Observer’s Guide to 2025’s Best Memoirs and Biographies, From ABBA to Ono

This year brings with it many exciting big-ticket book releases, ranging from the discovered diaries of a literary titan to the hotly awaited memoir of a major star. We’ve surveyed the publishing calendar and picked the must-read life stories of 2025—a list that encompasses both biography and memoir.

There are fascinating portraits of two nonagenarians—artist Yoko Ono and Golden Age star Vera Miles, both still living—plus memoirs from formidable writers on their fraught relationships with their mothers. Legends of music, including Cher and ABBA, also feature in intimate new books mapping the contours of their fabled careers in the spotlight.

If you find comfort or inspiration in reading about the lives of others—whether you prefer stories that reveal the secrets of success or tales of resilience in the face of great obstacles—you’ll find these 2025 memoirs and biographies worthy of your time.

Yoko: A Biography by David Sheff

After decades of public mistreatment, Ono has only recently received the recognition and acknowledgment deserving of such a forceful artist. In Yoko, David Sheff makes it his project to challenge Ono’s popular image as a “fraud … who broke up the greatest band in history.” The ensuing tome is a generous and humanizing portrait that draws on Sheff’s own extensive experience interviewing Ono and John Lennon. Ono’s art practice is given equal redemption here, as Sheff underscores the potency of her early feminist artworks and performances once caused in America.

SEE ALSO: A Tate Modern Retrospective Is Reclaiming Yoko Ono

Vera Miles: The Hitchcock Blonde Who Got Away by Christopher McKittrick

A survivor of both the slasher movie Psycho and old Hollywood, actress Vera Miles gets the corrective treatment in a new detailed biography. Vera Miles clears up some of the confusion about the famous blonde from The Wrong Man, stressing she largely had a harmonious relationship with Alfred Hitchcock and ultimately didn’t court more movie roles because of her decision to focus on family. The 95-year-old may not have contributed to this book, but its author does give Miles overdue credit for her 50-year career in memorable films like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A cinephile’s delight.

Notes to John by Joan Didion

Didion, one of America’s foremost journalists and observers of life, kept a diary in 1999 for just that year. Prompted by her psychiatrist’s encouragement, she began recording entries on her mental health struggles, difficulties with daughter Quintana and musings on her legacy and reputation (or “what it’s been worth”). Although only forty or so entries long, the slim volume Notes to John promises to give readers unedited and raw access to the elusive journalist. It shows the mythologized author grappling with everyday issues of grief and private anguish, with Didion never as unscripted as these late personal admissions promise to reveal.

Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux

Paul Gauguin, that breakaway French figure who abandoned not only his family but also the European art world, gets some taming in Sue Prideaux’s Wild Thing. The lively book sees the astute biographer—who has already tackled Edvard Munch and Friedrich Nietzsche—challenge the popular myth of Gauguin solely as a rebellious libertine. Instead, Prideaux underscores how the artist’s works notably challenged neoclassical ideals of beauty while his politics championed the rights of Indigenous peoples. With newly found writings (and even access to Gauguin’s teeth), this is a deeply restorative biography of one wholly misunderstood artist.

SEE ALSO: 12 New Non-Fiction Books You Need to Read in 2025

Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby

New Yorker writer David Denby tackles the lives of four famous Jews of American arts, politics and letters: Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Leonard Bernstein and Norman Mailer. The resulting project, Eminent Jews, is an entertaining homage to these turbulent and brilliant—if often egotistical—figures who transformed the standards of comedy and vulgarity, American reportage and music and even relations between men and women. Denby argues that the four helped “liberate the Jewish body,” seeking to reframe what it meant to be Jewish and American in the aftermath of history’s most heinous crimes against the Jewish people.

Mark Twain by Ron Chernow

Every few years, readers get a mammoth doorstop of a biography—and at 1,200 pages, Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain is this year’s. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer has produced an exhaustively detailed and discerning account of the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer author that shines a light on less appreciated parts of Twain’s biography. We learn, for instance, that Twain wrote countless articles in his career aggressively rebuking America’s treatment of Chinese immigrants. Razor-sharp and unflinching in its sizing up of Twain, this eponymous book is essential reading for students of American literature.

How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Jong-Fast

Erica Jong caused shockwaves with her 1973 roman à clef Fear of Flying, which depicted an unashamed incarnation of female sexuality. Her daughter, the writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast, now gives a frank and unfiltered diagnosis of the strained relationship she had with her distant celebrity mother. How to Lose Your Mother proves a riveting reckoning on the challenging ties many have to their parents. The memoir is both heartbreaking and humorous in mapping resentment, guilt and grief Jong-Fast all confronts as her mother’s mind deteriorates and she reflects on a life playing second-fiddle to this feminist force.

The Möbius Book by Catherine Lacey

Author of the transgressive novel Autobiography of X, Catherine Lacey returns with a hybrid novel-meets-memoir anchored in Lacey’s break-up with an elusive man called “The Reason.” The Möbius Book has no beginning or end but stresses the cycles that punctuate our lives, musing on memory and fiction and the centrality that faith—whatever form that may take—can have. With a heavy emotional thrust and a singular style, this book might resist easy definitions or categories but asks gnawing universal questions on intimacy, security and belief systems that are sure to enthrall many.

SEE ALSO: 11 Short Books to Help You Jumpstart Your 2025 Reading Resolutions

The Story of ABBA: Melancholy Undercover by Jan Gradvall

A founding figure behind the Swedish Music Hall of Fame and a confidante to band members, Jan Gradvall has penned an insider’s take on ABBA. The beloved Swedish pop band, who first hit big after winning 1974’s Eurovision Song Contest with “Waterloo,” gave Gradvall rare access and long, candid interviews that helped the journalist mount one complete history of these enduring music icons. The fact that the band returned in 2021 with a hit new album and virtual concert residency makes their backstory and enduring success even more tantalizing to now read about.

Joyride: A Memoir by Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean is a discerning observer of the human experience and an equally talented writer when chronicling it. Joyride sees The New Yorker contributor, however, turn her attention to her own life and career, one that was infamously fictionalized in the 2001 film Adaptation. It promises to be an intimate account of untold pains of her life—the loss of her mother, her mortality, a marriage breakdown—alongside career backstories and coups after fifty years in journalism (like working with the likes of Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown and Jonathan Karp). In all, the exercise is fueled by creativity and a hunger for answers, pursuits that fared Orlean well after decades of reporting so adeptly on others’ life stories.

Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy

Ever since winning the Booker Prize for her 1997 novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has used her global platform to advance human rights causes and urgent environmental issues. Roy now looks inward, however, turning her attention to her complex relationship with her mother, Mary, a famous women’s rights advocate who helped win a landmark Supreme Court ruling in India on inheritance rights. But Roy ran away from home at age 18 and remained estranged from her mother for years. It’s a decision Roy finally reflects on in the aftermath of her mother’s death in 2022, weaving together raw musings on loss, regret and the complex bonds that bind us.

Cher: The Memoir, Part 2 by Cher

Cher might have recently confessed that she hasn’t even finished writing part two of her blockbuster two-book memoir. But if part one is anything to go by, the acclaimed singer and actress is sure to meet her deadline again. It’s due to pick up when Cher pivoted to acting in the early 1980s, after a lackluster period in the music business following the end of Sonny & Cher. The resulting story might already be known—an Academy Award, a revitalized music career and countless comebacks—but Cher’s bare honesty (and trademark humor) promises to bring new shine to this well-trodden arc of her life.