Most Talked-About Memoirs and Biographies

Matthew Perry opens his memoir with a disarming hello — "Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name" — and that self-aware, darkly comic tone carries through every page. Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is the book that put a face on what it actually feels like to be beloved by millions while quietly drowning. Perry doesn't flinch: the addiction, the hospitalizations, the gap between Chandler Bing's effortless wit and the man behind it are all here, rendered with candor that earned it the #1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list and made it one of the most talked-about memoirs of 2022. The behind-the-scenes glimpses of Friends are fascinating, but it's the raw honesty about addiction that lingers. Lisa Kudrow's foreword adds warmth, and Perry's own narration of the audiobook is worth seeking out. That said, critics noted its limits as literary storytelling — readers looking for polished prose may find the voice uneven. For those who loved Perry, or who have lived anywhere near addiction themselves, this one cuts deep. His death in October 2023 gives the memoir an added, mournful weight it never asked for.

Greenlights is one of those books that's easier to describe than to categorize. Part memoir, part philosophy, part spoken-word monologue committed to paper, it reflects exactly how Matthew McConaughey actually thinks — which is either its greatest asset or its biggest obstacle, depending on your patience for aphorism. McConaughey spent fifty-two days alone in the desert distilling decades of personal diaries into this book, and that unusual origin story shows: the writing has a raw, unpolished quality that feels genuinely lived-in rather than ghostwritten. The central idea — that setbacks, reframed, can become "greenlights" that push you forward — is simple but applied with enough specificity to avoid feeling like a motivational poster. If you came for Hollywood gossip, you'll find some, but that's not really the point. Readers who prefer conventional memoir structure may find the format frustrating, and the book's freewheeling style isn't for everyone. But for those willing to meet it on its own eccentric terms, it's a genuinely interesting window into how one person has made sense of a very strange life.

Few public figures seem as warmly inevitable as Ina Garten — the kind of person you assume simply materialized in the Hamptons, chilled rosé in hand, always having known exactly what she was doing. Be Ready When the Luck Happens dismantles that impression entirely, and that's what makes it so good. Garten's first-ever memoir reveals a far more complicated origin story than her sunny Food Network persona suggests: a cold, difficult childhood, years of unfulfilling work as a White House budget analyst, and a marriage that took real time to become the partnership she describes it as today. The impulsive leap that changed everything — answering a newspaper ad for a specialty food store she'd never seen — turns out to be the memoir's beating heart, and Garten tells it with the same exacting attention she brings to a recipe. Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review, Time, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair, it earned those spots. Readers hoping for dish on celebrity friends or Food Network drama will find this more inward-looking than expected — but those willing to sit with a thoughtful life story will find it quietly absorbing.

There is no memoir quite like this one, and there may never be another. From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough exists because a daughter sat down with audio tapes her mother recorded weeks before dying and made the extraordinary decision to finish what she'd started. The result is a book that arrives, genuinely, from two sides of grief — Lisa Marie's voice drawn directly from her recordings, Keough's written in the silence that followed. What Lisa Marie captured on tape is raw and specific: childhood at Graceland, the golf carts and the unconditional love, and the small girl who ran toward her father's body on the bathroom floor. Her marriages, her addiction, the sorrow she carried her entire life — none of it is softened. Keough's additions give the book its second dimension, turning a memoir into something closer to a conversation across an uncrossable distance. An Oprah's Book Club pick and a New York Times bestseller, this one earned its praise. That said, readers looking for a tidy narrative arc will find this book resistant to one — it's searching and sometimes raw in ways that don't resolve neatly. That's also precisely what makes it worth reading.

Lena Dunham's Famesick is the kind of celebrity memoir that earns its title — not as a brag, but as a diagnosis. Where most famous-person memoirs describe the view from the top, this one catalogs what the climb cost: endometriosis, Ehlers–Danlos syndrome, years of opioids and benzodiazepines, and a body treated, in Dunham's own words, like "a clogged drain I was snaking." Darkly funny and genuinely uncomfortable in equal measure, the book covers her time running Girls at 24, surviving on energy drinks and Klonopin, and eventually confronting memories of childhood sexual abuse that resurface during a medical visit. It's compelling reading, and Dunham's prose has real wit even at its bleakest. Critics noted, though, that the self-reflection has limits — the book is better at describing damage than at sitting with accountability, and readers expecting Dunham to fully reckon with the controversies that followed her throughout her public life may finish the book still waiting. Come for the unflinching honesty about chronic illness and addiction; go in knowing the blind spots are real too.

Published in 2016, Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and became one of those rare books that people seemed to read as a referendum — on class, on the Rust Belt, on who gets to speak for a community. As a memoir, it's a gripping survival narrative: a boy raised in a household defined by his mother's addiction and instability, shaped by the fierce loyalties of Appalachian family culture, who eventually makes it to Yale Law School. Vance writes with genuine feeling about his grandparents, about the pride and pain woven into the world he came from, and about the gap between that world and the one he entered. It's worth reading as a firsthand account of a specific American experience — and equally worth reading alongside its critics, who argue that Vance over-generalizes from his family's story to a much larger population. His politics since the book's publication have become impossible to separate from how many readers now receive it, which makes Hillbilly Elegy one of the most usefully contested memoirs on any current reading list.