You may have noticed that I’ve inherited the blogger’s love of lists.
Today I’m going to list 20 pieces of life writing (autobiography, biography, anything in between) I’ve enjoyed reading. In most cases, that also means that, in reading them, I learned something new about writing lives.
Over time I want to address why each of these works helped develop my understanding of the genre. So, if the words are clickable, that means you can read more about what these books did for me.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot
Ken Dornstein, The Boy who Fell Out of the Sky
Margaret Forster, Diary of an Ordinary Woman
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces
Glen David Gold, Carter Beats the Devil
Susie Gordon, Peckham Blue
Edmund Gosse, Father and Son
Ian Hamilton, In Search of J.D. Salinger
Richard Holmes, Footsteps
Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
Matthew Alan Kreib, Filling a Gap: Authorship and Identity in Collaborative Autobiography
Roman Krznaric, Christopher Whalen and Theodore Zeldin (eds), The Oxford Muse: Guide to an Unknown University
Karoline Leach, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Yann Martel, Self
Marjane Sartrapi, Persepolis
Marcus Sedgwick, Blood Red Snow White
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Francis Spufford, The Child that Books Built
Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity