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Riot Recommendation

26 Of Your Favorite Powerful Memoirs By Women

Jamie Canaves

Contributing Editor

Jamie Canavés is the Tailored Book Recommendations coordinator and Unusual Suspects mystery newsletter writer–in case you’re wondering what you do with a Liberal Arts degree. She’s never met a beach she didn’t like, always says yes to dessert, loves ‘80s nostalgia, all forms of entertainment, and can hold a conversation using only gifs. You can definitely talk books with her on Litsy and Goodreads. Depending on social media’s stability maybe also Twitter and Bluesky.

This Riot Recommendation about for your favorite powerful memoirs by women is sponsored by Becoming by Michelle Obama.

Becoming cover imageBecoming is an intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States. With wit and candor, Mrs. Obama takes readers inside her remarkable journey from Chicago’s South Side to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, telling her full story—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same. Becoming by Michelle Obama is available now.


That sound you hear is how much this is ringing all of our bells! We’ve cleared room in our schedule and on our TBRs to read your favorite powerful memoirs by women—if we haven’t already! We suggest you also make some room to read some of these excellent picks.

26 of your favorite powerful memoirs by women. book lists | memoirs | memoirs by women | nonfiction books | nonfiction books by women

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

The Liar’s Club by Mary Karr

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

Girl In A Band by Kim Gordon

North of Normal by Cea Sunrise Person

Hunger by Roxane Gay

Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir by Janice Erlbaum

All That Is Bitter and Sweet by Ashley Judd

My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem

Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson

Daring to Drive by Manal Al-Sharif

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams

Yes, Please by Amy Poehler

Ask Me About My Uterus by Abby Norman

I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzasi

Educated by Tara Westover

Infidelity by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

Bossypants by Tina Fey

A Fighting Chance by Elizabeth Warren

The Shame Of Losing by Sarah Cannon

The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls.

Lucky by Alice Sebold

Troublemaker by Leah Remini