Autobiographies carry a strange kind of magic. You open the cover expecting someone else’s life, and somewhere along the way you find pieces of your own. These twenty-five books were not chosen because they dominate academic lists. They were chosen because they linger. Each one reveals a person in the process of becoming, messy and hopeful and frightened and brave, trying to make sense of a world that did not always make sense back.

Some were written in hiding. Some were pieced together in hospital rooms. Some were shaped by political revolutions or private heartbreaks. All of them remind us that an ordinary life becomes extraordinary the moment someone takes the time to tell it honestly.

This is a guide to the autobiographies and memoirs that stay with you, the ones that keep echoing long after the final page.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.

It all begins with an idea.