Sometimes the truth is more powerful than fiction. Memoirs give us the chance to delve into someone else's experience – whether it's an all-too relatable tale of bad dates and heroic mates, or an extraordinary feat of re-invention.
Tara Westover’s exhilarating coming of age story has only just come out and it’s already a classic. Educated is the inspirational tale of a childhood spent brain-washed by a cult, unregistered and invisible to the government health and education services. At the age of 16 Westover began the momentous task of re-inventing and re-educating herself. It’s a journey that takes her around the world, to Harvard and Cambridge University – and it leaves us readers dazzled and humbled in equal measure .
If your happiest childhood began at the library, Lucy Mangan’s memoir of a childhood spent reading will be irresistible. Taking us to Narnia, Wonderland, via chocolate factories, Womble burrows, hundred-acre woods and railway tracks, she chronicles a lifelong love of books. From discovering death with Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web to navigating adolescent urges with Judy Blume as guide, it’s a warm, witty story about stories and the way they shape us.
Doctor turned comedian turned writer Adam Kay captures the horror and hilarity of life as a junior doctor working a 97 hours a week. The combination of life, death, bodily fluids and exhaustion in his daily diaries is laugh-out-loud funny, fascinating and moving all at once. And after the onslaught of bitterly funny anecdote, this account takes a sharp turn into something altogether darker and more urgent. Prepare to never look at junior doctors in the same way.
The romantic minefield that was MSN Messenger will give all millennials a pang of nostalgia. Then there’s the moment you plan out an entire future with the person you’ve only just matched with on Tinder. Or the heart-wrenching blow of a break up – and the friends who rush to pick up the pieces. These highs and heartaches, spanning angsty adolesence to torrid twenties make for an engaging and instantly relatable memoir from journalist and former Sunday Times dating columnist Dolly Alderton.
In a society saturated with hot-takes on health, where cases of hospitalisation for disordered eating have doubled, it’s rare to find such a measured and honest account of recovery. Journalist Laura Freeman’s literary memoir is an account of anorexia, appetite and the power of fictional meals to heal one woman’s obsessive, destructive illness. Whatever your own personal relationship with food, The Reading Cure is a vital story of finding hope.
All rockstars have a wealth of good stories, but few are as well-equipped to tell them as Brett Anderson. The founder and lead singer of Suede recalls his grubby, eccentric and banal upbringing with vividness, lyricism and wit. You can’t help but root for him through the desperate attempts to make it in the music industry and the loves and losses he encounters along the way.
Tales don’t come more titillating than the Bad Beauty Editor or the Toxic Health Writer. Cat Marnell was the enfant terrible of Conde Nast and the doe-eyed drugged-up darling of Manhattan’s party scene. Unlike most memoirs about addiction, How To Murder Your Life doesn’t preach recovery or cast blames. In Marnell’s breathy, bouncy prose we see how her father prescribed pills to make his teenage daughter more manageable, then how a spark of talent and ambition was both fuelled and dulled by drugs. It’s a thrilling story, that captures the chaos, glamour and desperate loneliness of hedonism gone wrong.
Francisco Cantú’s timely account of patrolling the Mexican border gives us an insight into the suffering, desperation and bloodshed caused by this abitrary line in the sand. After a life of detaining drug smugglers and immigrants, Cantú is confronted with his own deep connections to this border and its devastating impact on his home nation. It’s essential reading for anyone that’s horrified by a society that wants to ‘build a wall’ and ‘keep them out’.
After a diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder, Terese Mailhot started writing as way of coming to terms with her dysfunctional upbringing and its lasting damage. The resultant series of lyrical essays gives us a snapshot of abuse, reconciliation and endurance. Mailhot writes with a bravura innovation, finding her own new structures to give shape to mental illness, trauma and memory. Now Heart Berries has been selected by Emma Watson as her March/April reading list top pick, it’s about to be huge.
The bravery that launched the Me Too movement is traced back to its source in Rose McGowan’s sobering, empowering account of Hollywood sexism. After a childhood dominated by a religious cult, and a career punctuated with sexualisation and exploitation, McGowan emerges as a rebel, speaking out with brutal honesty and urging us all to join her battle.
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