In 2025, personal stories proved popular and powerful – but several controversies raised questions about the future of the memoir genre.
Personal stories can be powerful, and no more so than in 2025. Over the past 12 months, memoirs have frequently made the headlines both for the stories they told – and the details they missed out.
In the spring, Sarah Wynn-Williams's Careless People, an exposé of her time working as an executive at Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, became a bestseller despite a gagging order banning her from publicising it.
Later in the year, Virginia Giuffre's powerful posthumous autobiography Nobody's Girl detailed her sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein and his circle, including allegations against Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has always denied. The book – which sold one million copies in two months – intensified pressure for the former prince to be stripped of his titles – which he was in late October.
Kamala Harris's 107 days, an account of her doomed presidential run, garnered plenty of column inches for her criticism of Joe Biden. And the year also saw high-profile memoirs by Margaret Atwood, Malala Yousafzai and Jacinda Ardern, as well as moving life stories like Arundhati Roy's Mother Mary Comes to Me and Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow, an account of losing two sons to suicide.
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