100 best biographies of all time

Childhood cancer left Grealy with half her jaw removed, a disfigurement that filled her with self-loathing. A heartbreakingly wise child reborn as a brilliant writer, she puts readers in touch with a self beyond ugliness or pain.

With deadpan humor, a killer eye for detail, and a badass persona founded at age 7, Karr makes a convincing case that there's no dysfunctional childhood that can't be redeemed with a great story.

Wurtzel's raw emotional honesty about coming of age with a diagnosis and a bottomless pill bottle stirred up a storm of criticism and outrage but spoke straight to the hearts of the Kurt Cobain generation.

A childhood of abject poverty and brutal loss in Limerick, Ireland, becomes a luminous legend in this extraordinary account. Feeling sorry for yourself about something? Here's a sure end to that.

LGBTQIA+ hero Bechdel grew up in a small-town funeral home run by her father, a man with many secrets. This beautifully illustrated graphic memoir inspires us to rethink the mysteries of our own pasts.

Strayed cut short a self-destructive spinout after her mother's death with an 1,100-mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail, blazing a path for readers who are having trouble forgiving themselves.

Lifting up brokenhearted women since 2006, this iconic story of reinvention after divorce goes from the pits—a cold bathroom floor—to the peaks, a year of sensory delights and spiritual magic in Italy, India, and Bali.

Kaysen's parents were so frightened by her adolescent melodrama that they hustled her into treatment and she spent over a year in a mental hospital. Her ability to recreate the mindset of a miserable 18-year-old qualifies this memoir as a self-help book for parents.

When their parents died within weeks of each other, leaving him the caretaker of his 8-year-old brother, the 21-year-old author had just one superpower—irony. If there's a grief guide for the cool kids, this is it.

If you need to know what makes life worth living in the face of a terminal diagnosis, this book has an answer. The heartfelt reckoning of a 36-year-old neurosurgery resident with stage IV cancer was completed by his wife after he died.

Knapp was exactly the kind of well-educated, high-powered woman nobody dreams has a drinking problem, partly because she was so good at hiding it. The gift she gained by ending the denial is one she shares.

Does your book club need a reboot? Nafisi's account of gathering with her former students to read forbidden classics in the midst of the Islamist crackdown comes with the world's most powerful reading list.

Burroughs's no-holds-barred account of his harrowing childhood—gross, hilarious, completely outrageous—writes a bold permission slip for anyone who worries her secrets are too much to share.

Macdonald's experience of bonding with her goshawk Mabel opens a bright window into the bond between people and animals, deepening our understanding of our role as custodians of the natural world.

A magic carpet ride to the bohemian New York of the late ’60s and early ’70s, the future punk heroine's love letter to her friend Robert Mapplethorpe is filled with idealism, beauty, and sweetness.

Ward wrote this book to understand the unjust, untimely deaths of her brother and four other beloved Black men, revealing the forces of poverty and racism in their most personal and vicious form.

The author's survival of the violence and terror of the Cambodian Pol Pot regime is a stirring testimony to the resilience of children, a green shoot of hope and goodness in the devastation of the killing fields.

Read this book to be astonished—by the gutting nightmare of Didion's loss, and by the power of her intellect and her sentences to transform it into an immortal thing of beauty and deep humanity.

Without a bit of sugarcoating, Walls shows how we can love our families and our history no matter how much of a nightmare it all was. Her journey from the trailer park to the limo is an all-American success story.

If laughter is the best medicine, Sedaris is a great big bottle of it. The avatar of dysfunctional families everywhere, his sardonic, self-deprecating storytelling is guaranteed to deliver comic relief.