Best biographies of the decade
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The 56 Most Popular Memoirs of the Past Decade
If you’ve acquired a taste for memoirs, then you already know how engrossing this particular format can be. The book-length first-person narrative is inherently fascinating, somehow. It’s the story of a life, by the person who lived it, usually delivered in some interesting and artful way.
We’ve gathered here the most popular memoirs on Goodreads from the past 10 years, in order from the top down. In other words, these are the memoirs most read, rated, and reviewed by your fellow Goodreads regulars over the past decade. Each has earned an overall rating of stars or better.
You’ll find some dishy celebrity memoirs here, along with more literary books that have broken through to the pop culture mainstream. The memoir is a famously flexible format, and many of the authors here introduce bold variations on the standard autobiography.
Some spotlight items, in no particular order: Author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates’ incisive Betwe
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Fierce Attachments
“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”
When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait of th
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Growing up, inom mostly read fiction, losing myself in adventures in other worlds. I didn’t want to think of my own. In college, I discovered memoirs, and I read book after book, soaking in the stories of people from all over the world. Books like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and The Year of Magical Thinking drew me in with their incredible prose and levande worldbuilding. inom felt like a little girl in the &#;90s who just discovered Lisa Frank. What an incredible genre full of life.
In the gods decade since college graduation, I’ve picked up memoir after memoir, book after book, scouring library sales and used book stores to add to my personal library. Memoirs in recent years have outdone themselves, showing an incredible amount of creativity and innovation. From graphic memoirs to experimental entries into the genre, there’s no singular way to write a memoir, making each story unique.
If you’re looking to read more memoirs, it can be difficult to figure out where to uppstart. So to h