Best biographies and memoirs to read in 2025

The best memoirs and biographies blend fascinating anecdotes with deeper meditations that make us reflect on our own lives. From poignant coming-of-age tales to candid confessionals, these are our top picks.

On Friendship

The novelist Andrew O’Hagan’s latest book is a “paean to the joys and power of friendship”, said Michael Kalisch in The New Statesman. It consists of eight “amiable” essays, each devoted to one of his friends. In one, he describes his “first best friend”, Mark MacDonald, a boyhood neighbour in North Ayrshire. Later pieces are about friendships “forged in the literary world”, such as with Seamus Heaney and Edna O’Brien. For O’Hagan, the best friendships are an antidote to the constrictions of family, said Anthony Cummings in The Guardian. He recalls his boyhood home as a “zone of adversities”, from which friends liberated him. Friendship, he writes, can be a “passport to being the kind of person you wanted to be”.

There’s a lot of “name-dropping” in these pages (Julian Assange, Richard Burton and Mark Rylance all figure), but O’Hagan “makes up for it with wit and good humour”, said Ceci Browning in The Times. Some of the pieces are truly moving – such as his account of another teenage friend, Keith, who on learning he was terminally ill, called on O’Hagan for support. More than romantic love, O’Hagan feels that friendship “describes the shape of your life” – and this joyous book suggests he is right.

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After Oscar

“Today, Oscar Wilde is one of the most celebrated writers in English, both instantly recognisable and actually read,” said Matthew Sturgis in The Guardian. “But it was not always so.” When he died in Paris in 1900, aged 46, five years after his arrest and imprisonment on charges of “gross indecency with male persons”, the dominant feeling was one of “relief that an embarrassing figure had been removed from the scene”. Few of his friends attended his funeral, and it was widely assumed that “he and his works would soon be forgotten”. This “fascinating book” by Wilde’s only grandchild, Merlin Holland, tells the story of what has happened since. Deftly weaving the cultural and personal, Holland details the fierce battles over Wilde’s legacy, and describes the “long shadow that he cast” over his two sons Cyril and Vyvyan. Although they were “camouflaged” by an adopted surname – Holland – their lives were badly damaged by his public disgrace. It is a work of “wit, personal candour and scholarly rigour”, which reveals that “Wilde’s afterlife” has been “almost as rich and entertaining as his life”.

Holland’s book is “extraordinarily gripping”, and very moving, said Melanie McDonagh in The London Standard. “It’s impossible not to flinch” at the trauma inflicted upon Cyril and Vyvyan, who were orphaned by their father’s death (their mother had died two years earlier) and sent to live with a “callous” guardian. Cyril died in the First World War; Vyvyan lived till he was 80, but remained a troubled figure. Holland has made it his mission to “champion his grandfather’s legacy”, and with this “compelling story” of “familial love and loyalty”, he has fulfilled that task heroically.

Fly, Wild Swans

Few non-fiction books have had as much impact as Jung Chang’s 1991 memoir “Wild Swans”, said Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Intertwining Chang’s childhood with the stories of her mother (pictured) and grandmother, it sold more than 13 million copies (despite never being published in China) and gave many Western readers their first glimpse of life under Chinese communism. Now, more than three decades on, Chang has written a “magnificent sequel”, which picks up where “Wild Swans” left off: with her move to England, aged 26, in 1978. Chang describes revelling in Western freedoms, including sex (a “dirty word” in China), and charts her development as a writer. Less happily, she also describes the deterioration of her relationship with her homeland. She used to go there regularly, but this became more difficult following her “devastatingly critical” 2005 biography of Mao Zedong (co-written with her husband Jon Halliday), and her last visit was in 2018. She dedicates this book to “my mother, whose deathbed I am unable to visit”.

Chang’s early life in Britain, on a “study scholarship”, was closely monitored by the Chinese state, said Kathryn Hughes in The Sunday Times. She was required to wear a “lumpy Mao suit” and was told never to venture into a pub, because it would be “full of naked women gyrating”. But Chang was a quick learner. She got a PhD in linguistics; then came “Wild Swans”, and a “Cinderella-like transformation”. By the mid-1990s, she was living in “swanky Notting Hill”, and was “chums with Martin Amis”. In these pages, she has again used “intimate experience” to make sense of larger events. It’s a method that “works as triumphantly today” as when “Wild Swans” “burst onto the scene”. This book feels in places like an “uneasy hybrid”, said Boyd Tonkin in the Financial Times. Parts of it “revisit in an abbreviated version” stories first told in “Wild Swans” – such as her Manchurian grandmother’s experiences of foot-binding. New readers might want first to encounter such material in the original. As a memoir, though, it’s very “engaging”, said Rana Mitter in Literary Review. Chang is “thoughtful without being sentimental”, and writes illuminatingly of her life both in England and China. Overall, it provides a timely insight into “the complexities of processing” history, family and personal identity, while dealing with a regime that insists on defining history, and keeping it “firmly in the past”.

How to Lose Your Mother

Molly Jong-Fast is the daughter of Erica Jong, best known for her groundbreaking and bestselling 1973 novel "Fear of Flying", about a liberated woman's quest for pleasure, said Alice O'Keeffe in The Times – and in which she coined the phrase "zipless f**k" to denote casual sex. As Jong-Fast relates in her "ruthlessly honest and often hilarious memoir", Erica's abilities as a writer weren't matched by her parenting skills. When her daughter was small, "she was never home, always travelling or out on the town". Erica's husband, Jonathan Fast, would try to get her to spend an hour a day with Jong-Fast, but she simply "couldn't do it": the most she'd manage would be half an hour. Eventually, Jong-Fast's parents divorced, and Erica slid into alcoholism ("always denied") and became increasingly obsessed with her waning fame. Jong-Fast developed problems of her own – including an eating disorder and drug and alcohol addiction – but she overcame these and is now a "devoted mother to three children", as well as a successful journalist and podcaster.

Her memoir is partly an account of her childhood, but also a description of her "annus horribilis" of two years ago, when Erica (by now in her early 80s) developed dementia, various friends and relatives died, and Jong-Fast's husband was diagnosed with cancer, said Lucy Scholes in the Financial Times. She spares few details as she documents her mother's decline: her increasingly stilted social interactions, her neglect of her personal hygiene. "Jong-Fast is aware that this memoir is a betrayal of a kind" (though her mother, she points out, often featured her in her writing). But if she is angry, she has reason to be: "put bluntly – bad mothers make bad daughters". Often rancorous, though never self-indulgent, this book is a moving portrait of a "painful and maddening" relationship.

The Spy in the Archive

In March 1992, an "elderly, ill-dressed and inarticulate" Russian walked into the newly opened British embassy in Vilnius, Lithuania, "carrying a duffel bag stuffed with papers", said Donald Rayfield in Literary Review. Vasili Mitrokhin, a retired KGB archivist, was nearly shown the door, but a young diplomat persuaded MI6 to "take a closer look". The bag proved to be a remarkable "counterintelligence bonanza": the papers revealed the identities of hundreds of Soviet spies, as well as numerous KGB plots, including a plan to break the legs of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, who'd defected to the West in 1961. In this "enthralling" biography, Gordon Corera charts Mitrokhin's journey from loyal KGB officer to "disillusioned" spiller of secrets. He had become horrified by the KGB's repression of the Soviet people, and its deceit, said Alan Judd in The Spectator. But his defection was also fuelled by resentment. During overseas postings early in his career, he had committed various blunders. As a result, he was removed from operational work and consigned to a "dead-end job in the archives".

Mitrokhin extracted information by writing coded messages on scraps of paper, which he'd smuggle out of the KGB's headquarters in his socks, said James Owen in The Sunday Times. At his dacha, he would "reconstitute the documents with a typewriter" – before burying them underground in milk churns. All this took "remarkable courage": discovery would have led to certain execution. After he was exfiltrated to England in 1994, he "became disappointed with what he found in the West" – and angry that his revelations didn't lead to "Nuremberg- style justice for Russia's former leaders". This book is an "overdue and often striking memorial" to a man who remained, to the end, a "prickly oddball".

The Memoir: Part One by Cher

"There was some sniggering" when the news broke that Cherilyn Sarkisian – aka Cher – was going to publish a two-part memoir, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. While a president can get away with such a "power move", it seems less justifiable for a pop star "who once sang 'The Shoop Shoop Song'". Yet it turns out that Cher has led such an eventful life that two volumes may not be enough. She was born in California in 1946, to a heroin-addicted Armenian father and a singer mother who married eight times, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. While much of her childhood was spent in chaotic poverty, there were periods of "wealth and plenty", depending on whom her mother was "married to at the time". Cher met her first husband, Sonny Bono, a songwriter 11 years her senior, in a coffee shop when she was 16. When he walked in, she recalls, "everyone else in the room faded". Having worked together as backing singers, they formed the singing duo Sonny & Cher, and in 1965 hit the big time with their "deathless global smash" "I Got You Babe", which knocked The Beatles' "Help!" off the top of the UK charts.

While Cher and Sonny had a "sizzling chemistry in performance", offstage he was an "old-fashioned, controlling" Svengali, said Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times. A fan of Machiavelli, he worked Cher "like a pack mule" while saddling her with contracts that gave him ownership of 95% of her earnings (the remaining 5% went to lawyers). The pair reinvented themselves as TV stars in the early 1970s, making the hugely successful "The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour", but divorced in 1975. Covering the period up to the dawn of Cher's "serious movie career in the early 1980s", "The Memoir: Part One" is a "detailed and characteristically profane" examination of a fascinating and remarkable life.

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Things in Nature Merely Grow

The Chinese-American novelist Yiyun Li begins her "quietly devastating" memoir by "laying out the facts", said Suzanne Joinson in The Guardian. "And those facts, raw and precise, are shattering." Li and her husband had two sons, Vincent and James. Vincent died in 2017, aged 16; James died in 2024, aged 19. Both ended their lives by jumping in front of trains not far from the family home in New Jersey. Both were academically gifted, but had very different personalities. Vincent, who "loved baking and knitting", was the more flamboyant and emotional of the two – a boy, Li says, who lived "feelingly". James, by contrast, a "brilliant linguist", was "self-contained, somewhat unreachable", more at home with facts than feelings. If Vincent died because he couldn't cope with his emotions, James, Li suggests, "died from thinking". The story she tells in "Things in Nature Merely Grow" is so terrible that it "can only be conveyed through a restrained and astringent English". Yet the effect of this is not to distance the reader, but to create an "almost unbearable intimacy".

Li, who grew up in Beijing, and began her "prize-winning literary career" after moving to the US in 1996, is fiercely resistant to "platitudes about loss and grief", said Daphne Merkin in The New York Times. "Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process," she writes, "and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone." Instead of grief, she strives for "radical acceptance" – which seems to mean being aware that she is condemned to exist in the "abyss", while also carrying on in the normal world – getting out of bed at the regular time, playing the piano, studying Euclidean geometry. "Life is stubborn," she writes. "So am I."

Li offers some context to her son's deaths by exploring her own past, said Helen Brown in The Daily Telegraph. We learn that she was "relentlessly belittled and beaten by her mother as a child", and that she suffered bouts of severe depression, and twice attempted suicide when her sons were young. Did this, she asks bluntly, make "death feel like a viable solution to life's problems" for them? In the face of such unanswerable questions, Li "resists anger or regret", opting instead for a "cool-headed clarity". There's something remarkable about her "determination to live with dignity and defiance through this extremity", said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Sunday Times. A work of "harsh beauty", her memoir is "unlike any other book I've read".

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Source Code by Bill Gates

In the first installment of his planned trilogy of memoirs, Bill Gates remembers his early life growing up in Seattle and journey to co-founding Microsoft at the age of 20. The tech billionaire "offers insight into his family", sketching an "affectionate" portrait of his father and "virtuous, albeit peculiar" mother, said Martin Chilton in The Independent. Both parents were worried about their "extremely bright, reclusive" son; Gates recalls struggling with social interactions, preferring instead to read books alone.

The book is filled with "candid" moments from his reflections on being considered "somewhat unlikeable" to his "youthful experiments with LSD". For those interested in how Gates became such an "influential businessman", "Source Code" will make for enjoyable reading. "Fascinating tidbits" give us the "inside view from a hyper-focused young man with a brilliant mind", and I finished the book with a "respect for Gates' intellect" and an "appreciation of why he is such a unique achiever".

It's a "charmingly told" story, and one that completely "immerses" us in Gates' world, added Tom Knowles in The Telegraph. "But the interested reader may be more inclined to wait for the second and third books. That, we can hope, is where the real drama will begin."

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Me and Mr Jones by Suzi Ronson

In 1971, Suzi Ronson (then Suzanne Fussey) was a 21-year-old hairdresser at a salon in Beckenham, southeast London, when one of her customers – Mrs Jones – mentioned her "artistic" son David, said Anthony Quinn in The Observer. The next week, Mrs Jones brought in David's wife, Angie, who was so delighted with the "outrageous" haircut Suzi gave her that she took her to meet David himself – "a pale and epicene young man" who had just started calling himself David Bowie. With the help of a German anti-dandruff product, Suzi transformed David's "mousy" hair into a "spiky red feather cut". It was the birth of the "look of Ziggy Stardust".

Suzi, infatuated with the couple and their bohemian world, became Bowie's stylist, and soon after went on the road with him and the Spiders from Mars. Five decades on, she has written an "honest and troubled memoir" of her time as his "hair'n'make-up mascot". It belongs to a niche genre – call it "I-was-Sinatra's-valet" – but her book offers a compelling portrait of Bowie "on the verge of stardom".

Ronson skilfully charts her drab suburban upbringing, so different from Bowie's "countercultural" mileu, said Deborah Levy in Literary Review. With "perfect pitch and tension", she recounts key moments in his early career – from his legendary performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in 1972 to the night a year later when he unexpectedly "retired" Ziggy Stardust.

Much Bowie literature consists of "pretentious evaluation" of his lyrics and influences, said Suzanne Moore in The New Statesman. Ronson, by contrast, barely mentions his music, and instead focuses on practical matters – such as sewing the jewels onto Bowie's jockstrap, or worrying "about all the sweat breaking the zips of his costumes". She tells us that she slept with him once, but is "discreet" about the details. It makes for an engaging, often endearing account of the "magical rising of Ziggy, by the woman who put the colour in his hair".

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