The Best Memoirs to Read in Summer 2025

At the age of 16, Sharon joined a group of hippies and embarked on an adventure across North America. Thrust into an adult world that ran counter to the sheltered life she had experienced, Sharon was forced to mature quickly. 

As Sharon comes of age in the early 1970s, she experiences love and pain while exploring who she can trust and the rise of the Women’s Liberation movement. Navigating life in a rural commune, she learns to work against the forces that seek to contain women and pave her own path towards freedom. 

In this eye-opening memoir, Sarah Wynn-Williams unpacks what happens when absolute power is held in the corrupt grasp of the global elite. She begins with the rise of Facebook and how it has come to shape the wrong turns taken in the past decade, particularly with its impact on Trump’s election.

Drawing from her own experience at one of the most influential companies in the world, Wynn-Williams offers readers a first-hand account of what it’s like to work in a place that rarely takes responsibility for the horrible consequences shaping our lives. 

Split into 24 chapters—to reflect his famous uniform number—Willie Mays explores his career, both on and off the field, as one of the greatest baseball players in history. Despite facing numerous challenges, Mays met every experience with positivity and instructs readers on how to do the same. He encourages individuals, both young and old, to pursue their dreams, because it’s never too late to do what you love. 

In this one-of-a-kind memoir, Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl S. Buck chronicles making a film in 1960s Japan, while grieving the death of her husband. She narrates the process of working with creatives, the numerous complications involved in shooting, and the atmosphere of Japan, a country reeling from the aftermath of war—all the while coming to terms with the loss of her great love, husband Richard Walsh. 

Jesmyn Ward, in a must-read memoir, describes a period of five years in which she lost five men she loved to addiction, suicide, and accidents. She chronicles the difficulties that follow those who are in poverty. 

As Ward begins to process the losses of her brother and friends, she asks herself why. She comes to the realization that it was a mix of who they were and the position they were dealt in life, living as black men in a history of racism. But Ward does not allow the people she’s lost to be defined by what fueled their deaths, and instead paints their beautiful and painful stories in intimate portraits. 

When Hamilton Jordan passed, his children discovered that he had written a mostly finished memoir that they worked together to complete. What follows is the story of Jordan’s childhood in Albany, Georgia, in which he comes to reconsider the beliefs he was born into—racism and religious intolerance—to a movement of acceptance and equality that he came to embody.

Born into a politically influential family, Jordan became a key figure in Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign, which ultimately led to his victory in 1976. In a stunning account, A Boy from Georgia offers an intimate glimpse into the southern establishment, showing readers that they can become more than what they are born into. 

In a stunning survival story, Chanel Miller recounts her experience being sexually assaulted on Stanford’s campus by Brock Turner. Although previously known to the world as Jane Doe, from her viral impact statement on BuzzFeed, Miller bravely reclaims her identity in the face of trauma, through the moving power of words. 

Her story demonstrates a cultural bias not to believe victims, in a criminal justice system that reinforces the narrative that, because of what they were wearing, they “asked for it.” But Miller works to undermine such a view that protects perpetrators, while instead illuminating the courage it requires to continue under the weight of unfathomable trauma. 

Grammy-nominated indie rock star Michelle Zauner, also known as Japanese Breakfast, picks up this pen in this profound memoir, which explores her experiences of losing her mother. She begins in childhood as the only Asian-American kid at her school, while struggling with the burden of her mother’s expectations.

But despite their differences, mother and daughter came together through Korean food in the aisles of H-Mart. As Zauner matured and found her place in the world as a musician, she grew to feel less connected to her Korean roots. This story is a return to who she was and the role her mother played in shaping her identity, while also serving as a reckoning of what she wants to be and what her mother means to her. 

With the release of Edna O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, came scandal—so much so that O’Brien’s local priest burnt the book. Nevertheless, she pushed forth unfettered and went on to have a grand life, from convent school to the wildness of 1960s London and Hollywood. 

The work explores the life of a celebrated writer, from the people she met, like Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton, to the places she went, living amongst a landscape she came to imprint upon.