Category Autobiography and memoir

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A Hymn to Life by Gisèle Pelicot review – a unique memoir by a figure of astonishing power

Pelicot’s riveting account of her ordeal refuses to conform to any agenda but her own

It is a mark of the power and honesty of Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir, A Hymn to Life – a seemingly impossible writing project in which the author must reconcile herself with horrors of which she has no recollection – that in the first 40 pages, the person I felt most angry towards was Pelicot herself. Her ex-husband, Dominique, who will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life for drugging and raping his wife and recruiting 50 men over the internet to do likewise, takes his place among the monsters of our age. In his absence, the reader may experience a version of what happened in Gisèle Pelicot’s own family – namely, the misdirection of anger towards her.

I have read enough books by female survivors of male sexual violence to say with confidence that Hymn to Life is unique. Pelicot – she decided to keep her married name in the interests of giving those of her grandchildren who share it a way to be proud rather than ashamed – was 67 when her husband of almost 50 years was arrested in 2020 for upskirting women in a supermarket in Carpentras, a small town in the south-east of France near the couple’s retirement home in the village of Mazan. When the police investigation uncovered a cache of videos and photos in which an unconscious Pelicot was shown being sexually assaulted by scores of men, she entered a nightmare.

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More heartache than Hamnet?: Maggie O’Farrell’s best books – ranked!

As her Women’s prize-winning novel heads to the Oscars, we rate the author’s best work – from tales of new motherhood to a life-affirming memoir of mortality

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she’s actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O’Farrell’s second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is “no longer with us” to mark a more permanent absence; in fact, Sinead has simply been thrown over, and it is in the details of the collapse of her relationship with Marcus that the novel most engages. Hints of the gothic ghost story deepen one of the main takeaways, which is that Marcus consists almost entirely of red flags.

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The Uncool by Cameron Crowe audiobook review – memoir of an awestruck insider

The film-maker and author narrates this vivid account of his wide-eyed adventures as young music journalist in 70s America, hanging out with heroes from David Bowie to Led Zeppelin

The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.

Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.

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The Colour of Home by Sajid Javid review – from one hostile environment to another

The ex-Home Secretary’s memoir of childhood racism is intimate and moving but raises difficult political questions

Sajid Javid’s memoir traces his journey from being a frightened child in racist 1970s Rochdale to becoming a leading member of a political party that attacks and marginalises people like him. However, it is an intimate, and sometimes moving, family portrait as well as a social history of race, class and aspiration in late 20th‑century Britain.

The opening chapters, with their ubiquitous skinheads and “Run, Paki, run” taunts, contain the book’s most arresting scenes. Racism is continuous and targeted: from graffiti on his father’s shop windows to the everyday humiliations at school, and on the buses where his father had bravely fought an informal colour bar to become a bus driver.

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Leaving Home by Mark Haddon review – blistering memoir of a loveless childhood

The Curious Incident author describes the upbringing that shaped him – and for which he can’t help feeling nostalgia

Attempting a psychological analysis of a literary work is a fool’s errand, for obvious reasons: you’re trying to assess the inside of the writer’s head from the inside of your own, using the inherently treacherous medium of make-believe. And the aim on their part, of course, is always to beguile, and often to deceive.

And yet the temptation is sometimes too great to resist. Mark Haddon, whose blistering memoir details a mainly miserable and loveless childhood and an adulthood studded with significant hurdles, hit the literary jackpot with The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003. In it, a teenage protagonist who struggles to communicate with the world around him uncovers a world of lying adults – most egregiously, he has been told his mother has died, rather than absconded with the nextdoor neighbour – and runs away from home. A more recent novel, The Porpoise, opens with a fatal air crash before morphing into a reworking of Pericles; in Leaving Home, we discover that Haddon is terrified of flying. We also learn that he borrowed heavily from childhood holidays in Brighton to create the atmosphere and texture for his story The Pier Falls, a merciless, documentary-style narration of a cataclysmic seaside disaster.

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Fatima Bhutto on her abusive relationship: ‘I thought it could never happen to me’

Fifteen years after her explosive memoir of growing up in Pakistan’s ruling political dynasty, the author has written a devastating account of the abuse she has since endured. She talks about a life on the run and finally settling down

Had Fatima Bhutto been left to her own devices, her devastating forthcoming memoir would have been almost entirely about her relationship with her dog, Coco. “I know it sounds nuts,” she laughs. And it’s true that being dog-crazy doesn’t quite track with the public perception of Bhutto as a writer, journalist, activist and member of Pakistan’s most famous political dynasty. But the pandemic had forced something of a creative unravelling and when Bhutto took stock, she found herself only really able to write about Coco. Her agent politely suggested her memoir might need something more. A second draft was written, then abandoned.

“Until I thought, what if I just tell the truth? And then it fell out of me – it didn’t even pour, it fell.” In around three weeks Bhutto had reworked her draft and, in the process, revealed a shocking chapter of her life that she’d kept secret from everyone around her.

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‘To say I was the favourite would imply I was liked’: Mark Haddon on a loveless childhood

As a bookish child with a distant father and a disapproving mother, the Curious Incident author retreated into a world of his own. Looking back, he asks what it means to lose parents who never showed you love

When I see washed-out photographs of English life in the 60s and 70s – cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes – I feel a wave of what can’t properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I’d want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I’d have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility. Why then this longing, this echo of some remembered comfort?

Is it that, as children, we live inside a bubble of focused attention that gives everything inside a memorable fierceness? The way one could lie, for example, on a lawn and look down into the jungle of the grass to see earwigs and woodlice lumbering between the pale green trunks like brontosauri lumbering between the ferns and gingkos of the Late Jurassic. The way a rucked bedspread could become a mountain range stretched below the wings of a badly painted Airfix Spitfire. Or do objects, in their constancy, provide consolation in a world where adults are unpredictable and distant and unloving?

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Googoosh: A Sinful Voice by Googoosh with Tara Dehlavi review – the extraordinary story of an Iranian icon

Her voice soundtracked the 60s and 70s, but the revolution silenced her. The legendary singer finally has her say in this uneven memoir

If you ask any Iranian to name the most important female pop star in our country’s history, they’ll say Googoosh. Nobody else comes close. Over six decades of revolution, suppression and exile, Googoosh has gone from singer to cultural icon, a symbol of a country’s grief for its murdered, imprisoned, and muzzled artists, and a living link between pre-revolutionary Iran and the diaspora.

Googoosh was just three years old when she started singing in small halls and cabaret venues where her father worked. By her teens she was a film actor and a fashion icon. In the 60s and 70s, when my mother was a teenager, Googoosh was everywhere: on television, in films, magazines, on the radio. She kept recreating herself – her style, her moves, her hair. (My mother and many of her university classmates copied Googosh’s famous wispy haircut.) For a while, this bold, creative young woman shaped how westerners saw Iran, and how a generation of Iranian women understood modernity, femininity and public life.

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Books to look out for in 2026 – nonfiction

Memoirs from Liza Minnelli and Lena Dunham, essays by David Sedaris and Alan Bennett’s diaries are among the highlights of the year ahead

Over the past year we’ve been spoiled for memoirs from high-wattage stars – Cher, Patti Smith and Anthony Hopkins among them. But 2026 begins with a very different true story, from someone who never chose the spotlight, but now wants some good to come of her appalling experiences. After the trial that resulted in her husband and 50 others being convicted of rape or sexual assault, Gisèle Pelicot’s aim is to nurture “strength and courage” in other survivors. In A Hymn to Life (Bodley Head, February) she insists that “shame has to change sides”. Another trial – of the men accused of carrying out the Bataclan massacre – was the subject of Emmanuel Carrère’s most recent book, V13. For his next, Kolkhoze (Fern, September), the French master of autofiction turns his unsparing lens back on himself, focusing on his relationship with his mother Hélène, and using it to weave a complex personal history of France, Russia and Ukraine. Family also comes under the microscope in Ghost Stories (Sceptre, May) by Siri Hustvedt, a memoir of her final years with husband Paul Auster, who died of cancer in 2024.

Hollywood isn’t totally out of the picture, though: The Steps (Seven Dials, May), Sylvester Stallone’s first autobiography, follows the star from homelessness in early 70s New York to Rocky’s triumph at the Oscars later that decade. Does achieving your creative dreams come at a price, though? Lena Dunham suggests as much in Famesick (4th Estate, April), billed as a typically frank memoir of how how her dramatic early success gave way to debilitating chronic illness. Frankness of a different kind is promised in More (Bloomsbury, September), actor Gillian Anderson’s follow-up to her bestselling 2024 anthology of women’s sexual fantasies, Want.

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A Mind of My Own by Kathy Burke audiobook review – an honest and hilarious memoir

The no-nonsense comic actor and author further cements her status as a national treasure with her trademark gobby one-liners

A lot of terrible things happen to Kathy Burke in her memoir, though you won’t find her mired in self-pity. Burke was a toddler when her mother died from stomach cancer, meaning she has no memory of her. In the Islington council flat where she grew up, she shared a bedroom with her alcoholic dad who would give up booze only to fall off the wagon and, at his worst, became violent. When a stranger on the estate called her ugly in front of her friends, she cannily deflected the insult with laughter. “I’m the best dancer at the ugly bug ball though,” she hooted, and did a little dance.

Burke would find her tribe on London’s punk scene and, in her teens, got the acting bug and a place at London’s Anna Scher Theatre school. This put her on the path to a brilliant and varied acting and writing career that saw her appearing in comedy sketches with Harry Enfield and French and Saunders, being called a genius by Peter Cook and taken by Luc Besson’s private jet to collect the prize for best actress at Cannes film festival for Gary Oldman’s 1997 film Nil By Mouth. There, much to her chagrin, she found herself “accepting a bellini cocktail from Harvey fuckface Weinstein”.

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