The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The New York Times’s book critics select the most outstanding memoirs published since 1969.

who voted:
Trade sources differ: a C-SPAN–based 2015 blog post tallied roughly 16 New York Times Book Review staffers, while a 2023 Publishers Weekly profile said the desk now has “more than 20 editors, critics and reporters” To keep our rankings conservative, we therefore credit each NYT list to 10 voters.

This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site almost 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
3162	Fierce Attachments	Vivian Gornick	1987	American	English
1037	The Woman Warrior	Maxine Hong Kingston	1976	American	English
1060	Fun Home	Alison Bechdel	2006	American	English
4140	The Liars' Club	Mary Karr	1995	American	English
7648	Hitch 22	Christopher Hitchens	2010	British	English
1752	Men We Reaped	Jesmyn Ward	2013	American	English
7072	Palimpsest	Gore Vidal	1995	American	English
5462	Giving up the Ghost	Hilary Mantel	2003	British	English
1996	A Childhood	Harry Crews	1978	American	English
2207	Dreams from My Father	Barack Obama	1995	American	English
3074	Patrimony	Philip Roth	1991	American	English
5692	All God’s Dangers	Theodore Rosengarten	1974	American	English
4068	Lives Other Than My Own	Emmanuel Carrère	2009	French	French
885	A Tale of Love and Darkness	Amos Oz	2002	Israeli	Hebrew
2670	This Boy's Life	Tobias Wolff	1989	American	English
5635	A Life's Work	Rachel Cusk	2001	British	English
2873	Boyhood	J. M. Coetzee	1997	South African	English
5826	Conundrum	Jan Morris	1974	British	English
5625	Wave	Sonali Deraniyagala	2013	Sri Lankan	English
8250	Always Unreliable	Clive James	2001	British	English
4076	Travels With Lizbeth	Lars Eighner	1993	American	English
6541	Hold Still	Sally Mann	2015	American	English
9833	Country Girl	Edna O'Brien	2012	Irish	English
670	Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi	2000	French	French
6130	Negroland	Margo Jefferson	2015	American	English
8758	Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys	Viv Albertine	2014	British	English
1827	Experience	Martin Amis	2000	British	English
4809	Slow Days, Fast Company	Eve Babitz	1977	American	English
3310	Growing Up	Russell Baker	1982	American	English
5708	Kafka Was The Rage	Anatole Broyard	1993	American	English
1209	Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates	2015	American	English
370	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	2005	American	English
1818	Barbarian Days	William Finnegan	2015	American	English
2341	Personal History	Katharine Graham	1997	American	English
7852	Thinking In Pictures	Temple Grandin	1995	American	English
5083	Autobiography Of A Face	Lucy Grealy	1994	American	English
8724	Dancing With Cuba	Alma Guillermoprieto	2004	Mexican	Spanish
6674	Minor Characters	Joyce Johnson	1983	American	English
9655	The Memory Chalet	Tony Judt	2010	British	English
2608	Heavy	Kiese Laymon	2018	American	English
3177	Priestdaddy	Patricia Lockwood	2017	American	English
2679	H Is For Hawk	Helen MacDonald	2014	British	English
2023	The Color of Water	James McBride	1995	American	English
1643	Angela's Ashes	Frank McCourt	1996	American	English
5260	Cockroaches	Scholastique Mukasonga	2006	French	French
8174	Life	Keith Richards	2010	British	English
8309	A Life In The Twentieth Century	Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr	2000	American	English
8852	My Lives	Edmund White	2005	American	English
2596	Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?	Jeanette Winterson	2011	British	English
7190	Close To The Knives	David Wojnarowicz	1991	American	English