There are myriad ways to tell the story of a life, as shown by this year’s best biographies. Craig Brown’s doorstopper A Voyage Around the Queen (4th Estate), about the reign of Elizabeth II, dispenses with linear storytelling in favour of a patchwork of diary entries, letters, vignettes, second-hand anecdotes and even dreams (the writer Paul Theroux once dreamed of being nestled in Her Majesty’s bosom). The result is an unorthodox and wonderfully irreverent book which, alert to the absurdities of the monarchy, reveals as much about how others saw the Queen as the woman herself.
Sonia Purnell’s Kingmaker: Pamela Churchill Harriman (Virago) is a rich and riveting portrait of another seemingly unknowable aristocrat. The daughter-in-law of Winston Churchill, Harriman was, says Purnell, a canny diplomat who exerted 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 celebrated US broadcaster). Lili Anolik’s Didion and Babitz (Atlantic Books) is a luminous joint biography of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, inspired by newly unearthed correspondence between the two writers that reads like “a lovers’ quarrel”. Anolik traces both women’s lives and their fraught friendship in the late 60s and early 70s, which fell apart after Didion was hired to edit Babitz’s first book. Reader, she fired her.
Ekow Eshun’s The Strangers (Hamish Hamilton) is a group biography, written in the second person, that artfully delves into the minds and motivations of five pioneering Black men: actor and playwright Ira Aldridge; explorer Matthew Henson; activist Malcolm X; footballer Justin Fashanu; and psychiatrist and thinker Frantz Fanon. Each is linked, writes Eshun, by being “an exile: a figure in motion through a world that regarded him as an alien”. Fanon is also the subject of The Rebel’s Clinic (Apollo), an enthralling new study by Adam Shatz that examines the man, his ideas and his legacy.
Another group biography, Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women (William Collins), deftly spotlights the women who shaped the novelist 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 cherished his free-spirited fictional women, he wasn’t so enamoured with the flesh-and-blood kind.
The prevailing 21st-century view of the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin is that he was an unsavoury character, but Sue Prideaux’s revelatory Wild Thing (Faber) offers another viewpoint: that although he was no saint, his reputation as a colonialist, predatory, syphilitic monster is unfair. A biography that reads like fiction, Maurice and Maralyn (Chatto & Windus) is Sophie Elmhirst’s brilliantly immersive account of a married couple’s ocean adventure, which became a nightmare in March 1973 when a whale crashed into their boat, leaving them adrift in a dinghy. As well as a remarkable tale of survival, Maurice and Maralyn is also a spiritual drama, laying bare the pressures of romantic partnership. “For what else is a marriage,” asks Elmhirst, “if not being stuck on a small raft with someone and trying to survive?”
David Baddiel’s My Family: The Memoir (4th Estate) is also a portrait of a marriage under pressure. Bracingly candid and wholly affectionate, it tells of his parents, Sarah and Colin, and Sarah’s affair with a golfing enthusiast named David White. Baddiel’s mother did nothing to hide her extramarital activities: not only did she leave love letters around the house, she also had White’s face emblazoned on a mug. Tiffany Murray’s My Family and Other Rock Stars (Fleet) tells of another unconventional domestic setup. Murray’s mother, Joan, was chef to the stars, meaning the author’s early years were spent running feral around a Monmouth recording studio in the company of musical giants such as Black Sabbath, Queen, David Bowie and Motörhead. Outre snapshots – Freddie Mercury recording in his slippers! Ozzy Osbourne naked in a graveyard! – are juxtaposed with Murray’s mother’s recipes in a book that is as unusual as it is charming. A mother-daughter relationship is at the heart of Nightshade Mother (Calon) by Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales, whose abusive childhood is relayed with courage, insight and rare generosity.
Two Clintons published memoirs this year: Something Lost, Something Gained (Simon & Schuster) finds Hillary Clinton reflecting both on what might have been – in 2016 she lost her bid for the White House to Donald Trump – and what is yet to be done in the realms of female equality, while Citizen (Hutchinson Heinemann) by Bill Clinton details the afterlife of an ex-president. In The Art of Power (Simon & Schuster), the former speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi gives vivid and unsettling accounts of the assault on Washington’s Capitol building in 2021, and on her husband, Paul, in 2022 when a far-right protester entered their home and attacked him with a hammer.
As the victim of “debilitating and corrosive” online abuse, Diane Abbott knows what it is to feel unsafe while doing her job. Her memoir A Woman Like Me (Viking) is a heartfelt and defiant self-portrait charting her journey to become Britain’s first Black female MP and now Mother of the House. There are battles aplenty in Nemonte Nenquimo and Mitch Anderson’s We Will Not Be Saved (Wildfire), a moving and evocative memoir detailing Nenquimo’s childhood in a Waorani village deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest and decision to become an environmental activist fighting to protect her ancestral lands.
Knife (Jonathan Cape) is a visceral account by the novelist Salman Rushdie of the attempt on his life in 2022 and the treatment and recovery that followed. Testament to his resilience and dark humour, the book finds the author reckoning with his mortality and “answer[ing] violence with art”. Question 7 (Chatto & Windus), by the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, is a powerful genre-bending work combining history, science and memoir that won this year’s Baillie Gifford prize. The author visits a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp where his father was interned as a labourer, weaving this together with scenes from history and from his own life, including a terrifying brush with death.
Amid the avalanche of celebrity memoirs, Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy (Century) stands out. It candidly details the actor’s transformation from delinquent school drop-out to struggling theatre actor to uber-cool star of Dog Day Afternoon and The Godfather. His story is punctuated with heartbreak, first from abandonment by his father when he was two and later from the death of his mother from an accidental overdose when he was 22. Pacino reveals how he subsequently lost himself in drink until the actor turned teacher Charlie Laughton intervened and persuaded him to quit. Cher: The Memoir, Part One (HarperCollins) tells of its author’s childhood, struggling with dyslexia in a chaotic household and her early professional and romantic partnership with Sonny Bono. (For the rest the story, readers will have to wait until next year when Part Two arrives.)
A Thousand Threads (Vintage) chronicles Neneh Cherry’s boho childhood moving between Sweden, home of her artist mother Moki, and the Chelsea hotel in New York, preferred haunt of her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry – and her own career as a singer. Though Cherry endures immense hardship, from racist encounters and Don’s heroin addiction to a vicious teenage assault, the overwhelming tone is one of joy, as she basks in family, friendship and the healing powers of music. Finally, the film-maker and actor Desiree Akhavan’s You’re Embarrassing Yourself (4th Estate) is a winningly frank, funny and life-affirming memoir about the mishaps and failures that shaped her and the rocky path to self-acceptance.
• To browse all biography and memoir books included in the Guardian and Observer’s best books of 2022 visit guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
• This article was amended on 9 December 2024 to make it clear that it was actor-turned-teacher Charlie Laughton, not the actor Charles Laughton, who helped Al Pacino quit drinking.
