There are countless ways to tell the story of a life, as this year’s best biographies show. Craig Brown’s goal stopper A trip around the queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, abandons linear storytelling in favor of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being snuggled into the chest of Her Majesty). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book who, alerted to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the queen as the woman herself.
To Sonya Purnell Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknown aristocrat. Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, Harriman, according to Purnell, was a shrewd diplomat who exerted a remarkable influence on mid-20th-century politics through her three marriages and numerous affairs with powerful men (her lovers included a prince, a shipping magnate, and a prominent American television operator). To Lily Anolik Didion and Babitz (Scribner) is a brilliant joint biography of Joan Didion and Yves Babitz, inspired by recently discovered correspondence between the two writers that reads like a “lover’s quarrel.” Anolik follows both the women’s lives and their rocky friendship in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which falls apart after Didion is hired to edit Babitz’s first book. Reader, she fired her.
To Ekow Eshun The strangers (Hamish Hamilton) is a band biographywritten in the second person, which expertly delves into the minds and motivations of five black pioneers: actor and playwright Ira Aldridge; researcher Matthew Henson; activist Malcolm X; football player Justin Fashanu; and the psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon. Each is connected, Eshun writes, by being “an outcast: a figure on the move through a world that considered him alien.” Fanon is also subject to The rebel’s clinic (Apollo), a fascinating new study by Adam Schatz that examines the man, his ideas and his legacy.
Another group biography, by Paula Byrne Hardy women (William Collins), expertly illuminates the women who shaped the writer Thomas Hardy. Featuring his fiercely proud mother Jemima; his unhappy first wife Emma; and the mistress who became his second wife, Florence, Byrne shows that while Hardy loved his free-spirited fictional women, he wasn’t so enamored with the flesh-and-blood ones.
The prevailing one 21st century view of post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin is that he was an unpleasant character, but Sue Prideaux’s revelation A wild thing (Faber) suggests otherwise point of view: that, though he was no saint, his reputation as a colonizer, a predator, a syphilitic monster, is unjust. A biography that reads like fiction, Maurice and Maralyn (Chatto & Windus) is Sophie Elmhurst’s brilliantly absorbing film account about a married couple’s ocean adventure that turns into a nightmare in March 1973 when a whale crashes into their boat, leaving them adrift in a dinghy. As well as a remarkable story of survival, Maurice and Maraline is also a spiritual drama revealing the pressures of romantic partnership. “Because what else is marriage,” Elmhurst asks, “if not staying on a little raft with someone and trying to survive?”
To David Baddiel My family: The memoir (4th Estate) is also a portrait of a marriage under pressure. Reassuringly candid and completely affectionate, he tells of his parents, Sarah and Colin, and Sarah’s affair with a golf enthusiast named David White. Baddiel’s mother did nothing to hide her extramarital affairs: not only did she leave love letters around the house, but she also had White’s face painted on a mug. To Tiffany Murray My family and other rock stars (Fleet) tells of another unconventional home setup. Murray’s mother, Joan, was a chef to the stars, meaning the author’s early years were spent wandering around a recording studio in Monmouth in the company of musical giants such as Black Sabbath, Queen, David Bowie and Motörhead. Outre photos – Freddie Mercury records in slippers! Ozzy Osbourne naked in a graveyard! – are matched with Murray’s mother’s recipes in a book that is as unusual as it is charming. At the core is the mother-daughter relationship Nightshade Mother (Calon) by Gwyneth Lewis, a former national poet of Wales whose abusive childhood was passed down with courage, insight and rare generosity.
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Two Clintons published memoirs this year: Something lost, something gained (Simon & Schuster) finds Hillary Clinton reflective as for what could have happened – in 2016. she lost her bid for the White House to Donald Trump – and for what has yet to be done on women’s equality, while Citizen (Hutchinson Heinemann) by Bill Clinton details the afterlife of a former president. c The art of power (Simon and Schuster), on former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi is bright and disturbing accounts from the attack on the Capitol building in Washington in 2021 and on her husband Paul in 2022, when a far-right protester entered their home and attacked him with a hammer.
As a victim of “debilitating and corrosive” online abuse, Diane Abbott knows what it’s like to feel unsafe doing your job. Her memoirs A woman like me (Viking) is hearty and defiant a self-portrait charting her path to becoming Britain’s first black female MP and now mother of the house. There are many fights in Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson’s We will not be saved (Wildfire), exciting and emotional memoirs describing Nenkimo’s childhood in the village of Vaorani deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest and the decision to become an environmental activist, fighting to protect his ancestral lands.
Knife (Jonathan Cape) is a a visceral account by the writer Salman Rushdie about the attempt on his life in 2022. and subsequent treatment and recovery. A testament to his resilience and dark humor, the book finds the author coming to terms with his mortality and “answering[ing] violence with art”. Question 7 (Chatto & Windus), by Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, is a powerful, genre-changing work combining history, science and memoir who won this year’s Baillie Gifford Award. The author visits a Japanese POW camp where his father was interned as a laborer, weaving this together with scenes from history and his own life, including a terrifying brush with death.
Among the avalanche of celebrity memoirs, Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy (Century) stands out. It candidly chronicles the actor’s transformation from a school dropout to a struggling theater actor to a super-cool star of Dog afternoon and The Godfather. His history was punctuated by heartbreak, first by being abandoned by his father when he was two and later by the death of his mother from an accidental overdose when he was 22. Pacino reveals how he subsequently lost himself in alcohol, while actor Charles Lawton did not intervene and persuaded him to give up. Cher: The Memoirs, Part One (HarperCollins) chronicles its author’s childhood, struggling with dyslexia in a chaotic household, and her early professional and romantic partnership with Sonny Bono. (For the rest of the story, readers will have to wait until next year, when part two arrives.)
A thousand threads (Vintage) chronicles Nene Cherry’s boho childhood, shuttling between Sweden, the home of her artist mother Moki, and New York’s Chelsea Hotel, a favorite haunt of her stepfather, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry—and her own singing career. Although Cheri held out enormous difficultiesfrom racial clashes and Don’s heroin addiction to a brutal teenage assault, the overwhelming tone is one of joy as she revels in family, friendship and the healing powers of music. And finally, that of director and actor Desiree Ahavan You are ashamed (4th Estate) is winningly frank, funny and life-affirming memoirs about the mishaps and failures that shaped her and the rocky road to self-acceptance.
