Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe in the Chelsea Hotel; the memoir of a friendship.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son about being Black in America; a letter in the tradition of Baldwin.
Michelle Obama from the South Side of Chicago to the White House.
A first love and a fundamentalist childhood in a Wisconsin winter; Craig Thompson's 600 pages.
A father and son ride from Minnesota to California while Pirsig asks what quality is.
Michael Herr's Vietnam, in the language the soldiers used; the best book about that war.
Mandela's autobiography from the Transkei to Robben Island to the presidency.
Stephen King's half memoir, half toolbox; kill your darlings and the accident that nearly killed him.
Hemingway's 1920s Paris, Gertrude Stein and Fitzgerald, published after his death.
Maya Angelou's childhood in Arkansas and the years of silence after the rape; the first of seven memoirs.
Keith Richards remembers more than he should; the rock memoir.
Bob Dylan's memoir, mostly about the years nobody asked about.
John Lewis's civil rights years, from Nashville lunch counters to Selma, in three books.
Anthony Bourdain on what really happens in restaurant kitchens; do not order fish on Monday.
Tara Westover, raised by survivalists in Idaho without school, ends up at Cambridge.
Alison Bechdel's father, a closeted funeral director, and her own coming out; the comic that became a musical.
Spiegelman's father in Auschwitz, Jews as mice and Nazis as cats; the only comic with a Pulitzer.
Marjane Satrapi grows up through the Iranian revolution, in black and white.
A boy in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, drawn by a survivor; the manga on the bomb.
From Detroit Red to Mecca, told to Alex Haley in the year before his assassination.
Trevor Noah on being the mixed-race child of an illegal union in apartheid South Africa.
Phil Knight on the first years of Nike, selling shoes from a car boot to a Japanese bank loan.
T. E. Lawrence's own account of the Arab Revolt.
Cheryl Strayed walks 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail after her mother's death.
Michael Lewis at Salomon Brothers in the 1980s; the Wall Street memoir.
Krakauer on the 1996 Everest disaster he survived.
Viktor Frankl in Auschwitz and the psychology he built from it; those with a why can bear any how.
A neurosurgeon diagnosed with lung cancer at 36 writes about it until he cannot.
A French girl and a Chinese man in colonial Saigon; Duras at 70 remembering.
Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.
Infobox
