The Best Memoirs of the Last Decade

Seventeen before she set foot in a classroom, and a Cambridge history PhD afterwards — but what carries the book is Buck's Peak, the Idaho mountain where her father ran a junkyard and stockpiled fuel and guns against the government's collapse. Random House published it on 20 February 2018; by 13 September 2020 it had spent 132 consecutive weeks on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction list. The violence of the brother she calls Shawn is set down without a flinch.

For nearly five years she was Emily Doe, a court document and a statement read aloud — from the January 2015 assault until she gave the alias up in September 2019. Handing it over is the act the whole book is built on. Viking published it on 24 September 2019 and it took the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography that year. She is funny and exact about the small indignities of being a witness in her own case.

Abuse inside a queer relationship had almost no shelf of its own when Graywolf Press put this out on 5 November 2019, so Machado builds the archive by force: every chapter is driven by a different narrative trope — haunted house, erotica, bildungsroman — and her younger self is addressed throughout as you. It won the 2021 Rathbones Folio Prize. The second person is not a trick; it is the distance she needed to write it at all.

Jaballa Matar was abducted in Cairo in 1990, handed to the Libyan regime and held in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli; his son went back to Libya in 2012 to find out what became of him, and did not find out. First published in June 2016, it won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 2017 Folio Prize, the first nonfiction book to take that award. Grief without an ending, written without a drop of self-pity.

Both of her sons died by suicide, and Li writes from inside what she calls the abyss — reasoning alongside Wittgenstein, Camus and Shakespeare rather than feeling a way out of it. We are left with the hardest, she writes: to live after their deaths. Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it on 20 May 2025. By this list's measure it gives away more than anything else here, and it does it in the flattest voice on the list.

Youngest of twelve children, and the family home in New Orleans East is the thirteenth character. Grove Press published it on 13 August 2019 and it won the National Book Award for Nonfiction that November. One detail stays: after Katrina the city demolished the place in the summer of 2006, and the single warning letter went to the condemned address itself, so her mother learned it was gone only afterwards.

Every page is aimed at his mother in the second person: a political scientist raising a hard-headed son in Jackson, Mississippi, and eventually his partner in a gambling habit neither of them could stop. Scribner published it in October 2018, and it took the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. His own anorexia and his weight are handed over without a defence.

Ken was shot dead at twenty in Vallejo in July 1998, after a party in Berkeley. What gets reconstructed is a friendship conducted almost entirely through taste — the zines, the mixtapes, the arguing — and then two decades of being unable to write about it. Doubleday published it in 2022; it won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography and the 2022 National Book Critics Circle award. The self-criticism is what makes it hold.

Diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer in May 2013, a neurosurgeon turned his own training on himself and died in March 2015 at thirty-seven, leaving the manuscript short of an ending. Random House published it on 12 January 2016; it was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography or Autobiography and spent 68 weeks on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Lucy Kalanithi's epilogue is the hardest and the best part.

Howard Djani Sinclair, a frustrated reggae singer and militant Rasta, ran his household on the principle that Babylon — the corrupting world outside — was forever waiting for his wife and daughters: no friends, no interests, no opinions of their own. Simon & Schuster published the memoir in October 2023 and it won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, announced in March 2024. A poet wrote it, and she neither excuses her father nor flattens him.

Twelve August 2022, on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution: he lost the sight in his right eye and the use of one hand. Jonathan Cape published the account in April 2024. He never names the man who did it, calling him only the A., and instead of visiting him in jail writes a chapter imagining their conversation — either an evasion or the only sane use of a novelist's equipment.

Celebrity memoir usually buys its subject a defence; this one buys none. A professional actress from the age of six, she stopped in 2017 and then set down what her mother Debra, who died of cancer in 2013, had actually done to her. The Nickelodeon producer appears only as the Creator. Simon & Schuster published it on 9 August 2022, and more than three million copies had sold by July 2025.

A girl runs to hug the Stalin statue in central Tirana and finds that pro-democracy protesters have already taken the head off, magnificent moustache and all. Later she works out that her family's talk of relatives away at university meant prison — international relations standing in for treason, economics for hiding gold. Published in 2021, shortlisted that year for the Baillie Gifford Prize and the Costa Book Award. Nobody is better on believing the wrong thing sincerely.

Three movements, and the third one is the argument: a section titled And, because the grammar of a life is addition rather than substitution. Her father Isaac died in September 2016 at seventy-four, eighteen months after she met the writer Casey Cep, who appears throughout as C. Random House published it in 2022. Books about bereavement tend to end in wisdom; this ends in a conjunction, which is funnier and more honest.

Born in Dublin on 16 February 1958, he starts the national history in his own birth year and lets the two run in parallel: a Crumlin childhood, a mother who cleaned, an altar boy kissing Archbishop McQuaid's ring. The real subject is a system of feigned ignorance — one eye open, one closed — that let a country know and not know at once. An Post Irish Book of the Year in 2021.

Science memoir is usually science with a thin autobiographical veneer; these two are both load-bearing. Using radioactive carbon isotopes, she traced birch and Douglas fir passing carbon to each other underground through mycorrhizal fungal networks, a claim that took years to win acceptance. Knopf published it on 4 May 2021, and Richard Powers based a character in his Pulitzer-winning novel The Overstory on her, which is its own kind of verdict.