Biography & Memoir Ebooks
Grow your digital library with some of the best biographies and memoir ebooks here on Scribd. With fresh and layered memories and language, biographies & memoirs open our eyes to astonishing and inspiring lives, experiences, and places. These intimate and honest non-fiction accounts make us close confidants as the authors reveal personal and poignant stories that shape our heroes and ourselves. Start exploring our highly rated biographies and memoir ebooks today.
Grow your digital library with some of the best biographies and memoir ebooks here on Scribd. With fresh and layered memories and language, biographies & memoirs open our eyes to astonishing and inspiring lives, experiences, and places. These intimate and honest non-fiction accounts make us close confidants as the authors reveal personal and poignant stories that shape our heroes and ourselves. Start exploring our highly rated biographies and memoir ebooks today.
Spotlight
From the author of Group, a New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club Pick, comes a moving, heartwarming, and powerful memoir about Christie Tate’s lifelong struggle to sustain female friendship, and the friend who helps her find the human connection she seeks. After more than a decade of dead-end dates and dysfunctional relationships, Christie Tate has reclaimed her voice and settled down. Her days of agonizing in group therapy over guys who won’t commit are over, the grueling emotional work required to attach to another person tucked neatly into the past. Or so she thought. Weeks after giddily sharing stories of her new boyfriend at Saturday morning recovery meetings, Christie receives a gift from a friend. Meredith, twenty years older and always impeccably accessorized, gives Christie a box of holiday-themed scarves as well as a gentle suggestion: maybe now is the perfect time to examine why friendships give her trouble. “The work never ends, right?” she says with a wink. Christie isn’t so sure, but she soon realizes that the feeling of “apartness” that has plagued her since childhood isn’t magically going away now that she’s in a healthy romantic relationship. With Meredith by her side, she embarks on a brutally honest exploration of her friendships past and present, sorting through the ways that debilitating shame and jealousy have kept the lasting bonds she craves out of reach—and how she can overcome a history of letting go too soon. But when Meredith becomes ill and Christie’s baggage threatens to muddy their final days, she’s forced to face her deepest fears in honor of the woman who finally showed her how to be a friend. Poignant, laugh-out-loud funny, and emotionally satisfying, BFF explores what happens when we finally break the habits that impair our ability to connect with others, and the ways that one life—however messy and imperfect—can change another.
Trending ebooks
A Stolen Life: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Magnolia Story (with Bonus Content) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Dry: A Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sun Tzu's The Art of War: Bilingual Edition Complete Chinese and English Text Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Moveable Feast Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Kitchen Confidential Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Glad My Mom Died Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of My Life (The Complete Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, Volume 10 of 12) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fear: Trump in the White House Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Heaven Is For Real Conversation Guide Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Me: Elton John Official Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Meditations: Complete and Unabridged Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Child Called It: One Child's Courage to Survive Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Story of My Life (The Complete Memoirs of Giacomo Casanova, Volume 1 of 12) Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Yes Please Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Discover more in Biography & Memoir
Buzzy new favorites
Orphan Bachelors: A Memoir From the bestselling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion In pre-Communist China, Fae Myenne Ng’s father memorized a book of lies and gained entry to the United States as a stranger’s son, evading the Exclusion Act, an immigration law which he believed was meant to extinguish the Chinese American family. During the McCarthy era, he entered the Confession Program in a failed attempt to salvage his marriage only to have his citizenship revoked to resident alien. Exclusion and Confession, America’s two slamming doors. As Ng’s father said, “America didn’t have to kill any Chinese, the Exclusion Act ensured none would be born.” Ng was her parents' precocious first born, the translator, the bossy eldest sister. A child raised by a seafaring father and a seamstress mother, by San Francisco’s Chinatown and its legendary Orphan Bachelors -- men without wives or children, Exclusion’s living legacy. She and her siblings were their stand-in descendants, Ng’s family grocery store their haven. Each Orphan Bachelor bequeathed the children their true American inheritance. Ng absorbed their suspicious, lonely, barren nature; she found storytelling and chosen children in the form of her students. Exclusion’s legacy followed her from the back alleys of Chinatown in the 60s, to Manhattan in the 80s, to the high desert of California in the 90s, until her return home in the 2000s when the untimely deaths of her youngest brother and her father devastated the family. As a child, Ng believed her father’s lies; as an adult, she returned to her childhood home to write his truth. Orphan Bachelors weaves together the history of one family, lucky to exist and nevertheless doomed; an elegy for brothers estranged and for elders lost; and insights into writing between languages and teaching between generations. It also features Cantonese profanity, snakes that cure fear and opium that conquers sorrow, and a seemingly immortal creep of tortoises. In this powerful remembrance, Fae Myenne Ng gives voice to her valiant ancestors, her bold and ruthless Orphan Bachelors, and her own inner self, howling in Cantonese, impossible to translate but determined to be heard.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeep Waters: A Memoir of Loss, Alaska Adventure, and Love Rekindled “. . . a survival story of the highest order, navigating the complex terrain of marriage, medical crisis, and a future reimagined.” —CAROLINE VAN HEMERT, award-winning author of The Sun is a Compass A marine biologist’s adventurous life as a professor and mother in Alaska is upended when her healthy husband is slammed by a rare type of stroke. His radical approach to recovery clashes with her instinct to keep him safe at home and sets them on a collision course as he insists on ambitious sailing expeditions with Beth and their young son in Alaska’s magnificent yet unforgiving waters.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMediocre Monk: A Stumbling Search for Answers in a Forest Monastery "I loved—and to a slightly uncomfortable degree related to—this book." Charles Bethea, staff writer at The New Yorker Funny, perceptive, and deeply personal, Mediocre Monk follows Grant Lindsley’s rocky journey toward spiritual growth—one that ultimately leads him to places he never imagined. After the sudden death of a friend, Grant Lindsley abandons his corporate job to train as a monk in one of the strictest Buddhist traditions on earth. Lost and bereft, he believes he can find answers in the mountains of Thailand. He shaves his head and eyebrows, eats one bowl of food a day, and lives in a cave, his solitude punctuated by brushes with snakes, scorpions, and drug smugglers. But Lindsley can’t transform himself into the profound guru he envisions—he’s hungry, restless, and lacking in the humility that monkhood requires. Eventually, he exhausts himself into moments of genuine growth, but not in the way he expects. Rather than transcending grief and becoming entirely self-reliant, he is surprised to find solace in allowing pain and reopening himself to community. For anyone who has nurtured a fantasy of dropping out in search of answers, Mediocre Monk suggests a reality that is far more complicated—and rewarding.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5LeBron NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * From the #1 bestselling author of The Dynasty and Tiger Woods comes the definitive biography of basketball superstar LeBron James, based on three years of exhaustive research and more than 250 interviews. LeBron James is the greatest basketball player of the twenty-first century, and he’s in the conversation with Michael Jordan as the greatest of all time. The reigning king of the game and the first active NBA player to become a billionaire, LeBron wears the crown like he was born with it. Yet his ascent has been anything but effortless and predetermined— the truth is vastly more interesting than that. What makes LeBron’s story so compelling is how he won his destiny despite overwhelmingly long odds, in a drama worthy of a Dickens novel. As a child, he was a scared and lonely little boy living a nomadic existence in Akron, Ohio. His mother, who had LeBron when she was sixteen, would sometimes leave him on his own. Destitute and fatherless, he missed close to one hundred days of school in the fourth grade. Desperate, his mother placed him with a family that gave him stability and put a basketball in his hands. LeBron tells the full, riveting saga of how a child adrift found the will to become a titan. Jeff Benedict, the most celebrated sports biographer of our time, paints a vivid picture of LeBron’s epic origin story, showing the gradual rise of a star who, surrounded by a tight-knit group of teenage friends and adult mentors, accelerated into a speeding comet during high school. Today LeBron produces Hollywood films and television shows, has a social media presence that includes more than one hundred million followers, engages in political activism, takes outspoken stances on racism and social injustice, and transforms lives through his visionary philanthropy. He went from a lost boy in Akron to a beloved hero who uses his fortune to educate underprivileged children and lift up needy families—and brought home Cleveland’s first NBA championship. But LeBron is more than just the origin story of a GOAT or a recap of his multi-championship, multi-MVP, gold medal–decorated career on the court. Benedict delves into LeBron’s relationship with fame and power: how he has cultivated it, harnessed it, suffered from it, and leveraged it. In these pages, we go behind the scenes of LeBron’s grappling with his seismic celebrity, from appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a high school junior to The Decision, which briefly turned the nation against him. We also watch his evolution from a player who avoided politics and was widely criticized for not joining his teammates in protesting China’s role in the Darfur genocide to becoming an athlete who partnered with President Obama; campaigned for Hillary Clinton; became an advocate against gun violence, racism, and voter suppression; and openly clashed with President Trump, empowering other athletes to speak out against social injustice. To capture LeBron’s extraordinary life, Benedict conducted hundreds of interviews with the people who were involved with LeBron at different stages of his life. He also obtained thousands of pages of primary source documents and mined hundreds of hours of video footage. Destined to be the authoritative account of LeBron’s life, LeBron is a gripping, inspiring, and unprecedented portrait of one of the world’s most captivating figures.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER America’s most popular sports media figure tells it like it is in this surprisingly personal book, not only dishing out his signature, uninhibited opinions but also revealing the challenges he overcame in childhood as well as at ESPN, and who he really is when the cameras are off. Stephen A. Smith has never been handed anything, nor was he an overnight success. Growing up poor in Queens, the son of Caribbean immigrants and the youngest of six children, he was a sports-obsessed kid who faced a number of struggles, from undiagnosed dyslexia to getting enough cereal to fill his bowl. As a basketball player at Winston-Salem State University, he got a glimmer of his true calling when he wrote a newspaper column arguing for the retirement of his own Hall of Fame coach, Clarence Gaines. Smith hustled and rose up from a high school reporter at Daily News (New York) to a general sports columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1990s, before getting his own show at ESPN in 2005. After he was unceremoniously fired from the network in 2009, he became even more determined to fight for success. He got himself rehired two years later and, with his razor-sharp intelligence and fearless debate style, found his role on the show he was destined to star in: First Take, the network’s flagship morning program. In Straight Shooter, Smith writes about the greatest highs and deepest lows of his life and career. He gives his thoughts on Skip Bayless, Ray Rice, Colin Kaepernick, the New York Knicks, the Dallas Cowboys, and former President Donald Trump. But he also pulls back the curtain and talks about life beyond the set, sharing authentic stories about his negligent father, his loving mother, being a father himself, his battle with life-threatening COVID-19, and what he really thinks about politics and social issues. He does it all with the same intelligence, humor, and charm that has made him a household name. Provocative, moving, and eye-opening, this book is the perfect gift for lovers of sports, television, and anyone who likes their stories delivered straight to the heart.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Expert recommendations
Staff picks for Pride Month View 22 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Staff picks for Pride Month
Queer works that celebrate every shade of the rainbow.
Best fatherhood books of all time View 17 titlesCurated by Emma Contreras Grant
Best fatherhood books of all time
These light-hearted stories on fatherhood are like dad jokes in memoir form.
Celebrity memoirs definitely worth reading View 9 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Celebrity memoirs definitely worth reading
Actresses like Mara Wilson and Constance Wu on sexism and the pressures of fame.
Bestselling celebrity tell-all books View 22 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Bestselling celebrity tell-all books
Because the behind-the-scenes drama is more shocking than what’s on screen.
Editors’ Picks: Biography & Memoir View 17 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Editors’ Picks: Biography & Memoir
Works that delve into the lives of people our editors find utterly fascinating.
These books will make you more cultured View 23 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
These books will make you more cultured
A crash course in the arts — music, language, architecture, and more.
Notable memoirs View 20 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Notable memoirs
Sharp observations and emotional reflections on life, love, and loss.
Current New York Times bestsellers View 40 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Current New York Times bestsellers
These books are topping the charts right now.
What Obama’s been reading since leaving office View 40 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
What Obama’s been reading since leaving office
Thought-provoking books that help us expand our worldview and have fun doing it.
There’s more to discover in Biography & Memoir
The Dress Diary: Secrets from a Victorian Woman's Wardrobe Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDark Star: The Roy Orbison Story Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pearl: The Obsessions and Passions of Janis Joplin Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unbroken: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Grit: From a Japanese American Concentration Camp Rises an American War Hero Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAll the Leaves Are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Always Think It's Forever: A Love Story Set in Paris as Told by an Unreliable but Earnest Narrator (A Memoir) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHalf Deaf, Completely Mad: The Chaotic Genius of Australia's Most Legendary Music Producer Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ruth Blau: A Life of Paradox and Purpose Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRebel King: The Making of a Monarch Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGettysburg Faces: Portraits and Personal Accounts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIcon: What Killed Marilyn Monroe, Volume One Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMen As Friends: From Cicero to Svevo to Cataldo Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAce of the Black Cross: The Memoirs of Ernst Udet Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5SAS – Battle Ready: True Stories from Memorable Missions Around the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBreadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsManaging Expectations: A Memoir in Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Power of Conflict Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Team America: Patton, MacArthur, Marshall, Eisenhower, and the World They Forged Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown's Cult Classic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Patriarchy Blues: Reflections on Manhood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5