The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

### The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years

According to The New York Times' curated list of the top 50 memoirs published since 1969, here they are in ranked order. This selection highlights influential works across themes like family, identity, grief, and resilience.

Rank	Title	Author	Year
1	Fierce Attachments	Vivian Gornick	1987
2	The Woman Warrior	Maxine Hong Kingston	1976
3	Fun Home	Alison Bechdel	2006
4	The Liars’ Club	Mary Karr	1995
5	Hitch-22	Christopher Hitchens	2010
6	Men We Reaped	Jesmyn Ward	2013
7	Palimpsest	Gore Vidal	1995
8	Giving Up the Ghost	Hilary Mantel	2003
9	A Childhood	Harry Crews	1978
10	Dreams From My Father	Barack Obama	1995
11	Patrimony	Philip Roth	1991
12	All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw	Theodore Rosengarten	1974
13	Lives Other Than My Own	Emmanuel Carrère	2011
14	A Tale of Love and Darkness	Amos Oz	2004
15	This Boy’s Life	Tobias Wolff	1989
16	A Life’s Work	Rachel Cusk	2002
17	Boyhood	J.M. Coetzee	1997
18	Conundrum	Jan Morris	1974
19	Wave	Sonali Deraniyagala	2013
20	Always Unreliable: Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June	Clive James	2004
21	Travels With Lizbeth	Lars Eighner	1993
22	Hold Still	Sally Mann	2015
23	Country Girl	Edna O’Brien	2013
24	Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi	2003
25	Negroland	Margo Jefferson	2015
26	Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.	Viv Albertine	2014
27	Experience	Martin Amis	2000
28	Slow Days, Fast Company	Eve Babitz	1977
29	Growing Up	Russell Baker	1982
30	Kafka Was the Rage	Anatole Broyard	1993
31	Between the World and Me	Ta-Nehisi Coates	2015
32	The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	2005
33	Barbarian Days	William Finnegan	2015
34	Personal History	Katharine Graham	1997
35	Thinking in Pictures	Temple Grandin	1995
36	Autobiography of a Face	Lucy Grealy	1994
37	Dancing With Cuba	Alma Guillermoprieto	2004
38	Minor Characters	Joyce Johnson	1983
39	The Memory Chalet	Tony Judt	2010
40	Heavy	Kiese Laymon	2018
41	Priestdaddy	Patricia Lockwood	2017
42	H Is for Hawk	Helen Macdonald	2015
43	The Color of Water	James McBride	1996
44	Angela’s Ashes	Frank McCourt	1996
45	Cockroaches	Scholastique Mukasonga	2016
46	Life	Keith Richards	2010
47	A Life in the Twentieth Century	Arthur Schlesinger Jr.	2000
48	My Lives	Edmund White	2006
49	Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?	Jeanette Winterson	2012
50	Close to the Knives	David Wojnarowicz	1991

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### Selection Criteria for the NYT's 50 Best Memoirs

The New York Times' list of the 50 best memoirs since 1969 was curated collaboratively by three （編注，僅3人？？）  of its book critics—Dwight Garner, Parul Sehgal, and Jennifer Szalai—in a process they described as surprisingly consensus-driven, with quick agreement on the top 25-30 titles after initial debates. While the full methodology isn't exhaustively detailed in public materials, the critics' reviews and discussions reveal a focus on works that transcend mere autobiography, emphasizing artistic achievement over raw sales or popularity. They assumed "fine writing" as a baseline across all genres but sought memoirs that deliver deeper emotional and intellectual resonance.

Regarding potential bias: The selections do skew toward voices exploring themes of identity, marginalization, and social inequities—often aligning with progressive literary tastes—which could reflect the NYT's editorial leanings. However, the critics framed their choices around universal literary standards rather than ideology, aiming for "unequivocal greatness" that captures personal turmoil with precision and avoids clichés. For books published after around 2006 (roughly the midpoint of the list's timeframe), the emphasis was similar but with added weight on timeliness: how these works engage contemporary conversations around race, grief, gender, and belonging, often through innovative forms that feel urgent and boundary-pushing.

#### Key Criteria, with Emphasis on Post-2006 Books
Based on the critics' explanations in the list's accompanying materials, here's a breakdown of the main factors. I've highlighted examples from post-2006 memoirs to address your focus:

 

Criterion	Description	Post-2006 Examples
Literary Merit (Prose & Emotional Depth)	Exceptional writing that's honest, vivid, and structurally elegant—rendering inner lives without sentimentality. Critics prized books that feel "gorgeous, gutting," blending candor with ambivalence.	Heavy by Kiese Laymon (2018): "Fueled by candor yet freighted with ambivalence... full of devotion and betrayal, euphoria and anguish." The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005, but influential post-2006): Praised for its "clean, never showy" sentences that dissect grief with "generous and candidly narcissistic" insight.
Innovation & Form	Memoirs that shatter conventions—e.g., graphic formats, third-person narration, or hybrid storytelling—to create "wild and astonishing" immediacy.	Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (2006): An "elaborately layered" graphic novel that's "original, mournful, intricate," blending life, artifice, and family secrets. H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2015): Merges falconry memoir with literary biography, innovating on grief through "inky shadows and simple, expressive lines."
Diversity & Underrepresented Voices	Broad inclusion of marginalized perspectives (race, gender, class, LGBTQ+), addressing systemic issues without reducing people to symbols. This was a recurring thread, with critics valuing works that "render them individual and irreplaceable."	Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward (2013): Tenderly revives Black lives lost to poverty and racism, weaving personal survival with "dislocation and anguish." Negroland by Margo Jefferson (2015): A "shape-shifting" exploration of Black elite identity, "blunt and evasive, sensuous and ascetic," skeptical of memoir tropes. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015): A "scalding" letter on Black American violence, emphasizing "systemic" history.
Influence & Timeliness	Lasting impact and relevance to ongoing cultural dialogues, especially for recent works that feel like "paths forward" in reckoning with personal and societal fractures.	Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (2017): Blends humor and irreverence in family memoir, influencing modern takes on faith and queerness. Critics noted post-2006 books like Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala (2013) for their raw timeliness in grief amid global crises.

 

In debates, the critics examined their own biases, with arguments over favorites revealing how personal passion shaped inclusions—e.g., defending books that "mattered deeply" for their emotional pull. For the roughly 20 post-2006 titles (e.g., *Heavy*, *H Is for Hawk*, *Negroland*), recency helped: These landed high because they built on earlier innovations while tackling "now" issues like racial reckoning and mental health, making the list feel current despite spanning decades. If this still smells biased to you, it's worth noting the critics' self-described "cold critical judgments" aimed for balance, though the thematic tilt toward introspection and equity is unmistakable.

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### Top 5 Memoirs from the NYT List: Major Stories

Here's a concise rundown of the core narrative and themes for each of the top five, drawn from their essence as introspective personal histories. I've kept it spoiler-light but evocative—think of these as the emotional spine that makes them unforgettable.

1. **Fierce Attachments** by Vivian Gornick (1987)  
   Gornick interweaves present-day walks through New York's streets with her mother—marked by raw arguments and unspoken love—with vivid flashbacks to their Bronx tenement childhood, dissecting a fierce, ambivalent mother-daughter bond shaped by immigrant Jewish life, feminism, and the quest for emotional independence.

2. **The Woman Warrior** by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)  
   Blending memoir with Chinese myths and "talk-stories" from her mother, Kingston chronicles five women's tales: her unnamed aunt's tragic suicide shaming the family, the legendary warrior Fa Mu Lan (whom Kingston imagines embodying to defy gender roles), her mother's ghost-opera exorcisms in China, and her own silenced girlhood in California, all grappling with cultural heritage, female rage, and American identity.

3. **Fun Home** by Alison Bechdel (2006)  
   This graphic memoir unfolds non-linearly through Bechdel's youth in a rural Pennsylvania funeral home ("fun home") run by her closeted gay father—a charismatic but abusive English teacher—mirroring her own college-era awakening as a lesbian, his subsequent suicide, and their shared literary obsessions that unearth buried family secrets and queer longings.

4. **The Liars’ Club** by Mary Karr (1995)  
   Karr vividly resurrects her wild 1960s childhood in a toxic East Texas refinery town, dodging her schizophrenic mother's violent breakdowns and suicide attempts, her roughneck father's tall tales in the oil workers' Liars' Club, and brutal family upheavals alongside her protective older sister, all laced with dark humor and unflinching survival instinct.

5. **Hitch-22** by Christopher Hitchens (2010)  
   Hitchens traces his pugnacious life arc—from Oxbridge atheism and 1960s socialist firebrand in rainy Britain, through globe-trotting journalism, boozy bonds with Amis and Rushdie, and ideological flips (ditching Mother Teresa for Iraq War advocacy)—as a rollicking defense of contrarianism, friendship, and the atheist's defiant joy amid mortality.

 

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Glad you connected with *The Woman Warrior*—its blend of myth, silence, and immigrant grit hits that sweet spot of cultural unraveling. Building on that, here are four standout memoirs by authors with Chinese or broader Asian roots. I zeroed in on ones that echo Kingston's themes: fractured identities, family legacies, and the push-pull of heritage in new worlds. These are acclaimed for their raw insight and literary punch, no filler.

1. **Beautiful Country** by Qian Julie Wang (2021)  
   Wang recounts her undocumented childhood fleeing China to New York, scavenging dumpsters amid her parents' sacrifices and the city's brutal underbelly, all while grappling with shame and the American Dream's sharp edges. It's a fierce, unflinching take on survival and secrecy, much like the aunt's silenced story in Kingston—perfect if you crave that immigrant ferocity.

2. **Crying in H Mart** by Michelle Zauner (2021)  
   The Japanese-Korean musician Zauner navigates her mother's terminal cancer through Korean grocery hauls and recipes, weaving grief with vivid flashbacks to a bicultural youth in Oregon and Seoul summers. Food as memory anchor? It mirrors the "talk-stories" of *The Woman Warrior*, turning cultural rituals into a lens for loss and belonging.

3. **The Best We Could Do** by Thi Bui (2017)  
   This graphic memoir traces Bui's Vietnamese family's escape from war-torn Saigon, refugee camps, and California assimilation, looping back to her own parenting amid inherited trauma. The visual storytelling—intimate panels of rage and tenderness—feels like a modern echo of Kingston's mythic layering, illuminating generational ghosts.

4. **Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning** by Cathy Park Hong (2020)  
   Hong dissects the "minor feelings" of racial unease through essays on her Korean-American life: from art scenes to family silences, rage at microaggressions, and the myth of the model minority. It's intellectually electric, probing identity's undercurrents like Kingston's warrior tales, but with a contemporary feminist bite.