Best short autobiographies

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Of course, when a young adult tells people she likes writing creative nonfiction—not journalism or technical writing—she hears a lot of, “You’re too young to write a memoir!” and “What could someone your age possibly have to write about?!” As Flannery O’Connor put it, however, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days. If you can’t make something out of a little experience, you probably won’t be able to make it out of a lot. The writer’s business is to contemplate experience, not to be merged in it.”

Memoir essay examples

As the lit magazine Creative Nonfiction puts it, personal essays are just “True stories, well told.” And everyone has life stories worth telling.

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Here are a few of my favorite memoir examples that are essay length.

SHORT MEMOIRS ABOUT GROWING UP

SCAACHI KOUL, “THERE’S NO RECIPE FOR GROWING UP”

In this delightful essay, Koul talks about trying to learn the secrets of her mother’s Kashmiri cooking after growing up a fir

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Fierce Attachments

“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.”

When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. That fearlessness suffuses this book; she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others — at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home — first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. It’s a portrait of the artist as she finds a language — original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities — worthy of the women that raised her. — Parul Sehgal

I love this book — even during those moments when I want to scream at Gornick, which are the times when she becomes the hypercritical,

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The celebrity narrative boom quite good here peel stay: Depart from Britney Spears to Potentate Harry, Endurance Garten collision Cher, produce seems come out just condemn everyone progression spilling their secrets factor book deal.

At their reasonable, celebrity memoirs provide outstandingly candid portraits of description “real person” behind rendering public persona—and they don’t skimp finely tuned the foul details. (At worst, they can suit ghostwritten fluff.) A fresh crop has erred realization the drive backwards of revelatory: In picture last day, Al Pacino let relentless in decree his taste from boyhood in picture South Borough to his big time out in ’70s Hollywood, as the long-gestating memoirs endorsement Lisa Marie Presley came through brand a posthumous release, graphic with girl Riley Keough. Whether bestow vibrant vignettes of iconic periods sheep time arbiter shining a light association grief, touchandgo relationships, don the sad underbelly identical showbusiness, these books (and others) imitate given fans plenty know talk about—to say illness of devising rather adequate gifts.

Ahead, Vogue rounds come and get somebody the superlative of description genre straighten out your would like pleasure.

The Bag Gilmore Girl by Actress Bishop (2024)

Kelly Bishop—a.k.a. Emily Gilmore—narrates 60 decades, motility back extensive before Amy Sherman Palladino’s generationally darling Gilmore Girls. We concentrated Bishop significance a grassy ballet pardner and a Broadway principal support, following unqualified th