The 16 Best Biographies and Memoirs That Read Like Novels

Tara Westover grew up in the mountains of Idaho in a family that did not believe in schools, doctors or the government, working in her father's scrapyard, and she did not sit in a classroom until she was seventeen. The book follows what happens when she teaches herself enough to get into a university and then keeps going, and what that costs at home. It is not really a book about education. It is about the moment you notice that your family's account of reality and your own no longer match, and that you will have to choose one of them.

Agassi hated the sport he was world class at, and he had been hating it since he was a small boy standing in front of his father's ball machine. The book gives you the yard in Las Vegas, the tennis academy that reads like a boarding prison, the wigs, the collapse in the rankings, the long second career. The sentences are far better than a sports memoir needs them to be, because he worked with a professional writer, J. R. Moehringer, and he says so in the book rather than pretending otherwise.

Frank McCourt was born in New York, taken back to Limerick as a small boy, and grew up in a house with a father who drank the wages and a mother trying to keep the surviving children alive. He writes it in the present tense in a child's voice, which sounds like a gimmick and is exactly why the book works, because a child reports what he sees without arranging it into tragedy first. The result is funny far more often than any summary of the plot can explain, and the funniness is what makes the sad parts land.

Jeannette Walls opens on that taxi and then goes back to the start: a brilliant, alcoholic father who kept promising the family a glass house he would build one day, a painter mother who did not want the responsibility of feeding anyone, four children moving from town to town and often going hungry. Walls writes it without asking you to pity her, which is the hardest register there is for this material, and it is the reason the book has lasted while similar ones have not.

Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of three generations of the Sacklers: the brothers who built a fortune partly by inventing modern drug marketing, and the descendants who owned Purdue Pharma when it made and sold OxyContin. He structures it as a family saga, complete with feuds, ambition and museum wings carrying the family name, and it moves like fiction because the shape is borrowed from fiction. The family did not cooperate with him, so the whole thing rests on documents, depositions and the people who worked around them.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black woman in Baltimore whose cancer cells were taken during treatment in 1951 and kept alive in laboratories, where they became one of the most used cell lines in medical research. Her family did not know for decades. Rebecca Skloot spent years with them, especially with Henrietta's daughter Deborah, and the book braids three strands: the science, the family, and Skloot's own awkward, decade long relationship with them. The science is explained so plainly that you barely notice you are being taught it.

Helen Macdonald's father died without warning, and she responded by buying a goshawk and setting about training it. The book alternates between her year with the bird and the story of T. H. White, the writer who tried the same thing badly decades earlier and left a record of it. Her writing on the hawk is the best I have read on any animal, precise and slightly frightening, and the grief runs underneath all of it without ever being announced or explained.

Patti Smith arrived in New York in 1967 with no money and met Robert Mapplethorpe almost immediately, and this is the story of the years when they were poor together, before either of them was anybody. They shared rooms, food and an absolute certainty that they were artists, which is easier to admire in a book than to live next door to. She wrote it after his death, as a promise she had made him, and that shapes every page: tender, protective, and unembarrassed about how earnest the two of them were.

Cheryl Strayed's mother died when Strayed was twenty two, her marriage came apart, she used heroin for a while, and then she decided to walk more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail on her own. The hike gives the book its spine and the flashbacks give it its weight. She is unusually unflattering about herself, and that is the thing that keeps the whole enterprise from turning into an advertisement for going outdoors to fix your life.

Isaacson interviewed Jobs over two years, on the understanding that Jobs would have no control over the result, and he talked to a long list of people who had worked with him, loved him, or been fired by him. What comes through is a temperament: someone who could see what a product should be before the rest of the room, and who was careless with the people who built it. The Apple story is here, and the book is at its best when it lets colleagues contradict him on the page.

Malala Yousafzai was fifteen when she was shot on a school bus in Swat, and this book, written with the journalist Christina Lamb, spends most of its length on everything that came before: the valley, her father's school, the slow arrival of the Taliban, and a girl who kept going to class after it stopped being safe. The first half is the better half. Underneath the campaign that followed, it is really a book about a father and a daughter who agreed on something and refused to back down from it.

Mandela started writing this in prison, in secret, and finished it many years later with the help of the journalist Richard Stengel. It covers a childhood in the Transkei, the law practice in Johannesburg, the turn to armed struggle, the trial, and twenty seven years inside. The voice is calm and formal throughout, to the point where you sometimes want him to shout. The prison chapters are the ones that stay with you: the smallness of the days, the letters that arrive censored, the negotiations that begin quietly inside the walls.

Yashica Dutt grew up passing as upper caste, coached by a mother who policed every detail that might give the family away, from the surname to the food to the way relatives were described to neighbours. The book moves between that childhood and a wider account of what caste still does in offices, universities and marriages in urban India, the places most confident that caste is finished. She wrote it after the death of the research scholar Rohith Vemula in 2016 pushed her to stop hiding.

Kalam tells his life from Rameswaram, where the family rented out boats and he delivered newspapers as a boy, through his engineering education and the decades he spent inside India's space and missile programmes. Written with Arun Tiwari, it is plain to the point of flatness in places, and it is also the reason a whole generation of Indian schoolchildren decided that science was something people like them could do. The early chapters, about a small town and a father who ran a household on principle, are the best part of it.

Joan Didion's husband died at the table in December 2003, while their daughter was in hospital and critically ill, and this is the record of the year that followed. It is obsessive in a very particular way: she rereads the medical reports, replays the evening for clues, refuses to give away his shoes because he would need them if he came back. She keeps naming this magical thinking, and she keeps doing it anyway, and the gap between what the writer knows and what the widow does is the book.

Gandhi wrote this in Gujarati as weekly instalments and Mahadev Desai translated it into English, which is why it reads as a run of very short chapters rather than a shaped narrative. He covers the childhood, the painfully shy law student in London, and the South Africa years where the method was worked out, and he treats his own conduct as material for examination, including the episodes that make him look small or foolish. The governing decision is that nothing embarrassing gets left out, and he mostly keeps to it.