My favorite memoirs of 2025 so far

I seem to have read a lot of memoirs this year, more than usual. Here’s a round-up of the best of the bunch, all published in 2025. 

I’ll Tell You When I’m Home by Hala Alyan

Alyan is a poet and novelists (and now memoirist) and clinical psychologist. I loved her novel Salt Houses about three generations of a Palestinian family and their search for home. Alyan’s new memoir, I’ll Tell You When I’m Home Again, is also about the search for home. Told over the course of nine months, while Alyan and her husband wait for a surrogate to give birth to their baby, Alyan’s story is gorgeously told. There’s a lot of talk in literature these days about generational trauma, but Alyan does the best job really showing the truth of it. 

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams

I can’t stop talking about this one. Facebook is evil. And you’ll tell me you know this, but it’s still worth reading the details so you have ammunition at cocktail parties. 

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

Dalton’s powers of observation are truly incredible. Her descriptions of the hare she accidentally adopted during the Covid lockdown are so detailed and at times make the animal unbearably cute to imagine. It’s just such a nice read. I loved it.

How to Lose Your Mother by Molly Jong-Fast

A memoir of Molly’s mother’s (Erica Jong) descent into dementia. Heartbreaking and brutally honest, the book also details Molly’s upbringing. It reminded me a lot of Wild Game by Adrienne Brodeur — both do such a good job of really getting at the complexity of these particular mother-daughter relationships. Yes, their mothers misbehaved, and yes, both were incredibly charismatic and loveable. Both women do an excellent job capturing that. 

Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks

If you need another Year of Magical Thinking (by Joan Didion) in your life, pick up Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. Memorial Days is the story of Brooks’ marriage to the writer Tony Horwitz, who died suddenly in the spring of 2019. And what a love story they had. As a fan of Brooks’ novels Year of Wonders and Horse, I was fascinated to also learn of how she came to be a novelist; for many years prior to the publication of Year of Wonders, her first novel (how was that a debut?? So good), she worked as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. Absolutely bonkers. She’s such a badass. 

I also enjoyed The Harder I Fight the More I Love You by Neko Case and All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley (published in 2023) and while I can’t say I enjoyed This Happened to Me by Kate Price, it was incredibly affecting, detailing her path to healing (working with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, author of the bestselling The Body Keeps the Score, in which Price is featured) after a horrifically abusive childhood.