Our reviews
20 biography & memoir books we've reviewed, each with who it's for, who should skip it and every source we used.
20 reviews match
Griffin Dunne
Best for: Readers who want Hollywood-insider storytelling anchored in genuine literary lineage and real stakes — admirers of Joan Didion and Dominick Dunne, and readers of true-crime-adjacent memoirs who want the trial material to be substantial rather than incidental.
Lena Dunham
Best for: Readers who followed Girls and want the unfiltered account of what was happening offscreen — and illness-memoir readers who want endometriosis, Ehlers–Danlos, and addiction rendered with specificity rather than uplift.
Gerald Durrell
Best for: Readers who loved My Family and Other Animals and want to follow Gerald Durrell deeper into his naturalist obsessions, or anyone drawn to memoir that blends comic family chaos with serious wildlife observation and a vivid sense of 1930s Corfu.
Christina Applegate
Best for: Readers drawn to celebrity memoirs that trade career gloss for psychological rawness — particularly those interested in Christina Applegate's life through the lens of childhood trauma, MS diagnosis, and the kind of candid self-examination rarely found in the genre.
Willie Nelson
Best for: Longtime Willie Nelson fans and country music history enthusiasts seeking the most comprehensive, publisher-sanctioned account of Nelson's life — from his pre-fame Texas hustle through decades as an outlaw country icon.
Tom Dymond
Best for: Readers who love travel memoirs that use a physical journey — here, a round-the-world sail on a tiny vessel — as a vehicle for honest self-examination about restlessness, freedom, and friendship.
Dave Portnoy
Best for: Existing Barstool Sports fans and readers already invested in Portnoy's public persona who want his unfiltered, first-person account of building a polarizing media empire and surviving sustained attempts to cancel him.
Steven Tyler
Best for: Devoted Aerosmith fans and rock-memoir enthusiasts who want Steven Tyler's full personality — chaos, bravado, and all — on the page rather than a sober, structured account of his life.
Susanna Janssen
Best for: Readers who love adventure travel memoirs with a strong authorial voice, a sharp eye for language and culture, and a taste for the absurd — especially those curious about or nostalgic for independent travel in the pre-internet era.
Mick Foley
Best for: Dedicated WWE Attitude Era fans who have already read Have a Nice Day! and want Foley's candid, firsthand account of his championship peak, retirement, and the cultural controversies surrounding the WWF.
Patrick Stewart
Best for: Readers who want a warm, wide-ranging account of one of Britain's most distinctive careers — whether they come to it as Star Trek fans curious about the man behind Picard, theatre lovers drawn to six decades of RSC and Broadway work, or general memoir readers with an appetite for transatlantic stories of upward mobility and artistic ambition.
Michael J. Fox
Best for: Readers drawn to celebrity memoir or illness narrative who want an account that balances Hollywood candour with genuine emotional weight — particularly those with a personal or professional connection to Parkinson's disease.
Suzanne LaVenture
Best for: Readers who have lived the friction between a devout religious upbringing and a globalising, border-crossing life — and anyone drawn to international education and cultural exchange as personal, lived experience rather than abstraction.
Rachel Lithgow
Best for: Midlife readers — particularly women navigating divorce, re-entry into dating, grief, or identity reinvention after 40 — who want those experiences rendered with honesty and wit rather than reassuring gloss.
Leo Weston
Best for: Readers drawn to LGBTQ+ life-writing who want a memoir rooted in the social history of queer London — specifically the gay pub scene during the HIV crisis — and who value chosen family and friendship given the same emotional weight as romantic love.
Libby Gelman-Waxner
Best for: Fans of sharp comic writing who enjoy Hollywood satire delivered through a fully inhabited fictional persona — particularly readers who appreciate humor that doubles as cultural observation about early-nineties film and its audience.
Michael Neiman
Best for: Outdoor adventure readers who want a complete, emotionally honest Appalachian Trail thru-hike memoir — especially those drawn to self-deprecating humour, genuine human connection, and the quiet drama of a parent-child relationship rebalancing across 2,192 miles.
Gerald Durrell
Best for: Readers who love nature writing woven through with affectionate character comedy — particularly anyone drawn to sun-drenched memoir, eccentric family dynamics, or the natural history of the Mediterranean — will find this an ideal, unhurried read.
Marla Gibbs
Best for: Fans of classic-era Black television — particularly The Jeffersons and 227 — and anyone drawn to late-bloomer stories of persistence, who will find both the behind-the-scenes Hollywood history and Gibbs's unfiltered personal voice genuinely rewarding.
Pamdiana Jones
Best for: Readers who enjoy self-deprecating, incident-driven travel humor — especially anyone who has survived their own travel disasters or is curious about what solo backpacking looked like in the pre-internet mid-1990s.
