.
Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel (1999)
Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house.
Prognosis: A Memoir of My Brain (2019)
When Sarah Vallance is thrown from a horse and suffers a jarring blow to the head, she believes she’s walked away unscathed. The next morning, things take a sharp turn as she’s led from work to the emergency room.
Educated (2018)
For readers of The Glass Castle and Wild, a stunning new memoir about family, loss and the struggle for a better future#1 International BestsellerTara Westover was seventeen when she first set foot in a classroom. Instead of traditional lessons, she grew up learning how to stew herbs into medicine, scavenging in the family scrap yard and helping her family prepare for the apocalypse.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (2018)
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, NAMED BY THE TIMES AS ONE OF “6 BOOKS TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRUMP’S WIN” AND SOON TO BE A MAJOR-MOTION PICTURE DIRECTED BY RON HOWARD “You will not read a more important book about America this year.”—The Economist “A riveting book.”—The Wall Street Journal”Essential reading.”—David Brooks, New York TimesHillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis—that of white working-class Americans.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2006)
The perennially bestselling, extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, “nothing short of spectacular” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir from one of the world’s most gifted storytellers.The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant.
Bettyville: A Memoir (2016)
When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over.
Best Memoir Books Worth Your Attention
We highly recommend you to buy all paper or e-books in a legal way, for example, on Amazon. But sometimes it might be a need to dig deeper beyond the shiny book cover. Before making a purchase, you can visit resources like Library Genesis and download some memoir books mentioned below at your own risk. Once again, we do not host any illegal or copyrighted files, but simply give our visitors a choice and hope they will make a wise decision.
An accidental sportswriter : a memoir
Author(s): Robert Lipsyte
ID: 876456, Publisher: Ecco , Year: [2011], Size: 2 Mb, Format: epub
Fanny Hill: Or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
Author(s): John Cleland
ID: 400087, Publisher: e-booksdirectory@com, Year: n.d., Size: 1018 Kb, Format: pdf
Go to School, You're a Little Black Boy: The Honourable Lincoln M. Alexander: A Memoir
Author(s): by Lincoln Alexander (Author), Herb Shoveller (Collaborator)
ID: 1308747, Publisher: Dundurn, Year: March 26 2012, Size: 30 Mb, Format: pdf
Please note that this booklist is not errorless. Some books are truly chart-busters according to Washington Post, others are written by unknown writers. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant books you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.