The Best Memoirs of 2024 (So Far)

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The best memoirs share individual stories that illuminate broader or universal truths. They avoid pat answers, challenging and complicating how we view our world, our relationships, and ourselves. We’re drawn to memoirs in part because reading another person’s story can help us better understand our own: What have we learned? Who have we found or left behind? How have we survived? A good memoir will demand our attention, entertain us, show us new vistas—and sometimes, it’s also a place where we can meet ourselves.

As a reader and writer of memoirs, I’m thrilled to share some of my favorites from this year’s bumper crop. These are some of the most audacious and moving personal stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, written by award-winning memoirists as well as those debuting in the genre. I was struck by the urgency, generosity, and beauty of each of these narratives—if a memoir is included here, you can assume that I found myself savoring and underlining sentences. Every book on this list represents a story its author needed to tell. I hope each one also finds readers who need it.

(A housekeeping note: I was asked to focus on memoirs as opposed to essay collections; I recognize the line between the two can be difficult to draw. I’ll continue to read new memoirs and update this list throughout the year, so if your favorite isn’t here, feel free to reach out and tell me about it.)

And now, presented in publication order, are the best memoirs of 2024 (so far).

The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History

This book, a personal and extensively researched account of pain, beauty, and survival amidst the climate crisis, has stayed with me ever since I read the galley last fall. Manjula Martin writes with clarity and deep thoughtfulness, balancing justified rage with a tenderness that never veers into sentimentality. A memoir, a work of ecological history, and a love letter to the wild and imperiled California landscape Martin calls home, The Last Fire Season shows readers one way to both hold grief and inhabit joy in the face of an uncertain future.

Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, by Crystal Wilkinson

In Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts, the former Poet Laureate of Kentucky uplifts the labor and legacy of her foremothers—five generations of Black Appalachian country cooks whose stories, recipes, and cooking rituals are now a treasured part of her inheritance. I am no cook myself, but I’m here for anything Crystal Wilkinson writes, and this stunning culinary memoir is one to savor. Wilkinson brings her many kitchen ghosts to vivid life through painstaking research and perfectly chosen details, reminding us that food is never just about the here and now—it is also a vital link to our families, our communities, and our history.

How to Live Free in a Dangerous World, by Shayla Lawson

From Mexico City to Montserrat, Kyoto to Cairo, Shayla Lawson explores issues of gender identity, Blackness in America and abroad, sex and relationships, disability, friendship, healing, and more, bringing readers along on a far-ranging journey that’s more about love and liberation than points on a map. Lawson is an insightful and unfailingly open-handed writer: eager to share what they’ve learned, sharp but never jaded, honest about their trials, unafraid to be vulnerable. Though their book is structured like a travel memoir, it defies easy categorization. Bursting with humor and life, it will do more than transport readers; for many, it will be transformative.

I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante

Early in this beautiful memoir, Lucy Sante writes: “Who am I? is a question I’ve been trying to resolve for the better part of my life.” Sante, an award-winning author, artist, and critic, shares the story of her fascinating life and a candid accounting of how she came to face the truth of her gender identity in her seventh decade (“I had at last met my reckoning”), after feeding photos into FaceApp’s gender-swap function helped her to finally meet herself as she is. A profound story of self-realization written with curiosity and bracing clarity, I Heard Her Call My Name is a work that both new and established readers of Sante will treasure.

Whiskey Tender, by Deborah Jackson Taffa

Deborah Jackson Taffa, director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, writes with compassion for her past self and the people and places that formed her, weaving stories of her parents and grandparents through an intimate account of her own childhood after her family left the Quechan (Yuma) reservation in California for a new home in Navajo territory in New Mexico. She writes about the challenges and dreams of her mixed-race, mixed-tribe family, confronts genocidal US government policies against Native people, and grapples with the specific harms visited on those pressured to uproot and assimilate. The result is a riveting, intricately layered exploration of family, belonging, trauma, and survival—an instant classic by a writer I can’t wait to read more from.

Here After, by Amy Lin

Amy Lin told me that she wrote Here After “in an agony that insisted”—a phrase I’ve continued to think about long after finishing this aching, fragmented memoir about her life with her husband Kurtis and his sudden death. If you’ve ever known loss so disorienting and cataclysmic that you want not stories of hope or survival, but ones that cry out in their brokenness—if you are looking for a place to meet your own pain and perhaps feel less alone with it—Here After might be the companion you need.

Where Rivers Part, by Kao Kalia Yang

Kao Kalia Yang’s The Late Homecomer, detailing her family’s escape from war in Laos, holds a place on my list of all-time favorite memoirs. The Song Poet focused on the story of her father, a song poet and a Hmong refugee. Now, in Where Rivers Part, she shares the story of her mother Tswb, who fled genocidal violence, lived in a refugee camp, and helped her family find and build a new home in the US. Yang keeps readers as close as possible to Tswb’s perspective, treating her history and hardships with care. Where Rivers Part is a sensitive, unforgettable account of one mother’s immeasurable strength and love for her family.

Bones Worth Breaking, by David Martinez

Bones Worth Breaking is the hard, immersive story of two brothers, David Martinez and his brother Mike, who start out and are in a sense always together throughout this arresting nonlinear narrative, although they eventually take very different paths in life. Martinez pulls no punches when writing about his upbringing as a multiracial Mormon in Idaho, family dysfunction, living with addiction, and surviving complicated losses—but the heart of this book is found in his defining relationship with his brother, and what it means share your life and your wounds with someone you ultimately cannot save.

Cactus Country, by Zoë Bossiere

Growing up in an Airstream trailer in Tucson, Zoë Bossiere doesn’t quite know where they belong or have the language for their gender fluidity. Surrounded by people who want to categorize them, often treated like a boy, young Zoë has more questions than answers as they dream of a life beyond Cactus Country RV Park. In seeking out stories like her own, finding vital community, and eventually writing about the home she leaves behind, Bossiere begins to imagine a future that holds more joy, more safety, and more truth. Heartrending and hopeful by turns, written with precision and a deep-rooted sense of place, Cactus Country is a soulful coming-of-age story I'm grateful to have read.

Love Is a Burning Thing, by Nina St. Pierre

In Love Is a Burning Thing, Nina St. Pierre tries to untangle the complicated and painful legacy left by her mother, Anita, whose recovery from self-immolation ten years before Nina’s birth led her to a lifelong obsession with Transcendental Meditation. This debut memoir is a daughter’s reckoning: a quest to understand her mystery of a mother, an exploration of mysticism and untreated mental illness, and an indictment of the systems that failed their family. Reading it was something of a homecoming for me, as St. Pierre and I grew up in the same remote corner of the west, but you don’t need to know it in order to appreciate the descriptions that add lush texture to this searching, empathetic narrative.

The Dead Don't Need Reminding, by Julian Randall

Julian Randall showcases both his range and his generosity as a writer in his nonfiction debut. His unflinching excavation of family history, mental health struggles, legacy, and loss flows around and through lyrical reflections on media, ranging from Spider-Man and BoJack Horseman to the Creed movies and Jordan Peele’s filmography. Incisive, enthralling, and full of heart, this book doesn’t just set itself apart in the genre of blended personal/pop culture writing; it deserves to be seen as a reinvention of it.

Woman of Interest, by Tracy O'Neill

In the spring of 2020, as thousands of people worldwide succumb to Covid, Tracy O’Neill finds herself suddenly consumed by the fear that her unknown birth mother might be dying alone in Korea. She seeks out a private investigator, puzzles over unearthed clues, and eventually travels to the other side of the world, determined to learn more about herself as well as the mysterious woman who bore her. O'Neill invites readers to consider the complex and often confounding nature of family mythology in Woman of Interest—a funny, effervescent addition to the memoir-as-detective-story genre.

The Lucky Ones, by Zara Chowdhary

Zara Chowdhary was 16 years old when terrifying anti-Muslim violence erupted in Gujarat in 2002. Instead of taking her school exams, she spent three harrowing months locked with her family in their apartment in Ahmedabad while violent Hindu mobs hunted down and massacred hundreds of their fellow Muslims. In The Lucky Ones, she describes her relatives’ and neighbors’ terror under siege in unshrinking detail, naming the extremist hatred and violence that destroyed so many lives and remade her own. An astonishing feat of storytelling, an urgent reckoning with a past that feels all too present, and a moving ode to the women in her family, Chowdhary’s memoir is one that should and will haunt you.

First in the Family, by Jessica Hoppe

Jessica Hoppe writes with grace and gripping candor about being the first in her family to recover from addiction in this fiery debut memoir. “Although alcohol would become my drug of choice, American exceptionalism was the first drug I ever took,” she writes. In sharing both her family history and her individual journey to recovery, Hoppe doesn’t shy away from challenging “the propaganda of the American Dream” she was raised to believe in—she explicitly connects her personal experiences with racialized trauma and substance use to a broader and more devastating story about this country.

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