The Best Non-Fiction Books and Memoirs of 2024

Every year, bookstore shelves swell with new non-fiction works by authors who are all writing in response to their inner and outer lives, their surroundings, and their yearning for a better world. This year was no different—except it’s eight years after Donald Trump was first elected to the presidency; four years after the start of the Covid pandemic; and two years after the overturning of Roe versus Wade. So, yeah, a little different. 

Our non-fiction list is made up of books from small presses and big publishers alike, this list comprises essential histories of both the personal and political, all with a bent toward tenacity and gumption. Read on to discover which non-fiction books from this past year are fortifying our future in the making. 

Magical/Realism by Vanessa Angélica Villarreal

Magical/Realism is a woven adventure of intergenerational wisdom and personal power told with razor-sharp cultural criticism. Villarreal shines a light on the efficacy each of us hold to alchemize our individual and shared history, in order to write a new reality for ourselves and our families. 

This title is an ode to the far reaches of one’s capability to affect change in the past and the future through a transcendent relationship with the present moment. 

Publisher’s Description: In Magical/Realism, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal offers us an intimate mosaic of migration, violence, and colonial erasure through the lens of her marriage and her experiences navigating American monoculture. As she attempts to recover the truth from the absences and silences within her life, her relationships, and those of her ancestors, Vanessa pieces together her story from the fragments of music, memory, and fantasy that have helped her make sense of it all. 

The border between the real and imagined is a speculative space where we can remember, or re-world, what has been lost—and each chapter engages in this essential project of world-building. In one essay, Villarreal examines her own gender performativity through Nirvana and Selena; in another, she offers a radical but crucial racial reading of Jon Snow in Game of Thrones; and throughout the collection, she explores how fantasy can help us interpret and heal when grief feels insurmountable. She reflects on the moments of her life that are too painful to remember—her difficult adolescence, her role as the eldest daughter of Mexican immigrants, her divorce—and finds a way to archive her history and map her future(s) with the hope and joy of fantasy and magical thinking.

The Story Game: A Memoir by Shze-Hui Tjoa 

Inventive and compelling in both its content and structure, The Story Game is an invigorating departure from the standard memoir. It is both a testament to the jewels of self-expression, as well as our instinct to uncover and face our inner world through storytelling.  A must-read for anyone who has been held back by their past for too long and is ready to let themselves free through radical acceptance.

Publisher’s Description: In the humid dark of a eucalyptus-scented room, a woman named Hui lies on a mattress telling stories about herself to her listener, a little girl. She talks about her identity as the child of an immigrant, her feelings about being in a mixed-race marriage, her opinions on mental health. But as her stories progress, it becomes clear a volatile secret lurks beneath their surface. There are events in Hui’s past that have great significance for the person she’s become, but that have gone missing from her memory. What is it, exactly, that is haunting Hui? Who is the little girl she talks to? And who is Hui herself?

As the conversation continues, what unfolds is a breathtaking, unexpected journey through layers of story toward truth and recovered identity; a memoir that reenacts, in tautly novelistic fashion, the process of healing that author Shze-Hui Tjoa moved through to recover memories lost to complex PTSD and, eventually, reconstruct her sense of self. Stunning in its originality and intimacy, The Story Game is a piercing tribute to selfhood and sisterhood, a genre-shattering testament to the power of imagination, and a one-of-a-kind work of art.

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt 

The kids, as it turns out, are not alright. The Anxious Generation illuminates how the first generation of digital natives are coping (or not) with their chronically online lives.  In a similar vein to the Hulu docuseries Social Studies, which offers a riveting close-up following a group of high schoolers post-COVID. And author Jonathan Haidt provides a thorough analysis of what led to this mental health epidemic and then posits a plan for managing the crisis.

This book is a must-read for parents of school-aged children, anyone who loves a Gen Zer, and the curious individual who wants to clearly understand the ramifications of living a phone-based existence. 

Publisher’s Description: After more than a decade of stability or improvement, the mental health of adolescents plunged in the early 2010s. Rates of depression, anxiety, self-harm, and suicide rose sharply, more than doubling on many measures. Why?

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.

Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the “collective action problems” that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.

Haidt has spent his career speaking truth backed by data in the most difficult landscapes—communities polarized by politics and religion, campuses battling culture wars, and now the public health emergency faced by Gen Z. We cannot afford to ignore his findings about protecting our children—and ourselves—from the psychological damage of a phone-based life.

Any Person is The Only Self by Elisa Gabbert 

Sometimes, we feel more camaraderie with a character from a book than the warm-blooded characters in our real lives. In Any Person is The Only Self, Gabbert explores the friendship she feels and the meaning she finds in the works of her favorite authors. 

This essay collection is perfect for those who have a propensity to self-examine through their exposure to literature, the arts, and culture.

Publisher’s Description: Who are we when we read? When we journal? Are we more ourselves alone or with friends? Right now or in memory? How does time transform us and the art we love?

In sixteen dazzling, expansive essays, the acclaimed essayist and poet Elisa Gabbert explores a life lived alongside books of all kinds: dog-eared and destroyed, cherished and discarded, classic and clichėd, familiar and profoundly new. She turns her witty, searching mind to the writers she admires, from Plath to Proust, and the themes that bind them―chance, freedom, envy, ambition, nostalgia, and happiness. She takes us to the strange edges of art and culture, from hair metal to surf movies to party fiction. Any Person Is the Only Self is a love letter to literature and to life, inviting us to think alongside one of our most thrilling and versatile critics

The Third Gilmore by Kelly Bishop

One could say that Gilmore Girls is experiencing a bit of a renaissance these days, but we say it never went anywhere in the first place.

 Kelly Bishop was a trailblazer in so many ways, not least of which for originating the role of Sheila in A Chorus Line on Broadway and as arguably the first Gilmore girl (hold for Trix, perhaps). We love this memoir for its intimate account of what it takes to make it in this business we call show, with Bishop’s prose full of wisdom from her past and joy for her future.

Publisher’s Description: Kelly Bishop’s long, storied career has been defined by landmark achievements, from winning a Tony Award for her turn in the original Broadway cast of A Chorus Line to her memorable performance as Jennifer Grey’s mother in Dirty Dancing. But it is probably her iconic role as matriarch Emily in the modern classic Gilmore Girls that cemented her legacy.

Now, Bishop reflects on her remarkable life and looks towards the future with The Third Gilmore Girl. She shares some of her greatest stories and the life lessons she’s learned on her journey. From her early transition from dance to drama, to marrying young to a compulsive gambler, to the losses and achievements she experienced—among them marching for women’s rights and losing her second husband to cancer—Bishop offers a rich, genuine celebration of her life.

Full of witty insights and featuring a special collection of personal and professional photographs, The Third Gilmore Girl is a warm, unapologetic, and spirited memoir from a woman who has left indelible impressions on her audiences for decades and has no plans on slowing down.

Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten

Ina Garten’s vivacious presence has graced our kitchens for years, as a mainstay on our screens and shelves. Her approach to cooking is centered on fearlessness, affability, and using the finest ingredients. Now, the Barefoot Contessa shares the details of her illustrious career and her recipe for success. 

Be Ready When the Luck Happens is a testament to an unflinching belief in oneself as the key ingredient to realizing your dreams.

Publisher’s Description: Here, for the first time, Ina Garten presents an intimate, entertaining, and inspiring account of her remarkable journey. Ina’s gift is to make everything look easy, yet all her accomplishments have been the result of hard work, audacious choices, and exquisite attention to detail. In her unmistakable voice (no one tells a story like Ina), she brings her past and her process to life in a high-spirited and no-holds-barred memoir that chronicles decades of personal challenges, adventures (and misadventures) and unexpected career twists, all delivered with her signature combination of playfulness and purpose.

From a difficult childhood to meeting the love of her life, Jeffrey, and marrying him while still in college, from a boring bureaucratic job in Washington, D.C., to answering an ad for a specialty food store in the Hamptons, from the owner of one Barefoot Contessa shop to author of bestselling cookbooks and celebrated television host, Ina has blazed her own trail and, in the meantime, taught millions of people how to cook and entertain. Now, she invites them to come closer to experience her story in vivid detail and to share the important life lessons she learned along the way: do what you love because if you love it you’ll be really good at it, swing for the fences, and always Be Ready When the Luck Happens.

Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life And Work Of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius by Carrie Courogen

Carrie Couragen excavates the hidden history of a woman who chose to live in the shadows, however considerable her talent as a comedian, writer, and director was. Elaine May finally receives her due credit as a pioneer for women in entertainment, as Couragen also highlights how often women in the arts go their entire careers as anonymous contributors to their life’s work. 

Publisher’s Description: After performing their Broadway smash An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Elaine set out on her own. She toiled unsuccessfully on Broadway for a while, but then headed to Hollywood where she became the director of A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky, and the legendary Ishtar. She was hired as a script doctor on countless films like Heaven Can Wait, Reds, Tootsie, and The Birdcage. In 2019, she returned to Broadway where she won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in The Waverly Gallery. Besides her considerable talent, May is well known for her reclusiveness. On one of the albums she made with Mike Nichols, her bio is this: “Miss May does not exist.” Until now.

Carrie Courogen has uncovered the Elaine May who does exist. Conducting countless interviews, she has filled in the blanks May has forcibly kept blank for years, creating a fascinating portrait of the way women were mistreated and held back in Hollywood. Miss May Does Not Exist is a remarkable love story about a prickly genius who was never easy to work with, not always easy to love and frequently often punished for those things, despite revolutionizing the way we think about comedy, acting, and what a film or play can be.

Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery by Annie Liontas

Difficulty with expressing oneself emotionally, let alone physically engaging in intercourse are challenges many people who have suffered brain injuries confront. Annie Liontas approaches the complex and pervasive ways a brain injury alters every aspect of one’s life, especially their relationships, with a frank and compassionate lens. She writes with honesty and fervor about her personal struggles adjusting to life, love, and identity after a brain injury in an intimate story told with acuity and optimism.

Publisher’s Description: Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community. She uncovers the surprising legacy of brain injury, examining its role in culture, the criminal justice system, and through historical figures like Henry VIII and Harriet Tubman. Encountering Liontas’s sharp, affecting prose, the reader can imagine this kind of pain, and having to claw one’s way back to a new normal. The hidden gift of injury, Liontas writes, is the ability to connect with others. 

Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt: A Memoir in Verse by Brontez Purnell

Lyrical prose meets social commentary in this memoir by queer writer and musician Brontez Purnell (100 Boyfriends). His candor and the strength of his spirit are what draw us in, as he recounts personal details from both his interior and exterior worlds as a gay Black man; he keeps us enraptured with his sense of humor and dexterity in navigating the depths of humanity.

Publisher’s Description: In Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, Brontez Purnell―the bard of the underloved and overlooked―turns his gaze inward. A storyteller with a musical eye for the absurdity of his own existence, he is peerless in his ability to find the levity within the stormiest of crises. Here, in his first collection of genre-defying verse, Purnell reflects on his peripatetic life, whose ups and downs have nothing on the turmoil within. “The most high-risk homosexual behavior I engage in,” Purnell writes, “is simply existing.”

The thirty-eight autobiographical pieces pulsing in Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt find Purnell at his no-holds-barred best. He remembers a vicious brawl he participated in at a poetry conference and reckons with packaging his trauma for TV writers’ rooms; wrestles with the curses, and gifts, passed down from generations of family members; and chronicles, with breathless verve, a list of hell-raising misadventures and sexcapades. Through it all, he muses on everything from love and loneliness to capitalism and Blackness to jogging and the ethics of art, always with unpredictable clarity and movement.

With the same balance of wit and wisdom that made 100 Boyfriends a sensation, Purnell unleashes another collection of boundary-pushing writing with Ten Bridges I’ve Burnt, a book as original and thrilling as the author himself.

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq’ by Steve Coll

An approachable analysis of the political dangers of hubris, particularly on an international scale. This Kirkus Prize nominee offers up a lesson in irony, pride, and poor diplomacy, providing the critically-minded citizen with rich and insightful context into the past twenty years of U.S. foreign affairs. 

Publisher’s Description: When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, its message was clear: Iraq, under the control of strongman Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction that, if left unchecked, posed grave danger to the world. But when no WMDs were found, the United States and its allies were forced to examine the political and intelligence failures that had led to the invasion and the occupation, and the civil war that followed. One integral question has remained unsolved: Why had Saddam seemingly sacrificed his long reign in power by giving the false impression that he had hidden stocks of dangerous weapons?

The Achilles Trap masterfully untangles the people, ploys of power, and geopolitics that led to America’s disastrous war with Iraq and, for the first time, details America’s fundamental miscalculations during its decades-long relationship with Saddam Hussein. Calling on unpublished and underreported sources, interviews with surviving participants, and Saddam’s own transcripts and audio files, Steve Coll pulls together an incredibly comprehensive portrait of a man who was convinced the world was out to get him and acted accordingly. A work of great historical significance, The Achilles Trap exposes how corruptions of power, lies of diplomacy, and vanity—on both sides—led to avoidable errors of statecraft, ones that would enact immeasurable human suffering and forever change the political landscape as we know it.

Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption and the Privilege of American Motherhood by Gretchen Sisson

Gretched Sisson confronts the misconception that adoption is the solution to a lack of abortion access, while also addressing the long and sordid history of wealthy white families stealing children away from their birth parents. A timely book in the wake of the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

Publisher’s Description: Adoption has always been viewed as a beloved institution for building families, as well as a mutually agreeable common ground in the abortion debate, but little attention has been paid to the lives of mothers who relinquish infants for private adoption. Relinquished reveals adoption to be a path of constrained choice for those for whom abortion is inaccessible, or for whom parenthood is untenable. The stories of relinquishing mothers are stories about our country’s refusal to care for families at the most basic level, and to instead embrace an individual, private solution to a large-scale, social problem.

With the recent decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization revoking abortion protections, we are in a political moment in which adoption is, increasingly, being revealed as an institution devoted to separating families and policing parenthood under the guise of feel-good family-building. Rooted in a long-term study, Relinquished features the in-depth testimonies of American mothers who placed their children for domestic adoption. The voices of these women are powerful and heartrending; they deserve to be heard.

The Big Freeze by Natalie Lampert

Since the invention of egg freezing, women have endured rounds of painful injections, shocking hormonal changes, and financial stressors from fertility treatments in private, with their partners, or alone in silence. Lampert opens up the conversation on this sensitive and timely topic with genuine curiosity and heartfelt honesty. 

The Big Freeze extends a sense of community to those who may be interested in — or in pursuit of — this innovative fertility option.

Publisher’s Description: Ovaries. Most women have two; journalist Natalie Lampert has only one. Then, in her early twenties, she almost lost it, along with her ability to ever have biological children. Doctors urged her to freeze her eggs, and Lampert started asking questions.

The Big Freeze is the story of Lampert’s personal quest to investigate egg freezing, as well as the multibillion-dollar femtech industry, in order to decide the best way to preserve her own fertility. She attended flashy egg-freezing parties, visited high-priced fertility clinics, talked to dozens of women who froze their eggs, toured the facility in Italy where the technology was developed, and even attended a memorial service for thousands of accidentally destroyed embryos.

What was once science fiction is now simply science: Fertility can be frozen in time. Between 2009 and 2022, more than 100,000 women in the United States opted to freeze their eggs. Along with in vitro fertilization, egg freezing is touted as a way for women to “have it all” by conquering their biological clocks, in line with the global trend of delaying childbirth. A generation after the Pill, this revolutionary technology offers a new kind of freedom for women. But does egg freezing give women real agency or just the illusion of it?

SLUTS: Anthology by Michelle Tea

Some of our favorite contemporary non-fiction writers have come together (!!!) to discuss the steamy seduction of sluttiness. All at once, this term possesses both a potent history as a pejorative as well as the unlimited power to transform the sensual into the divine. These writers have crafted personal essays and criticism that speak to the heart of sexual promiscuity in all its glorious complexity. 

Featured writers in this anthology include, but are not limited to, the rave empress herself Mackenzie Wark, short story magician Lydia Conklin, master of the confessional Chloe Caldwell, and irreverent genius Brontez Purnell, whose memoir is also included in this year-end roundup.

Publisher’s Description: What it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture, edited by cult-favorite author Michelle Tea. SLUTS, the first publication from vulgarian queer publisher Dopamine Books, is an exploration of what it means to be sexually promiscuous in contemporary American culture. Featuring personal essays, spilled secrets, fiction, memoir, and experimental works, SLUTS asks writers and readers to investigate the many ways the notion of the slut impacts our inner and outer lives, as a threat or an identity, a punishment or an aspiration, a lifestyle, an aesthetic, a philosophy and rallying cry. From hideous and terrifying first encounters to postapocalyptic polyamory, from unionizing sex workers to backstage tableaux of sex and drugs and rock and roll, SLUTS’s stories probe the liberating highs and abject lows of physical abandon. Featuring work from performer Miguel Gutierrez, hailed by the New York Times as “an artist of ordered excess”; former Nylon magazine editor in chief Gabrielle Korn; award-winning author Brontez Purnell; Whore of New York author Liara Roux; National Book Critics Circle Award winner Jeremy Atherton Lin; and a host of additional artists and writers, SLUTS reveals the knowledge provoked by a dalliance with desire.

The Miseducation of a 90s Baby by Khaholi Bailey

The spirit of the teenage girl is alive and well in The Miseducation of a 90s Baby, a delectable bildungsroman from a fresh new literary voice. Khaholi Bailey writes about her coming-of-age in the 90s’ New York City with hilarity, sincerity, and intimacy, superlative in her ability to make you feel seen in your own adolescent excentricities. 

Reading this essay collection is as comforting as sitting on the edge of a friend’s bed and swapping stories, while holding back tears from laughter.

Publisher’s Description: 90s kids were raised on sparse and slow internet, cable TV and adults who said the darndest things. Some learned that weed was the gateway to insanity, that people of the cloth would never disrobe you, or to hope for inconspicuous, tiny tits. 

Khaholi Bailey was taught as much and more, only to discover that the dank green does God’s work, and a well-timed catcall could make her day. Through her family, as much as from MTV and New York City, Khaholi discovers that right from wrong is a matter of time, place and whoever’s asking. 

In frank and comedic essays, Khaholi shares the vulnerability (and sometimes grace) that comes from aging in a rapidly changing world. The Miseducation of a 90s Baby will give you all the lols and feels, and she might even teach you something along the way. 

Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV by Emily Nussbaum

A highly anticipated history of the world’s favorite guilty pleasure from Pulitzer Prize winner and The New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum. Cue the Sun! is a propulsive read explaining why we can’t look away, even when we know what we’re watching is fake. 

The prophetic reporter charts the evolution of the genre, which Nussbaum refers to as “dirty documentary,” cataloging the cultural and political implications of a nearly century-old style of television. 

Publisher’s Description: Who invented reality television, the world’s most dangerous pop-culture genre? And why can’t we look away? In this revelatory, deeply reported account of the rise of “dirty documentary”—from its contentious roots in radio to the ascent of Donald Trump—Emily Nussbaum unearths the origin story of the genre that ate the world, as told through the lively voices of the people who built it. At once gimlet-eyed and empathetic, Cue the Sun! explores the morally charged, funny, and sometimes tragic consequences of the hunt for something real inside something fake.

In sharp, absorbing prose, Nussbaum traces the jagged fuses of experimentation that exploded with Survivor at the turn of the millennium. She introduces the genre’s trickster pioneers, from the icy Allen Funt to the shambolic Chuck Barris; Cops auteur John Langley; cynical Bachelor ringmaster Mike Fleiss; and Jon Murray and Mary-Ellis Bunim, the visionaries behind The Real World—along with dozens of stars from An American Family, The Real World, Big Brother, Survivor, and The Bachelor. We learn about the tools of the trade—like the Frankenbite, a deceptive editor’s best friend—and ugly tales of exploitation. But Cue the Sun! also celebrates reality’s peculiar power: a jolt of emotion that could never have come from a script.

What happened to the first reality stars, the Louds—and why won’t they speak to the couple who filmed them? Which serial killer won on The Dating Game? Nussbaum explores reality TV as a strike-breaker, the queer roots of Bravo, the dark truth behind The Apprentice, and more. A shrewd observer who adores television, Nussbaum is the ideal voice for the first substantive history of the genre that, for better or worse, made America what it is today.