Memoirs worth your time

Phil Knight

The improbable, white-knuckle origin of Nike.

Tara Westover

A girl from the mountains who taught herself to think.

Michelle Obama

One of the most iconic women of our era, in her own words.

Paul Kalanithi

A young surgeon's reckoning with what makes life worth living.

Trevor Noah

Growing up mixed in a country that made his existence a crime.

Viktor E. Frankl

Finding purpose in even the darkest circumstances.

Walter Isaacson

The authorized portrait Jobs asked for and never controlled.

Jeannette Walls

A childhood of brilliant, broken parents — remembered without self-pity.

David Goggins

From abused kid to Navy SEAL ultrarunner — mastering the mind by refusing it comfort.

Anne Frank

Two years in a hidden annex — the most widely read testimony of the Holocaust.

Jon Krakauer

A bright young man gives away everything and walks into Alaska — Krakauer follows the trail to the bus.

Maya Angelou

The memoir that turned a silenced Black girlhood in the Jim Crow South into American literature.

Nelson Mandela

Twenty-seven years in prison to president of the country that jailed him — in his own words.

Laura Hillenbrand

Olympic runner, plane crash, 47 days on a raft, two years of POW camps — and that's not the hard part.

Elizabeth Gilbert

Italy, India, Indonesia — one year of putting a life back together, 12 million readers along for the trip.

Cheryl Strayed

1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail with a too-heavy pack and a broken life.

Bryan Stevenson

A young lawyer fights for the condemned and the wrongly convicted in America's Deep South.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

A father's letter to his son about surviving in a Black body in America.

Anthony Bourdain

A chef pulls back the curtain on the brutal, addictive, gloriously profane underworld of professional kitchens.

Jon Krakauer

A journalist summits Everest and descends into the deadliest disaster the mountain had ever seen, and lived to reconstruct it.

Frank McCourt

A childhood of staggering poverty in the lanes of Limerick, remembered with such wit that the grief goes down like music.

Michelle Zauner

A Korean-American musician grieves her mother through the food they shared, wandering the aisles of the Asian grocery store where memory lives.

J.D. Vance

A Marine turned Yale Law graduate looks back on the Appalachian family and Rust Belt town that shaped him, and the crisis of the white working class.

Lori Gottlieb

A therapist's own life falls apart, so she goes to therapy herself, and lets us sit in on both chairs at once.

Matthew McConaughey

The actor cracks open decades of diaries to share the outlaw logic he's lived by, catching the green lights and finding meaning in the red ones.