Biography and Memoir

Discover the stories of their lives, in recent biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs.
Updated April 9, 2024
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
ELON MUSK
Isaacson, Walter
#1 New York Times bestseller From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era--a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of...
Making It So: A Memoir
Patrick Stewart
THE NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER The long-awaited memoir from iconic, beloved actor and living legend Sir Patrick Stewart! From his acclaimed stage triumphs to his legendary onscreen work in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises, Sir...
The Woman in Me
Britney Spears
Named a Best Book of the Year by Elle, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, NPR, Financial Times, Vanity Fair, and more! "In Britney Spears's memoir, she's stronger than ever." --The New York Times Over 2 million...
My Name is Barbra {book}
Barbra Streisand
The long-awaited memoir by the superstar of stage, screen, recordings, and television Barbra Streisand is by any account a living legend, a woman who in a career spanning six decades has excelled in every area of entertainment. She is among the handful of EGOT winners (Emmy,...
Medgar and Myrlie: Medgar Evers and the Love Story That Awakened America
Joy-Ann Reid
#1 New York Times Bestseller "Medgar Evers deserves a place alongside Malcolm X and Dr. King in our historical memory. Evers, with Myrlie as his partner in activism and in life, was doing civil rights work in the single most hostile and dangerous environment in America."--from Medgar...
Sharing Too Much: Musings from an Unlikely Life
Richard Paul Evans
The #1 New York Times bestselling author and "king of Christmas fiction" (The New York Times) delivers a charming and inspirational collection of personal essays. Before he was the #1 New York Times bestselling author of holiday classics such as The...
THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND a memoir at the end of sight /
Leland, Andrew,
We meet Andrew Leland as he's suspended in the liminal state of the soon-to-be blind: he's midway through his life with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that ushers those who live with it from sightedness to blindness over years, even decades. He grew up with full vision, but starting in his...
Enough
Cassidy Hutchinson
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Cassidy Hutchinson's desk was mere steps from the most controversial president in recent American history. Now, she provides a riveting account of her extraordinary experiences as an idealistic young woman thrust into the middle of a national...
World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music
Jeff Tweedy
What makes us fall in love with a song? What makes us want to write our own songs? Do songs help? Do songs help us live better lives? And do the lives we live help us write better songs? After two New York Times bestsellers that cemented and expanded his legacy as one of America's best-loved...
My Side of the River: A Memoir
Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
A New York Times Editor's PickA People Magazine Best Book to Read in February A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book of 2024 "My Side of the River is both fierce and poetic. It brilliantly reframes border writing while embracing nature and...
A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial
Viet Thanh Nguyen
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide With insight, humor, formal invention,...
Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
Drew Gilpin Faust
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America. To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two...
Up Home: One Girl's Journey
Ruth J. Simmons
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . "Simmons's evocative account of her remarkable trajectory from Jim Crow Texas, where she was the youngest of twelve children in a sharecropping family, to the presidencies of Smith College and Brown University shines with tenderness and dignity."-The New York...
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me
Bernie Taupin
**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** An evocative, clear-eyed, and revealing memoir by Bernie Taupin, the lyrical master and long-time collaborator of Elton John "I loved writing, I loved chronicling life and every moment I was cogent,...
Charlie Chaplin vs. America: When Art, Sex, and Politics Collided
Scott Eyman
The remarkable, must-read story of Charlie Chaplin's years of exile from the United States during the postwar Red Scare, and how it ruined his film career, from bestselling biographer Scott Eyman. Bestselling Hollywood biographer and film historian Scott Eyman tells the story of...
Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong
Katie Gee Salisbury
Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a glamorous starlet, flapper, and fashion icon who graced Oscar-winning films and who was mobbed by clamoring fans and the adoring press both here and abroad. Anna May Wong was plucked from her...
How to Say Babylon: A Memoir
Safiya Sinclair
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness<...
Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World
Christian Cooper
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER . Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up. "Wondrous . . ....
PRESIDENT GARFIELD From Radical to Unifier
Goodyear, C. W.
An "ambitious, thorough, supremely researched" (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America's twentieth president--James Garfield. In "the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years" (The Wall Street Journal),...
Father and Son: A Memoir
Jonathan Raban
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * A poignant memoir of love, trauma, and recovery after a life-changing stroke, twinned to a powerful account of his father's experience in World War II, by a winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. "A beautiful,...
Talking to My Angels
Melissa Etheridge
Twenty years after the success of her first memoir, the New York Times bestseller The Truth Is . . ., the Grammy and Oscar award-winning rocker and trailblazing LGBTQAI icon takes stock of the intervening years, recounting the euphoric triumphs and the life-altering tragedies of her life. ...
Wandering through Life: A Memoir
Donna Leon
Theinternationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells herown adventurous life story as she enters her eighties In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, DonnaLeon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more...
Only Say Good Things: Surviving Playboy and Finding Myself
Crystal Hefner
A JANUARY 2024 APPLE BOOKS STAFF PICK AND AUDIBLE EDITORS SELECT NAMED A BEST BOOK TO READ THIS JANUARY BY THE GLOSS A raw and unflinching look at the objectification and misogyny of the Playboy mansion, a woman's stolen young adulthood and her...
In the Form of a Question: The Joys and Rewards of a Curious Life
Amy Schneider
"Warm and funny." --The New York Times * "Refreshingly no-holds-barred." --USA TODAY * "Delightful." --San Francisco Chronicle An inspirational, witty, and bold memoir from the most successful woman ever to compete on Jeopardy!--an exploration of...
Lou Reed: The King of New York
Will Hermes
The most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death ten years ago, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock-poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture...
The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing
Lara Love Hardin
Soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors' credit cards. She is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes incarcerated. When she's released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. But shame is a poison worse than heroin. Lara must learn how to...
Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
Maria Bamford
From "weird, scary, ingenious" (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, an instant New York Times bestselling, brutally honest, and "laugh-out-loud funny" (Jennette McCurdy, #1 New York Times bestselling author) memoir about show business, mental health, and the...
George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle
Philip Norman
From the premiere Beatles biographer--author of the New York Times bestseller John Lennon: The Life and Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation--a rare and "absorbing biography" (Wall Street Journal) of George Harrison, the most misunderstood and mysterious Beatle,...
Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant: A Memoir
Curtis Chin
An American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book--Israel Fishman Nonfiction Award A 2024 Michigan Notable Book Best Nonfiction Books of the Year--Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year--Apple Books  
Larry McMurtry: A Life
Tracy Daugherty
A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry from New York Times bestselling author Tracy Daugherty. In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior...
On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain
Ronald C. White
NATIONAL BESTSELLER . From the author of A. Lincoln and American Ulysses comes the dramatic and definitive biography of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the history-altering professor turned Civil War hero. "A vital and vivid portrait of an unlikely military hero who...
THE WOMAN THEY WANTED shattering the illusion of the good Christian wife / Shannon Harris.
Harris, Shannon
"No one is coming to rescue me. I am going to have to rescue me." As a twenty-three-year-old singer and the soon-to-be wife of youth pastor Joshua Harris, nothing in Shannon Harris's secular upbringing prepared her to enter the world of conservative Christianity. Soon Joshua's...
The Race to Be Myself: A Memoir
Caster Semenya
Olympian and World Champion Caster Semenya is finally ready to share the vivid and heartbreaking story of how the world came to know her name. Thrust into the spotlight at just eighteen years old after winning the Berlin World Championships in 2009, Semenya's win was quickly overshadowed by...
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell's Invisible Life
Anna Funder
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR * WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST * This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century --and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern world<...
Exit Interview: A Memoir
Kristi Coulter
A candid, intensely funny memoir of ambition, gender, and a grueling decade inside Amazon.com, from the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This. "A unique and brilliant book." --Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks What would you...
The Night Parade: A Speculative Memoir
Jami Nakamura Lin
A Most Anticipated Book by Poets & Writers * The Boston Globe * San Francisco Chronicle * Los Angeles Times * The Millions * Library Journal * Book Riot * Debutiful * and many more!  In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias,...
Breaking Through: My Life in Science
Katalin Karikó
A powerful memoir from Katalin Karikó, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, whose decades-long research led to the COVID-19 vaccines "Katalin Karikó's story is an inspiration."--Bill Gates "Riveting . . . a true story of a brilliant...
When I Was Your Age: Life Lessons, Funny Stories & Questionable Parenting Advice from a Professional Clown
Kenan Thompson
"Kenan is a master storyteller with extraordinary stories to tell. I wouldn't miss this for the world."--Leslie Jones When I Was Your Age is a hilarious, heartwarming and surprising ode to growing up, getting older and wiser, and luck, life, and learning from the school of hard knocks...
Lovers in Auschwitz: A True Story
Keren Blankfeld
The "mesmerizing and inspirational" (Judy Batalion) true story of two Holocaust survivors who fell in love in Auschwitz, only to be separated upon liberation and lead remarkable lives apart following the war--and then find each other again more than 70 years later. Zippi...
Leslie F*cking Jones
Leslie Jones
WINNER OF THE 2024 AUDIE AWARD FOR HUMOR A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A BARNES AND NOBLE'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR  A TOWN & COUNTRY BEST CELEBRITY MEMOIR OF 2023 A VULTURE BEST COMEDY...
Overlooked : a celebration of remarkable, underappreciated people who broke the rules and changed the world /
Padnani, Amisha,
An unforgettable collection of diverse, remarkable lives inspired by "Overlooked," the groundbreaking New York Times series that publishes the obituaries of extraordinary people whose deaths went unreported in the newspaper-filled with nearly 200 full-color photos and new, never-before...
Borderline: Defending the Home Front
Vincent Vargas
An inside look at the U.S./Mexican border through the eyes of former U.S. Border Patrol agent, Vincent Vargas, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the U.S. Army's 75th Ranger Regiment. Featuring a Foreword by #1 New York Times bestselling author Jocko Willink. ...
Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith
John Szwed
Named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the New Yorker and The New York Times' Dwight Garner "The first comprehensive biography of this hipster magus . . . [John Szwed] allows different sides of Smith's personality to catch blades of sun. He brings the right...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.