Best memoirs 2024

The Flitting: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons, and Butterflies, by Ben Masters

The Flitting is one of the most moving and exquisite books I’ve read all year. When Ben Masters’s naturalist father is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he is unable to follow the butterfly cycle that has been his obsession since childhood, so Masters steps in to help his father maintain a connection to his beloved butterflies, carrying home reports of species and habitats he has long loved and studied but can no longer see for himself. This debut memoir explores the nature of memory, masculinity, the generation gap, and more; at its heart, however, it is a portrait of a son trying to share and connect with his father while he still can. Combining elements of memoir, nature writing, literary journalism, and pop-culture analysis, written with wonder and deep feeling, this is a story of loss that nonetheless pulses with life.

Lovely One, by Ketanji Brown Jackson

I was glad for the opportunity to learn more about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in Lovely One, her absorbing and gracefully written new memoir. If readers find the justice’s life story to be an inspiring—even motivational—read, that should come as no surprise; Jackson is very clear about writing her memoir to inform as well as uplift: “My hope is that the trials and triumphs of my journey as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, litigator, and friend will stand as a testament for young women, people of color, and strivers everywhere.” As Jackson reflects on her family history, her upbringing with educator parents, her professional journey, her experiences as a wife and mother, and her commitment to justice, she does not gloss over the racism or the hardships she and her family have faced. Yet she is equally frank about her blessings and her capacity for joy and resilience—no matter how “daunting” the assignment, she says, “God has provided me with everything I might ever need to meet this moment.” Sharing her perseverance and steadfast hope with readers, the justice urges us not to let adversity turn us away from our own dreams.

The Mourner’s Bestiary, by Eiren Caffall

In this poignant and deeply researched memoir, Eiren Caffall details her experience with inherited polycystic kidney disease—the incurable illness that killed several of her family members before the age of fifty—alongside stories of sea creatures fighting for survival in two of the fastest-warming marine habitats in the world, the Long Island Sound and the Gulf of Maine. The Mourner’s Bestiary is unfailingly honest about what it means to live with illness, fear, and grief in an era of threatened ecosystems and climate collapse. It is also a clear-eyed and ultimately life-affirming exploration of how to consider uncertainty and loss—and embrace our own vulnerability—with renewed commitment to the future we want.

Ingrained: The Making of a Craftsman, by Callum Robinson

In Ingrained, master woodworker Callum Robinson shares how he learned his craft from his father, established his own workshop, then pivoted to a new path after the business he spent years building threatened to collapse. You will discover a great deal about wood and woodworking while reading his book, although it is neither a practical introduction to carpentry nor a straightforward story of entrepreneurial risk and reward. Rather, it is an invitation to reflect on creativity and labor, our relationship to nature, and the things we value most. While I was fascinated by the woodworking details and Robinson’s arc as an artist and businessman, it is his writing—natural, never over-polished, accessible, and finely wrought—that makes his memoir one to savor. In a world obsessed with speed and convenience and the acquisition of the disposable, it’s a true pleasure to read about how one craftsman has worked so patiently, so intentionally, to create objects of beauty that will endure. In writing this book, Robinson has done so again.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens, by Ina Garten

Many of Ina Garten’s recipes are simple enough that even someone like me, the least talented cook in my family, can’t screw them up. Yet the much anticipated Be Ready When the Luck Happensshows that her path to success wasn’t always easy. When you think of Garten, you might think of her culinary and business triumphs, her best-selling cookbooks, and her effervescent grace on camera. While all these things are part of her story, her memoir also invites readers into some of the hardest and most vulnerable times in her life. These moments include her upbringing with an emotionally detached mother and a severe, abusive father as well as the challenges that could have ended her marriage to her husband, Jeffrey, despite their deep love for each other. Garten’s story may impress and inspire, but it’s her honesty and willingness to reflect on every stage of her extraordinary life that makes this book so satisfying.

One Way Back, by Christine Blasey Ford

Twenty million people watched Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s September 2018 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in which she stated that Brett Kavanaugh, then Trump’s Supreme Court justice nominee, had sexually assaulted her when she was 15 years old. Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed in a 50–48 vote and began a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court, while Ford faced death threats and was forced to hire private security and move her family not once but several times. In One Way Back, Ford recounts her decision to come forward, her preparation and testimony, and the relentless attacks on her character, privacy, and safety. Even as she acknowledges the risks of writing a memoir—“Why would I throw myself back out to the sharks?” Ford, an avid surfer, asks at one point—she notes that doing so has helped her find more clarity about her decision to speak out. She confronts the painful, complicated truth of all that she has undergone as an extraordinarily visible survivor, placing her experiences in the context of a larger movement: “If my act of speaking out plays a role in an eventual paradigm shift, ending stigma around sexual assault and holding powerful people accountable … then I accept whatever personal sacrifices I had to make.”

There’s Always This Year, by Hanif Abdurraqib

I love Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing for many reasons, one being that it consistently surprises me—I don’t always know where we’re going, but I feel lucky to be along for the trip. His latest book, There’s Always This Year, takes its structure from a basketball game—a pregame introduction followed by four quarters, the clock running down on each—but there is something here for everyone, whether or not they’re sports fans. Basketball provides a kind of personal and cultural meeting ground for Abdurraqib’s wide-ranging reflections on the home and people he loves; the mythology of “making it”; the nature of performance and aspiration, mortality and grief. As always, his writing is as curious and expansive as it is agile, shifting readers from the close and intimate to the more universal with inimitable grace. The result is a true wonder of a book, one you can both run and rest with, that will offer more each time you read it.

Read an interview with the author here at Esquire.

We Loved It All, by Lydia Millet

In her first book of nonfiction, Lydia Millet, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys, examines how we live in our wild and rapidly changing world. Grappling with the perils of climate change and extinction—and how to find a meaningful narrative in the face of all we stand to lose—Millet, who has worked at the Center for Biological Diversity for more than two decades, offers herself up as a firsthand guide. She intersperses memories from her own life with engaging meditations on the idiosyncrasies of nature, the power of storytelling, and the many living creatures that deserve our recognition and solidarity. Brimming with wit and imagination, We Loved It All is an invitation to contemplate our collective choices, losses, and responsibilities—a poignant and beautifully written ode to life in this most urgent moment.

Fi: A Memoir of My Son, by Alexandra Fuller

“All parents who hear of Fi’s death have told me this: I wouldn’t survive the death of my child,” Alexandra Fuller writes. “I tell them that I didn’t survive and also that I did. Both things happened. Fi died, and everything that I’d believed until then blinked out with him.” Reading Fuller’s latest memoir, Fi, which so closely captures the anguish and utter bewilderment of grief, I was sometimes aware of an ache in my chest—a faint echo of the ache I felt when my mother was dying. All the same, I couldn’t look away from this book. To read it is not to fully comprehend how Fuller felt after suddenly losing her beloved 21-year-old son—how could we?—but to bear witness to the pain that sends her reeling and learn along with her what kind of solace or “settling place” can be found after unfathomable loss.

Ambition Monster, by Jennifer Romolini

I appreciated how clearly I could hear Jennifer Romolini’s voice as I read this book. Overwork, she writes, was long a means of trying to become “somebody other than the unlovable monster I was quite sure I was inside.” Romolini explores the connection between her unresolved trauma and her former workaholism in this brutally honest memoir that also touches on family and finances, climbing the corporate ladder, parenting, and the publishing industry. She situates her personal history within a broader discussion about the cost of trying to escape your pain through productivity and shares what she has learned in the process of redefining and reclaiming her ambitions for herself alone.

An Honest Woman, by Charlotte Shane

As a longtime reader of Charlotte Shane’s essays and criticism, I’ve always been struck by her candor, clarity, and craft. Her writing is spare but never reductive; her sentences snap but never show off. Shane brings that same precision and grace to An Honest Woman, a memoir about intimacy and honesty, womanhood and misogyny, labor and love, all examined through the lens of her own relationships and her history as a sex worker. Her strengths as a writer are all on display in this book—she’s frank, funny, fearsomely smart—but what I appreciate most is her ability to slice straight to the heart of a matter with unerring aim, sparing no one (including herself).

Becoming Little Shell, by Chris La Tray

In Becoming Little Shell, Montana poet laureate Chris La Tray unravels the mystery of his family’s past, delving into his own identity and what it means to be Chippewa and Métis. Unlike his father and grandfather, who denied their Indigenous heritage, La Tray had “a lifetime of questions” about their ancestry and set out to learn more following his father’s death. Blending history and memoir, research and interviews, La Tray combines separate yet connected personal, family, and community narratives to craft a story of both recovery and loss. Though he recognizes that there are some answers he may never find, his search helps him better understand the people he comes from—and his own place among them. “I set out to write this book as a Little Shell person in service to my Little Shell people,” he writes, “but now I find myself a Little Shell person in service of the world.”

No One Gets to Fall Apart, by Sarah LaBrie

Sarah LaBrie’s book opens with a call from her grandmother, who informs her of her mother’s mental-health emergency on the side of a Houston freeway. Her mother’s late-in-life schizophrenia diagnosis is a revelation that compels LaBrie to reexamine the events of her volatile childhood, her mother’s unstable and often destructive behavior, and the legacy of mental illness within her family. In her memoir, she reckons with this complex and painful family history while reflecting on fear and friendship and love; her coming-of-age as a young Black woman from Houston; the creative inspirations and obsessions that have long driven her; and what it means to both strive and survive. No One Gets to Fall Apart is a sensitive and courageous debut by a talented writer seeking a deeper understanding of herself and her past.

The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History, by Manjula Martin

This book, a personal and extensively researched account of pain, beauty, and survival amid the climate crisis, has stayed with me ever since I read the galley last fall. Manjula Martin’s clear prose stirs and sings, balancing justified rage and anxiety with a tenderness that never veers into sentimentality. A memoir threaded with natural history and a complicated 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 look for new possibilities 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 and share. 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, writer and poet Shayla Lawson explores issues of gender identity, sex and relationships, race, disability, friendship, healing, and more, inviting 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—honest about their trials and lessons learned, sharp but never jaded, unafraid of being vulnerable. Most travel memoirs aim to transport readers; Lawson’s may transform many.

I Heard Her Call My Name, by Lucy Sante

Early in this beautiful book, 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 narrative 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 relocated from the Quechan (Yuma) reservation in California to Navajo territory in New Mexico. Taffa writes about the challenges, dreams, and traditions of her mixed-tribe, mixed-race family, confronts genocidal U.S.-government policies against Native people, and grapples with the specific harms visited on those pushed 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 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 or 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 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 U.S. 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.