The best autobiographies to read

Read an autobiography, and you’ll feel closer to the subject than you’d ever get in real life. They might not reveal their deepest, darkest secrets, but they will usually wind back the clock and walk you through their childhood and early years, so you can see how they became the person they are today.

The raciest autobiographies are frequently indiscreet, the most engaging may name-drop with wild abandon, and the best stand on the quality of their writing, regardless of the subject matter. Some are ghost-written, granted, but so long as the voice sounds authentic and the contents are true, does that matter?

Here, we’ve picked out six of the best autobiographies you can buy today. Most were published in the past couple of years, although one is considerably older and was re-released in 2018, several decades after it was first published. We’ve included it because of the quality of the writing and the compelling story it tells.

Before that, though, if you’re struggling to choose between them – or any of the dozens of other autobiographies published every year – check out our tips for choosing the best autobiography for you.

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Best autobiographies: At a glance

• Best showbiz autobiography: One of them by Michael Cashman | £9.19
• Best political autobiography: Free by Lea Ypi | £6.99
• Best autobiography for the 90s TV generation: Gotta Get Theroux This by Louis Theroux | £6.99

How to choose the best autobiography for you

They say everyone has at least one story in them. Perhaps that’s why there are so many autobiographies to choose from. The trick is to pick one that appeals to you, and keeps your attention from the first page to the last.

Look for something unfamiliar

The most engrossing book is often one that immerses you in an entirely unknown world, yet evokes it so clearly that the images are vivid and all-encompassing. For most readers, Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and Lea Ypi’s Free, each of which features in our selection, fall into these categories. They take the reader into a realm that most will (thankfully) never have experienced. And, in doing so, they demonstrate that a return to those places, times and attitudes is something we must avoid.

Uncover the other side of a story

The biggest-selling autobiographies are those written by the most recognisable names in show business, sport, politics and music, and most of the readers who pick them up are hoping they’ll tell the stories behind the headlines. Gotta Get Theroux This, by Louis Theroux, delivers here, examining not only how Theroux himself came to prominence, but the back stories – and occasional fall-out – of some of his most high-profile encounters. Elton John’s Me is an incredibly honest and revealing chronicle of his life, while Tom Allen’s No Shame is a candid tale of growing up gay in the suburbs – a world away from the glamour of primetime TV.

Don’t forget the audiobook option

Where an autobiography has been written by an actor or other public performer, it’s not uncommon for them to also narrate the audiobook. This is true of Adam Buxton with Ramble Book, Michael Cashman with One of Them, Miriam Margolyes with This Much is True, and Stephen Fry with his various volumes of autobiography, including The Fry Chronicles, More Fool Me and Moab Is My Washpot. Hearing the author’s words in their own voice brings another dimension to the work, and lets you take them with you wherever you’re going, whatever you’re doing.

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The best autobiographies to read in 2023

1. One of Them by Michael Cashman: Best showbiz autobiography

Price: £9.19 | Buy now from Amazon

Michael Cashman will be remembered by many as Albert Square’s yuppie graphic designer, Colin. But his time in EastEnders is just a small, if very visible, episode in a varied, high-profile career that took him from the back streets of London’s East End to the benches of the House of Lords. Indeed, performing is, in many ways, a mere side act: this is a book in which, at least in the second half, politics takes centre stage.

Cashman grew up in what could well have been EastEnders’ back yard (if it hadn’t actually been filmed in west London), but his childhood, in which untrustworthy and exploitative strangers loom large, would likely have been too extreme for the soap’s scriptwriters to contemplate. He was perfectly cast, then, as a truly mould-breaking character at a time when gay relationships were rarely portrayed as being equal to their straight equivalents on mainstream TV.

After close to 200 episodes, he left to pursue other interests, and eventually found himself elected to the European Parliament, representing the seat of West Midlands. He was a spokesperson on human rights and, before his time in Brussels drew to a close in 2014, he’d been awarded a CBE for public and political service. Returning to Britain wasn’t the end of his political career, nor of his campaigning, and he took his seat in the House of Lords as a life peer.

From humble beginnings, Cashman has reached great heights in both show business and politics, despite facing significant challenges. There are some shocking episodes in his autobiography, but perhaps none is so heartbreaking as that with which it draws to a close.

Key details – Length: 432 pages; Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing; ISBN: 978-1526612366

2. Free: Coming of Age at the End of History by Lea Ypi: Best political autobiography

Price: £6.99 | Buy now from Amazon

Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the London School of Economics, but she grew up in Albania during the years of communist rule. Her grandfather had been prime minister for just over a year in the early 1920s, and was assassinated in December 1940. Those facts – and the detrimental impact the family’s association with the former prime minister would have – were kept from her during her childhood.

To a degree, it’s kept from the reader, too. The book is cleverly structured, with the first part covering Ypi’s life under socialism, and the second venturing into the years of the free market economy and the country’s transition to capitalism. Thus, as Ypi grows and learns, so do we. Through her narrative, we overhear relatives talk of family members who have gone away to “university”, always wondering whether there isn’t more to their back story. Inevitably, there is. This is a curious biography, then – one in which the reader grows with the narrator, and learns through her own experience. Yet there’s no naivete in her description of those early years, and no raised eyebrows or nudge to the reader who, reading from the future, knows better than she did herself.

Neither is there any romanticising of life on either side of that political transition. “Five years after the fall of socialism, episodes of our life back then had become part of the repertoire of amusing family anecdotes,” Ypi writes. “It didn’t matter if the memories were absurd, hilarious or painful, or all of these at once. We would joke about them over meals, like drunken sailors who had survived a shipwreck and relisted showing one another the scars.”

Key details – Length: 336 pages; Publisher: Penguin; ISBN: 978-0141995106

3. Gotta Get Theroux This by Louis Theroux: Best autobiography for the 90s TV generation

Price: £6.99 | Buy now from Amazon

Louis Theroux is best known for his calm, persistent profiling of rich, famous or unusual characters. Here, he turns that focus on himself as he recounts a career that, from the outside, he seems almost to have fallen into. On the subject of landing his own series off the back of work on TV Nation, Theorux writes that “from a state of directionless obscurity I had been vaulted into a realm of possibility I hadn’t ever dared imagine. And one part of me saw it this way. But another, greater part was dubious, suspecting that the transformation was not wholly earned and therefore not really mine.”

Earned or not, Theroux has more than proved his right to grace our screens in the years since, through a series of groundbreaking documentaries exploring, and sometimes exposing, the less often represented.

Born in Singapore to travel writer Paul and BBC arts producer Anne, he grew up in London, then went to boarding school, spent summers on Cape Cod, and later moved to the US under his own steam as his journalistic career took off. First came newspapers, then television. “For a year and a half, up the Amazon in a rocket motorboat, in the revolutionary hills of Mexican Chiapas, among religious crazies in Jerusalem and good old boys in the backroads of the Deep South, and occasionally amid the almost-as-alien milieu of a well-funded workplace with ambitions to change American television and society, I worked at TV Nation. But it was all a salutary apprenticeship – I was learning, without realising it, skills and techniques that I would rely on throughout the course of my TV career.”

Many of his career highs are well known, but here their background and aftermath are explored in detail. He looks back on his encounter with Jimmy Savile, the resulting broadcast, and the investigation that followed Savile’s death, at which Theroux was called to speak. And he describes the fall-out from an ill-advised tweet, and how it made him feel (“my lawyer advised me to instruct a high-powered QC… I would brood about my own stupidity at sending the tweet and the likelihood of its having catastrophic consequences… I wondered inwardly whether I’d be remortgaging the house, and should I just apologise, or did that, as the lawyers claimed, lay me open to massive damages…”).

It’s easy to imagine that investigative presenters like Theroux simply swoop in, do their jobs and move on to the next subject, the next programme or the next big thing with barely a thought for the one they’re leaving behind. This autobiography proves that not to be the case at all. Not only are there real people behind the stories; there are real people presenting them, too.

Key details – Length: 416 pages; Publisher: Pan; ISBN: 978-1509880393

4. Ramble Book by Adam Buxton: Best autobiography for kids and teens of the 80s

Price: £8.49 | Buy now from Amazon

It wasn’t his first TV appearance, but Adam Buxton hit the big time in 1996, with Channel 4’s The Adam and Joe Show. Since then, he’s been a regular on BBC3, Xfm, the Edinburgh Festival, films and Eight out of Ten Cats Does Countdown’s dictionary corner. To many, he’ll be best known for his long-running podcast, with a simple formula – an unhurried, rambling chat – that attracts guests of impressive calibre. You don’t need to scroll far through the archive to come across Joe Lycett, Robbie Williams, Zadie Smith, Derren Brown, David Sedaris, Michael Palin, Frank Skinner, and skaters Torvill and Dean. The mix is as eclectic as it is entertaining.

But it’s also not surprising that they feature. The aptly named Ramble Book is a roll-call of the great and the good, with whom Buxton’s diverse media career has brought him into contact. He was at school with documentary maker Louis Theroux – and the “Joe” of The Adam and Joe Show is their mutual friend, filmmaker Joe Cornish. Buxton’s father was the Sunday Telegraph travel editor, as a result of which Buxton junior visited such diverse destinations as Brabadon, China and “all over America” during his childhood.

Yet it’s not a showy book. It’s underpinned by a humbleness, frequently diverts into introspection or random thoughts, and finds Buxton in situations familiar to us all, like the times we’ve made fools of ourselves objecting to what we consider somebody else’s bad behaviour – and the discomfort we often feel afterwards.

There’s a humanity to Ramble Book, a familiarity, and a reminder that famous people are just like the rest of us – just a bit better known.

Key details – Length: 368 pages; Publisher: Mudlark; ISBN: 978-0008293338

5. Conundrum by Jan Morris: Best trans and gender dysphoria autobiography

Price: £8.57 | Buy now from Amazon

Jan Morris was born James Humphry Morris in Somerset in 1926, and died in Wales in 2020. She underwent gender reassignment surgery in 1972, after travelling to Morocco for the procedure. Two years later, she wrote Conundrum, in which she told the story of her transition. It was re-released in 2018.

Morris is best known as a travel writer, and that career took her to Everest with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, to Fiji, to Suez during the crisis and, memorably, to Italy. Her work on Venice is of particular note. But Conundrum is something else entirely. It’s an internal journey – a journey home in many respects – that sets out its stall at the very beginning.

“I was three or perhaps four years old when I realised that I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl,” she writes. “I remember the moment well, and it is the earliest memory of my life.” What follows is a highly evocative sentence, that hints at the beauty of the writing to come: “I was sitting beneath my mother’s piano, and her music was falling around me like cataracts, enclosing me as in a cave.”

Morris was far from alone in her conviction that she’d been born into the wrong body, but Britain was not a society in which she was free to undertake the necessary transition on her own terms and, “for forty years… a sexual purpose dominated, distracted and tormented my life: the tragic and irrational ambition, instinctively formulated but deliberately pursued, to escape from maleness into womanhood… each year my longing to live as a woman grew more urgent, as my male body seemed to grow harder around me”.

It’s impossible not to fall in love with Morris’ style. That her subject matter is one so rarely discussed makes this short autobiography all the more engaging.

Key details – Length: 160 pages; Publisher: Faber & Faber; ISBN: 978-0571341139

6. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: Best race history autobiography

Price: £8.46 | Buy now from Amazon

“I was nine years old when my mother threw me out of a moving car.” She was saving his life. Noah was born in apartheid South Africa, to a black mother and white father, at a time when inter-racial relationships were illegal. It was a world and a time “where violence was always lurking and waiting to erupt… Had I lived a different life, getting thrown out of a speeding minibus might have fazed me. I’d have stood there like an idiot… but there was none of that. Mom said ‘run’ and I ran. Like the gazelle runs from the lion, I ran.”

It’s a story that will thankfully be unfamiliar to a large part of its audience. For a white reader with no experience of the political system under which he came into the world, it’s difficult to comprehend Noah’s need to remain hidden and so often confined to the house. Apartheid came to an end when Noah was still a child, but even in the wake of that momentous event the fall out was unequal and extreme.

“What I do remember, what I will never forget,” he writes, “is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets.”

Today, as the host of The Daily Show, Noah has been named as one of the most powerful people in New York media. To have reached such heights after so difficult a start in life makes this story all the more remarkable.

For younger readers, there’s also a YA version of this book, at £8.17.

Key details – Length: 304 pages; Publisher: John Murray; ISBN: 978-1473635302