(Auto)Biographies and Memoirs to Read Right Now

Where’s that draft coming from? Oh it’s you, Wondercade reader. Welcome to my library. Please, grab that handle behind you — yes, the gold-filigree fixture there, the one shaped like a quill — and close the door.

There we are! As you see, I’ve latched the windows, opened the cobwebbed flue and stoked the first fireplace conflagration of the season. While the fall equinox has not officially arrived, the autumnal festivities have begun here in The Bookstorian’s lair.

I celebrate the arrival of September less like the average mortal (with your donning of cozy sweaters and sipping of artificial pumpkin beverages), and more like the schoolteacher — with you, dear Wondercader, being my pupil. To help you ease back into your reading rhythm after summer vacation, I’ve devised a curriculum for this month. A theme, if you will. Look to your left, just beyond the shelf on Mongol Empire military history and Greco-Roman folklore and you’ll see it written on a chalkboard: Autobiographies, Biographies and Memoirs.

I generally prefer not to capitulate to cliché, but the axiom “truth is stranger than fiction” is one I’ve found, after reading thousands upon thousands of real-life accounts, to be unquestionably accurate. As such, I’m thrilled to share a handful of books in these nonfiction genres — all published relatively recently, all centered around engrossing figures from history to the present day — that will rekindle your reading habit as the temperatures dip and the light fades.

Autobiographies and Memoirs

William Shakespeare, Donna Tartt, James Baldwin. That’s the literary dinner party of my dreams (though the list changes depending on my mood, and my to-read list). But I’d also be overjoyed to welcome Ketanji Brown Jackson, Ina Garten and Al Pacino into my candlelit sanctuary here. If you’re about to say I just listed a justice, a cook and an actor, not authors, I’ve got a surprise for you.

Earlier this month, Justice Jackson released one of the most highly anticipated memoirs of the year, Lovely One, which describes the path that she, and only she, will ever lay claim to: becoming the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. Make sure to pick up that inspiring account now, because come October, there are two books that rabid fans have been asking me about for years: Ina Garten has finally penned a memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, after her 13 best-selling cookbooks; and so has Al Pacino, with Sonny Boy, after his dozens and dozens of critically-acclaimed movies (I can’t say I know how many by heart, as I’m a bibliophile, not a cinephile).

You may have never heard the name Catherine Coldstream before, but that doesn’t make her memoir any less engaging than the narratives from the aforementioned luminaries. In fact, her account in Cloistered: My Years as a Nun — which recounts, in page-turning fashion, her 12 years as a silent sister in a Carmelite monastery — will almost certainly become fodder for some future Oscar-winning actress. I hear All That Glitters: A Story of Friendship, Fraud, and Fine Art by Orlando Whitfield has already begun that page-to-screen process, so now’s the time to read the cautionary tale of an art dealer caught in his own web of lies before it’s a hit on HBO. And to end where we began, Michelle Ephraim’s Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare brings us along on her journey to become a scholar of history’s greatest playwright. Less high stakes than the others here? Possibly. But like myself, you may be more enraptured for the deeper focus on the prose than the plot.

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Biographies

If I weren’t The Bookstorian, sometimes I think I’d like to have been a biographer. What a joy it would be, spelunking into the archives, poring through moth-eaten records, criss-crossing the planet in search of sources in order to see through the eyes of another.

For Dean Jobb, they were the eyes of “one of the most charming, audacious burglars in history” in his unputdownable book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue. Meanwhile, Sonia Purnell reveals the grossly misunderstood life of Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law in Kingmaker: Pamela Harriman’s Astonishing Life of Power, Seduction, and Intrigue. As for Noliwe Rooks, it was a towering Black leader she sought to understand, and ensure she wouldn’t be lost to time, in A Passionate Mind in Relentless Pursuit: The Vision of Mary McLeod Bethune.

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet offered my usual titles for children and young adults. But there’s a method to my madness: biographies — even the dustiest, densest tomes — are some of the best titles for young people, offering not just fodder for the endless book reports required of them, but a better understanding of the innumerable branching paths a life can take. A teenager will find as much inspiration in Brad Gooch’s biography of Keith Haring and Katherine Bucknell’s deep dive into the life of Christopher Isherwood as someone who’s seen as many moons as I have. But if you have, say, a Bookstorian-in-training in the single digits, I’d suggest teaching them about Langston Hughes with There Was a Party for Langston or Walt Whitman with The Soldier’s Friend. Now there’s another literary soirée I’d love to host…