Memoir Examples: 15 Notable Memoirs and What They Teach Writers

The best way to understand what a memoir can do is to look at good ones. Below are fifteen memoir examples of different kinds, each with its author, year and a one-line summary, followed by the craft lesson each book offers. Together they show how much the form can hold once you narrow it to one part of a life.

Fifteen memoir examples at a glance

Memoir	Author	Year	Kind
The Liars' Club	Mary Karr	1995	Childhood
The Glass Castle	Jeannette Walls	2005	Childhood
The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion	2005	Grief
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly	Jean-Dominique Bauby	1997	Illness
When Breath Becomes Air	Paul Kalanithi	2016	Illness
The Night of the Gun	David Carr	2008	Addiction and recovery
The Woman Warrior	Maxine Hong Kingston	1976	Immigrant family
Lost in Translation	Eva Hoffman	1989	Immigration
Tender at the Bone	Ruth Reichl	1998	Food
Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain	2000	Food and work
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek	Annie Dillard	1974	Nature
H Is for Hawk	Helen Macdonald	2014	Nature and grief
Maus	Art Spiegelman	1986, 1991	Graphic memoir
Persepolis	Marjane Satrapi	2000–2003	Graphic memoir
Fun Home	Alison Bechdel	2006	Graphic memoir

The memoirs, by kind

Childhood

• The Liars' Club, Mary Karr (1995). A turbulent 1960s childhood in a refinery town in Southeast Texas; the book is credited with sparking a revival of interest in memoir.
• The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (2005). A nomadic, chaotic childhood with loving but unreliable parents; the title is her father's never-kept promise to build the family a glass castle.

Illness and grief

• The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (2005). Grief after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003, while their daughter was repeatedly in the hospital; it won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby (1997). Written in French by the editor of Elle after a stroke left him with locked-in syndrome; he composed the whole book by blinking his left eyelid as letters were read aloud.
• When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi (2016). A neurosurgeon's account of facing late-stage lung cancer, published after his death, with an epilogue by his wife, Lucy Kalanithi.

Addiction and recovery

• The Night of the Gun, David Carr (2008). A journalist looks back on his cocaine addiction and the years that followed, investigating his own past as if he were reporting on someone else.

Immigration

• The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston (1976). A Chinese American girlhood shaped by her mother's "talk-stories," told in five linked chapters that blend memory with old Chinese folktales; it won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
• Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, Eva Hoffman (1989). The author emigrated from Kraków, Poland, to Vancouver at 13 in 1959, and the book follows her remaking of a self in English.

Food

• Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, Ruth Reichl (1998). A childhood and youth told through food, by a writer who later became restaurant critic for The New York Times and editor of Gourmet.
• Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain (2000). Life inside restaurant kitchens; it grew out of his 1999 New Yorker article "Don't Eat Before Reading This."

Nature

• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (1974). A year of close attention to a creek in Virginia's Blue Ridge near Roanoke, arranged by the four seasons; it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
• H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald (2014). After her father's sudden death in 2007, Macdonald trains a goshawk, and she weaves in the story of T. H. White, who wrote about training one in The Goshawk (1951). It won the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize and Costa Book of the Year.

Graphic memoirs

• Maus, Art Spiegelman (two volumes, 1986 and 1991). Spiegelman interviews his father, Vladek, about surviving the Holocaust, drawing Jews as mice and Germans as cats; it received a Pulitzer Prize Special Award in 1992.
• Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi (French edition 2000–2003; English 2003–2004). A childhood in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution, teenage years in Vienna and a return home, drawn in stark black and white.
• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel (2006). Her complicated relationship with her father, a funeral director and high school English teacher in Beech Creek, Pennsylvania; it was later adapted into a musical that won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical.

What each one teaches a writer

Reading as a writer means asking "How did they do that?" Here is one technique to borrow from each book.

• Karr: anchor sections in place and time. Her three parts are titled by place and year. Headings like these let you jump across years without losing the reader.
• Walls: open in the present, then go back. The book begins with an adult encounter with her mother in New York before returning to Walls's earliest memory at age three. A present-day frame tells readers why the past matters.
• Didion: keep the frame tight. The book stays with one loss and the months around it. A narrow frame lets you go deep instead of wide.
• Bauby: let a limit sharpen the prose. When every letter costs effort, nothing is wasted. Try drafting one chapter with a strict word budget.
• Kalanithi: accept an ending you cannot write. His wife's epilogue completes the story. If your story is still open, say so honestly rather than forcing closure.
• Carr: report on yourself. He interviewed people from his past to test his own memories. Before you write a key scene, ask someone else who was there.
• Kingston: use family legend openly. She sets her mother's stories beside her own experience. You can include stories you only heard, as long as you mark them as stories.
• Hoffman: make language part of the subject. For anyone who has changed countries, the words you lost and gained are a story in themselves.
• Reichl: organize around one recurring thing. Her subtitle, Growing Up at the Table, names the thread. Meals, cars, houses or jobs can all carry a life.
• Bourdain: start with a short piece. His book grew from a single magazine article. Write the essay first; if it keeps growing, you have a book.
• Dillard: let the calendar shape the book. Four seasons give a natural beginning, middle and end.
• Macdonald: braid two stories. Her year with the hawk runs alongside T. H. White's. A second, parallel story can say what you cannot say directly.
• Spiegelman: show the interview. The scenes of Spiegelman talking to his father are part of the book. If your memoir rests on someone else's memories, let readers see how you gathered them.
• Satrapi: trust the child's eye. Big historical events seen at a child's height can be clearer than any summary.
• Bechdel: circle back. She returns to the same events as new information emerges, spiraling toward the center. Revisiting a scene from a new angle can be stronger than telling it once.

How to use these examples

Pick the two or three books closest to the story you want to tell and read them twice: once for pleasure, once with a pencil. Mark where each chapter starts and ends, where the writer slows down into a scene and where they speed up with summary. Then try the technique on a page of your own. Our guide on how to write a memoir walks through the process from first notes to finished draft, and if you are still deciding on the scale of your project, see memoir vs autobiography.