“No, I haven’t read it yet. But I bought a copy.”

If you have no idea what I’m referring to right now, you may need to renew your subscription to People Magazine, spend more time on social media, or even read NY Times Book Reviews more often. The question for this answer is:

Have you read Prince Harry’s memoir yet?

For a number of reasons, I haven’t. I do own it, and like everyone else, regardless of how many spoilers they’ve heard or how well they personally know the royals - I have very strong opinions. However, those are for another post after I actually read the book!

For now - it seems as though memoirs are enjoying a great amount of attention these days. I can imagine during the dark days of COVID, many high-profile people thought “well I can’t perform right now, so why not write a book?” and readers are now enjoying their toils. So I thought it would be timely to honor their hard work of self-reflection and writing and take a moment to share a few of my more recent favorites memoirs.

Biographies have long been a favorite genre of mine. Does anyone remember the Value Series books? I was obsessed - especially with the book on Jackie Robinson and his imaginary baseball friend. I spent countless nights listening to my dad read these books and I know I am the better for it.

I never stopped loving this genre, and as great as biographies are… I find so much more emotion and insight in a well-written memoir. I may not agree or even like the person, but I find learning their perspective and thought process to be fascinating.

Here is a picture of me at the first book signing I attended and obviously I’m not a fan of the author at all. However, the book was fascinating. Also, in case you are concerned about safety - no chairs were thrown at this event.

Surprisingly, I had a horrible time ranking my favorite memoirs so I listed them alphabetically. How can I pick a favorite between Jessica Simpson, Trevor Noah, and Julia Child? These are all first among equals!

Also, this is not an exhaustive list by any means. So at the end of this post, I included a few honorable mentions as well as other memoirs that I am hoping to read sooner-rather-than-later. Finally, for the most part, I focused on recent memoirs as opposed to those which have stood the test of time - like Diary of a Young Girl - in my opinion, books like these belong in a separate category.

As always and most importantly, I would love to hear about any memoirs and autobiographies that you love!

Friendly reminder - if this list inspires you to purchase a book, please do so from an independent bookshop.