15 Memoir Examples Worth Studying (2026), and What Each One Teaches

How do you read a memoir like a writer?

Reading memoirs is the fastest way to learn how to write one, but only if you read with a few questions in mind. Otherwise you finish a great book knowing it was great and not why.

For each book below, notice three things. The slice: which part of the author's life does it cover, and what's left out? The structure: in what order are events told, and why? The voice: who is telling the story, the younger self living it or the older self looking back?

The fifteen memoirs here are grouped by the one lesson each teaches most clearly. You don't need to read all of them. Pick the two closest to the book you want to write.

Which memoirs teach structure?

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (2012). After her mother's death and the collapse of her marriage, Strayed hikes more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail alone. The lesson: the braided structure. The hike moves forward day by day, and flashbacks to her past are woven in when the trail calls them up. A present-day journey gives a backstory-heavy memoir forward motion.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014). After her father dies suddenly, Macdonald trains a goshawk. Alongside her own story, she tells the life of the writer T. H. White and his own troubled attempt to train a goshawk. The lesson: braid your story with another life or subject. A second thread can say things about you that would sound self-absorbed if said directly.

Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986 and 1991). A graphic memoir in which Spiegelman interviews his father, Vladek, a Polish Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. The lesson: the frame. The book shows both the father's wartime story and the present-day interviews, including their difficult relationship. If you're writing a parent's story from conversations with them, the conversations themselves can be part of the book.

Which memoirs teach voice?

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt (1996). McCourt's childhood in poverty in Limerick, Ireland, after his family returns from Brooklyn. It won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. The lesson: the child's-eye voice. The story is told from inside the boy's point of view, so the reader often understands more than the narrator does, and that gap is where the heartbreak and the humor live.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (2016). Noah's childhood in South Africa as the son of a Black mother and a white father at a time when their relationship was illegal. The lesson: humor carrying weight. The chapters work as mostly self-contained stories, and they're often funny, but the jokes are how the serious points arrive. His mother is the book's center, not him.

Heavy by Kiese Laymon (2018). Laymon's memoir about his body, his family and growing up Black in Mississippi, written directly to his mother. The lesson: choose who you're talking to. Addressing one person as 'you' makes every sentence feel like it matters to someone. Try drafting a chapter as a letter to one person in your story.

Which memoirs teach theme: one slice, one question?

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005). The year after her husband's sudden death, while their daughter was seriously ill. It won the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The lesson: a short time span. One year is enough for a whole book when you go deep instead of wide.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021). Zauner, the musician behind Japanese Breakfast, writes about losing her Korean mother to cancer and holding on to her through Korean food. The lesson: a sensory thread. Food carries the memories, the grief and the identity questions. What object, smell or ritual could carry yours?

Educated by Tara Westover (2018). Westover grows up in rural Idaho with survivalist parents, never attends school as a child, and eventually earns a doctorate. The lesson: a clear transformation arc. Every chapter moves her further from who she was. She also flags where family members remember events differently, a model for handling disputed memories honestly.

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (2005). Walls's childhood with a brilliant, alcoholic father and a free-spirited mother, moving from town to town in poverty. It opens with the adult Walls in New York seeing her mother on the street. The lesson: start with a present-day image that raises a question, and tell hard things without passing judgment. The reader decides how to feel.

Which memoirs show how to write about someone else?

Just Kids by Patti Smith (2010). Smith's years with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as young, broke artists in New York. It won the 2010 National Book Award for Nonfiction. The lesson: a memoir can be about a relationship. Your life seen through one person can be more revealing than your life told straight.

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom (1997). A sports journalist reconnects with his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying of ALS, and visits him on Tuesdays. The lesson: conversations as chapters. Each visit turns around a topic, such as family, regret or money. If you're recording a grandparent's life, this is the simplest shape there is.

These two, along with Maus, are the closest models for a family legacy book: the author is present, but the book belongs to someone else's life.

Which recent memoirs are worth reading? (Pulitzer winners 2023–2026)

The Pulitzer Prizes added a separate Memoir or Autobiography category in 2023; before that, memoirs competed in the Biography category. The winners so far are a good list of recent memoir examples, and three of them teach moves the older books above don't.

Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022, Pulitzer 2023). Hsu's student years at UC Berkeley in the 1990s and his friendship with a classmate, Ken, who was killed in a sudden act of violence. The lesson: a friendship can be the whole subject. The book follows one relationship and the years Hsu spent making sense of losing it.

Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (2024, Pulitzer 2025). A graphic memoir about three generations of women in Hulls's family, from China to Hong Kong to California. The lesson: your story can start before you were born. If what shaped you happened to your grandmother, that's where the book begins.

Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li (2025, Pulitzer 2026). Li writes about losing both of her sons, years apart. The lesson: a memoir doesn't have to resolve. Li doesn't wrap grief into a lesson, and the book is honest about what words can and can't do.

All 15 memoir examples at a glance

Use this as a reading list. Pick the lesson you need most, and start with that book.

How do you use memoir examples without copying them?

Borrow moves, not sentences. The braided structure of Wild isn't Strayed's property. It's a tool anyone can use. Her sentences are hers.

A useful exercise is the reverse outline. Take one chapter from a memoir you admire and write one line for each scene: where it happens, what changes, where the older narrator steps in to reflect. You'll see the skeleton under the prose, and you can build your own chapter on the same skeleton with your own material.

Finally, notice what these books leave out. None of them tells the author's whole life. Every one picked a slice, and that choice is the most important lesson on this page.

How do you go from reading memoirs to writing yours?

Once you know which shape fits your story, whether braided, framed, one year or one relationship, you can plan it. In the Novelleo app (iOS and Android), choose "My own story" and answer a few questions about your book. Novelleo sets up a title, premise, the people in your story and a 4–20 chapter plan.

The AI drafts each chapter with you, you steer what the next chapter covers, and you edit every line so the voice stays yours. Export the finished book as a PDF or Word file. The first AI chapter is free.