The Best Bios & Memoirs of 2024

The LA Times loved this esteemed music critic's new portrait of Joni Mitchell, saying "[Powers] shows us how we can love an artist like Mitchell and let her be human, too, how we can understand her genius from — forgive me, Joni — both sides now."

With Joan Didion as an aunt, Carrie Fisher as a best friend, and acting and production roles in Martin Scorsese's After Hours, few people have had as much access to the intimate lives of America's cultural aristocracy as Griffin Dunne. On the page, all the glitz and glamour, combined with the devastating killing of his younger sister and the high-profile trial which followed, make for a complicated, eclectic, and fascinating read about a singular life.

The world-renowned gastronome gives readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into her audacious choices, career milestones, and life lessons she learned on the path to becoming one of the food world’s biggest stars. (Out 10/1)

A riveting biography of a pioneering comedian, director, actor and writer that the New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme said "manages to capture, with nuance and wit, the life of a woman who is as hilarious as she is complex, as sparkling as she is serious, as ambitious as she is aloof. Courogen makes an undeniable case for May's permanent place in the cinematic canon as a major director and singular comedic talent; after reading this book, I will be saying 'justice for Ishtar!' to anyone who will listen."

After being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2019, the famed critic published 46 essays reflecting on art and life, against the backdrop of an America marked by pandemic, conflict and social unrest, which Kirkus called "a gorgeous memento mori from a singular writer."

Judith Jones discovered The Diary of Anne Frank in Doubleday Paris' slush pile when she was 25, marking the beginning of a remarkable career. Over the next fifty years, she would shepard the careers of Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Julia Child, and more. This intimate biography illuminates the behind-the-scenes work it took to turn these names into literary and cultural icons.

"The world that Gooch describes, of interconnected gay and cultural networks in the febrile atmosphere of 1980s New York, is one in which he too took part. And first-hand experience has clearly proved integral in shaping his book, for it reads not only as the definitive biography of its subject, but as a memorial to a collective past, from which many did not survive," observed The Art Newspaper.

Time praised punk legend Kathleen Hanna's first memoir, calling it "candid and reflective, Rebel Girl tells the stories behind her best-known songs and reframes her most mythologized brushes with the mainstream—like that time she accidentally titled Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

The Golden Globe winning actor and cookbook author records twelve months of eating--in restaurants, kitchens, film sets, press junkets, at home and abroad, with friends, with family, with strangers, and occasionally just by himself. (Out 10/15)

The Dancer Upstairs author has written "a monumental record of Fleming's life. The completeness of the book is beyond doubt. Shakespeare leaves no future biographer much to discover. Fleming's place in history is assured," declared the Sunday Times.