Recommended biography & memoir

In the Dream House
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of...
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Minor Feelings
A radically honest work of art, Minor Feelings forms a portrait of one Asian American psyche - and of a writer's search to both uncover and speak the truth.
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Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
The prescient, page-turning account of a journey into Silicon Valley. Uncanny Valley is a defining memoir for our digital age.
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Tell Me Why: The Story of My Life and My Music
A powerful memoir of a true Australian legend: stolen child, musical and lyrical genius, and leader.
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Jack Charles: Born-again Blakfella
Jack Charles has worn many hats throughout his life: actor, cat burglar, musician, heroin addict, activist, even Senior Victorian Australian of the Year. But the title he's most proud to claim is that of Aboriginal Elder.
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Unfollow
The metamorphic journey of Megan Phelps-Roper: a young woman raised in a religious hate group, who has become an advocate for equality, diversity and tolerance.
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Sontag: Her Life
The definitive portrait of one of the twentieth century's most towering figures: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her private face.
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The Way Through the Woods: Of Mushrooms and Mourning
One woman's journey to overcome grief by delving into an overlooked wonder of nature.
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Olive Cotton
A landmark biography of a singular and important Australian photographer, Olive Cotton, by an award-winning writer - beautifully written and deeply moving.
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Two Cultures, One Story
Told with grace and strength, this memoir shares the inside story of a respected Elder and his drive to break down cultural barriers and improve the lives of his people.
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Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume One, 1978-1987
The private diaries of one of Australia's greatest living writers, the much loved, fearless and fierce Helen Garner.
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Monsters
From award-winning writer and critic Alison Croggon, Monsters is a hybrid of memoir and essay that takes as its point of departure the painful breakdown of a relationship between two sisters.
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Childhood
The astonishing first volume in Ditlevsen's celebrated autobiographical trilogy - a major publication for Penguin Classics in 2019.
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The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption
A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple's attempt to adopt a child.
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Year of the Monkey
From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.
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Rudolf Nureyev: The Life
Born on a train in Stalin's Russia, Rudolf Nureyev was ballet's pop icon. Nureyev's achievements and conquests became legendary: he rose out of Tatar peasant poverty to become the Kirov's thrilling maverick star; slept with his...
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The Chronology of Water
A journey of addiction, grief and the healing power of art - the highly acclaimed memoir from the author of The Book of Joan
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The Bells of Old Tokyo
A hauntingly original book about Tokyo and the Japanese relationship to time, memory and history, seen through the eyes of an outsider, searching for the past that underlies the city's arrestingly visible present.
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Split: True Stories of Leaving, Loss and New Beginnings
In this compelling anthology of personal essays, curated by award-winning author Lee Kofman, some of Australia's most beloved writers reveal, for the first time, powerful, occasionally funny and often heartbreaking stories of...
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Alice to Prague
A bittersweet story of a search for identity, belonging and love, set in a time, a place and with a man that fill Tanya's life with contradictions.
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The Trauma Cleaner
Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife...
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Becoming
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States
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Breaking Badly
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Staying: A Memoir
A searing memoir by acclaimed novelist Jessie Cole, about surviving the suicide of loved ones, and finding a place to heal.
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Miss Ex-Yugoslavia
Unpolished Gem with a touch of Stasiland: a funny, dark and tender memoir about growing up between the lunacy of Yugoslavia's civil war and suburban Australia.
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Always Another Country
A moving portrait of the life journey and all the romance, heartache and grief that has helped to make Sisonke Msimang the writer, activist, mother and woman she is today.
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Educated
An extraordinary memoir about a woman's discovery of education, its transformative power and the price she has to pay for it.
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Eggshell Skull
A fiercely intelligent, heartbreakingly honest memoir and feminist call to arms in the tradition of Fight Like A Girl
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One Hundred Years of Dirt
Social mobility is not a train you get to board after you've scraped together enough for the ticket. You have to build the whole bloody engine, with nothing but a spoon and hand-me-down psychological distress.
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Tracker
Miles Franklin-winning author Alexis Wright has crafted a memoir in story form of the charismatic Indigenous leader Tracker Tilmouth, and an epic portrait of a important period in the political life of Australia, reminiscent in...
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The Hate Race
'Maxine Beneba Clarke is a powerful and fearless storyteller...Clarke is the read deal, and will, if we're lucky, be an essential voice in world literature for years to come' - Dave Eggers, international bestselling author
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Heavy: An American Memoir
In this powerful and provocative memoir, genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon explores what the weight of a lifetime of secrets, lies, and deception does to a black body, a black family, and a nation teetering on the...
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The Argonauts
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of 'autotheory' offering fresh, fierce and timely...
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I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You
In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today
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A Life of My Own
A memoir that follows Claire Tomalin through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant...
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The Enigmatic Mr Deakin
Alfred Deakin-scholar, spiritualist, prime minister-was instrumental in creating modern Australia. In the first biography of Deakin in more than half a century, the acclaimed political historian Judith Brett deftly weaves together...
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Just Kids
Winner of the 2010 Non-Fiction National Book Award Patti Smith's evocative, honest and moving coming-of-age story of her extraordinary relationship with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe
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Priestdaddy: A Memoir
The childhood of Patricia Lockwood, the poet dubbed 'The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas' by The New York Times, was unusual in many respects. There was the location: an impoverished, nuclear waste-riddled area of...
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Holding the Man
At an all-boys school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and, ultimately, death. This book...
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When Breath Becomes Air
At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling...
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My Place
Traces the experiences of Sally Morgan's life, growing up in Perth in the 50s & 60s. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge and a fascinating story unfolds - a...
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Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer
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Naked
A riotous collection of memoirs which explores the absurd hilarity of modern life and creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world.
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A Mother’s Story
An updated edition of the profoundly moving and inspiring memoir from Australia's domestic violence crusader, Rosie Batty. Rosie Batty knows pain no woman should have to suffer. Her son was killed by his father in a violent...
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The Glass Castle
Jeanette Walls narrates her nomadic and adventurous childhood with her dreaming, 'brilliant' but alcoholic parents. At the age of seventeen she escapes on a Greyhound bus to New York with her older sister; her younger siblings...
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Kitchen Confidential: Insider’s Edition
The bestselling author of Don't Eat Before You Read This expands his appetizer into a deliciously funny, delightfully shocking banquet that lays out his 25 years of sex, drugs, and haute cuisine.
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Dreams from my Father
In this lyrical, unsentimental, and compelling memoir, the son of a black African father and a white American mother searches for a workable meaning to his life as a black American. It begins in New York, where Barack Obama learns...
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