At the end of last year, Netflix released Too Much – a sickly, indie-sleaze romcom about an American transplant who falls for a troubled British muso. It was created by Lena Dunham and her musician husband Luis Felber, and apparently loosely based on the couple’s backstory. It felt, to many critics, like second-screen fare, decidedly Lena Dunham-lite. Was this really the same person who had given us the spiky, self-absorbed world of Girls, the millennial Sex and the City complete with brutal situationships, toxic besties and, er, one of the main characters accidentally smoking crack?

Famesick sheds almost all the Richard Curtis-isms to find that old, controversy-courting Dunham alive and – if not exactly well – then learning to cope with it. Her second memoir (Not That Kind of Girl was published in 2014) charts the chronic illness and seemingly unending stress that came to define her 20s and 30s after she had snagged her own HBO series aged just 24. The afflictions described across its 400 pages include – though are not limited to – OCD, colitis, the connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, endometriosis, early menopause, PTSD and addiction to both opioids and benzodiazepines. At one point, Dunham accidentally sets herself on fire; at another, she panics about how Vogue will cover up the impetigo on her face, “a waterfall of golden blisters, turning a sickly green as they dried”. The book is scattergun and sometimes lacking in self awareness (who cares that Dunham had to give her designer booties up, like contraband, when she entered rehab?). It’s also undeniably frank and exhaustive: a lifetime of therapy condensed into something you could conceivably rip through in a weekend.

Dunham’s health doesn’t initially dominate, but – like a chronic illness itself – it slowly and quietly becomes the focus. She describes it all in unvarnished but terrifying fashion, from the digestive tract she had treated “like a clogged drain I was snaking” – surviving on energy drinks and diet supplements on the set of Girls – to her use of, and later dependence on, Klonopin, “on and off, for years, like a lover I wasn’t particularly attached to, could take or leave”. There’s a horrifying retelling of an episode in which Dunham punctures her eardrum with a cotton bud that would go on to inspire a plotline on Girls. As Famesick continues, the injury feels almost trivial when compared to Dunham’s constant gynaecological issues, or the run-in with a doctor that brings back long-buried, “sickly waves” of memories of being sexually abused by a babysitter. The darkness increasingly creeps into the celebrity world she continues to inhabit, as with the Met Gala that Dunham attended in 2018 while on release from rehab, “wan and haunted … champagne I couldn’t drink circulating like a joke I wasn’t in on”.

Many inappropriate men walk in and out of Dunham’s life, like bit-part players in a TV show. The two that stand out are her former longterm partner, musician Jack Antonoff, and her Girls co-star Adam Driver, neither of whom come out of Famesick particularly well. Antonoff lavishes her with tchotchkes and promises of marriage and children, before – as Dunham tells it – slowly tiring of her medical issues and drug dependency. Driver, meanwhile, appears as an allegedly unpredictable, often angry man who may not have been doing much acting in Girls: “I remember doing a fight scene with Adam … when I opened my mouth, all that came out was a stammer – until finally, Adam screamed, ‘FUCKING SAY SOMETHING’ and hurled a chair at the wall next to me. ‘WAKE THE FUCK UP,’ he told me. ‘I’M SICK OF WATCHING YOU JUST STARE.’” Once the show had wrapped, the pair never spoke again.

The girls of Girls are described in loving but hazier terms, apart from Jemima Kirke – “part Lolita, part Keith Richards” – who is faithfully drawn in a way that maybe only a childhood friend could be. The female friendship that really propels her through the making of the show, it turns out, is one with its producer Jenni Konner, who morphs from best friend to acquaintance and back to stranger as the book nears its end. There is so much going on here that it feels like there’s scarcely space for Dunham to adequately explain the episode that saw her and Konner put out a statement in 2017 defending Girls writer Murray Miller against sexual assault allegations (denied by Miller) made by actor Aurora Perrineau. But, where she does address it, her sense of shame and the feeling she may have harakiri-ed her career is clear: “I did not decide to kill myself,” she writes, “but I did think it was time to die.” Similarly, she apologises to anyone alarmed by her description in Not That Kind of Girl of touching her sibling’s genitals as a child, although she does think that some saw it as an opportunity to take her down. She writes about dealing with the resulting online furore in the midst of a trip to the Netherlands to promote the book: “Had you told me I’d still be getting those comments 11 years later, I would have downed the rest of the bottle of pills and chosen that plane as my final resting place”.

Dunham doesn’t always make it easy to feel sorry for her, though. There are moments big and small where her decision-making seems questionable – continually moving house, passing up career opportunities when she desperately needed them, deciding to carry a blind, ailing dog around in a tote on a TV set. Elsewhere, weighty names are dropped – from Oprah to Nora Ephron – in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the other words on the page (see also: needless cameos for a pre-fame Safdie brothers and “TayTay” – Taylor Swift – featuring in a long, long list of acknowledgements).

And yet, there’s an honesty and a fluency to her prose that makes her hard to dismiss. Illness, she writes, “wasn’t just a town I was passing through, but a city that I was going to pay taxes in”; when Girls first took off, it was “a miracle to me that I managed to speak cogently about the work, when I had to tell my feet to walk”. On parenthood, and a failed round of IVF, she is at her most truthful: “The irony is that knowing I cannot have a child – my ability to accept that and move on – may be the only reason I deserve to be anyone’s parent at all. I think I finally have something to teach somebody.”

Towards the end of Famesick, Dunham meets Felber, and the London era that inspired Too Much begins. Met Gala invites fall away and friends’ weddings populate her calendar instead. It’s easy to see now why she wrote that series, and retreated into something less jagged than the reality of her own past decade. But it’s clear –in Famesick as in Girls – that Dunham is able to write about the painful parts of life in a way that feels both intimate and universal. Perhaps the real horror of this book (dedicated to, among others, Sharon Tate, Whitney Houston, Caroline Flack and Liam Payne) isn’t so much that celebrity can make you sick. Rather, it’s that no amount of fame or money can keep you safe once it does.

“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of his credentials and an implicit call to further inquiry. What constitutes a life, and what can it mean to write about it? Can you write about your own from inside it?

Before his bestselling and highly praised account of his father’s life and death, And When Did You Last See Your Father?, was published in 1993, Morrison had a life as a poet, a critic and a literary editor. And perhaps his interest in penetrating the mysteries of another’s interior world was already in evidence: a few years earlier, he had written The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper, in which he had attempted to capture what newspaper reports had missed of serial killer Peter Sutcliffe (“So cops they lobbed im questions / Through breakfast, dinner, tea, / Till e said: ‘All right, you’ve cracked it. / Ripper, aye, it’s me.’”).

The poem features in On Memoir, as an example of how form can be used against the grain of expectations to talk about traumatic collective experiences; Morrison also points to As If, his exploration of the trial of Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, the 10-year-olds who had killed the two-year-old James Bulger. Life writing, then, doesn’t always mean your own life, and almost never only yours. So how do you do it?

Morrison’s response is a deceptively breezy alphabetically ordered guide, with Flashbacks, Food and Footnotes giving way to Persona, Photos and Plagiarism, and so forth. There’s plenty of cheerfully nuts-and-bolts advice for the would-be memoirist, culled from the author’s years teaching the form at Goldsmiths, University of London: the most pedestrian example might be not to keep repeating everyone’s names, and perhaps the most surprising not to write off self-publishing if you really want to get your story out there. The book also functions as a terrific reading list, encompassing titles from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, through Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and the work of Annie Ernaux to, more recently, Catherine Taylor’s The Stirrings, a memoir of growing up that also found itself compelled by Peter Sutcliffe’s crimes.

But the most insistent questions seep between the entries, recurring throughout and never quite resolving. Chief among them is: does it have to be true? Memory, after all, is a slippery customer, and although the contemporary exhortation to “speak one’s truth” might appear simply to encourage openness and reject shame, it also draws attention to the fact that others have their truth too. When accounts of events and their associated emotions and conclusions are contested, things can get messy quickly.

Should a committed life writer worry about what other people think? Morrison hedges his bets a touch: one should be as truthful as possible, and certainly not fabricate entire histories in order to deceive and manipulate (see Binjamin Wilkomirski’s invented experiences of the Holocaust). But neither can writers allow themselves to be self-seduced by the desire to be likable, or to quail from excavating experiences that are painful or embarrassing. You can’t mind too much, either, if your old school friend is cheesed off because you inaccurately remembered seeing his brother on a train (as happened to Morrison), although you should practice human decency when you’re revealing your father’s love affairs (also Morrison).

One of the most intriguing consequences of his A-Z approach is that you start to add your own entries. Between Likability and Loss, I wondered, wasn’t there a place for Loneliness? Not simply as a way to understand why people might want to write about their own histories, but to grasp why so many of us read them? Poring over the minute details of another’s life isn’t the same as befriending them, but can it make one feel – to use another telling contemporary term – “seen”? Maybe that should be under N for Nosiness.

Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual partner hurt me, I felt seen”) and how she conquered her dependency. On Substack an actor describes her grief on losing a baby (“After the miscarriage, I became convinced my daughter was backstage. I would push back the costumes on the rack and almost expect to find her”). And then there are the published memoirs, first-person stories of trauma, displacement and heartbreak. It’s not just women who unburden themselves, of course. As Martin Amis says in his memoir, Experience: “We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the CV, the cri de coeur.”

Recent memoirs have upped the ante, though. What was once a geriatric, self-satisfied genre (politicians, generals and film stars looking back fondly on long careers) is now open to anyone with a story to tell – “nobody memoirs”, the American journalist Lorraine Adams has called them. Candour is the key, no matter how fraught the consequences. “Most writers I know,” Maggie Nelson writes in The Argonauts, “nurse persistent fantasies about the horrible things – or the horrible thing – that will happen to them if and when they express themselves as they desire”. But she takes that risk, addressing the book to “you”, her fluidly gendered husband Harry (who’s angry when she shows him a draft), while exploring identity, pregnancy, motherhood and sexuality.

“The words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the concrete floor”; this appears in the first paragraph of The Argonauts in 2015. It’s hard to imagine an author volunteering that 30 years ago, or being allowed to be so passionately upfront (and violently facedown) at the start of the story. I remember the embarrassment I felt in the 1990s, walking into the office one morning, after a reviewer in the Sunday papers had noted a passage in the memoir of my father I’d written in which I describe masturbating in the bath around the time of his death. What possessed me to disclose that? What would my colleagues think of me? I wouldn’t need to be so blushingly shy about it today.

Shock is an integral part of memoir and sometimes the facts are shocking, without embroidery. Thomas Blackburn’s autobiography, A Clip of Steel, takes its title from the mechanical device sent to him at boarding school by his father, in order to discourage involuntary ejaculation or self-abuse: “The instrument had an outer clip of thin firm steel whose inner edge was serrated with spiked teeth … if you had an erection then your expanding penis pressed into the sharp teeth of the firm outer clip.” Ouch. But this isn’t a contemporary memoir reaching new levels of explicitness. Blackburn’s book came out over half a century ago, as did JR Ackerley’s two memoirs My Dog Tulip and My Father and Myself, which are frank not only about his homosexuality and his father’s secret second family, but describe canine love (his sensual arousal when touching his pet alsatian) in astonishing detail.

In literature the mode used to be called confessionalism. These days, pejoratively, it’s called oversharing. At best it prompts welcome recognition: Wow, great, here’s someone who’s had the same experiences, thoughts and feelings that I’ve had. But there’s often resistance as well: Ugh. TMI. I don’t need to know this. When the divulgence is sad-fishing on Facebook, curated self-glorification on Instagram or out-there revelation in a memoir, readers may feel irritated or affronted. Enough of this me-me-me-ism; they won’t take the proffered hand. When I wrote a book about the murder of James Bulger by two 10-year-olds, some reviewers liked the personal approach; others hated how I’d brought in my own children when I brooded on the age of responsibility.

It’s not essential for writers to bean-spill, after all. They’re not victims on a talkshow, outmanoeuvred by Jerry Springer or Jeremy Kyle; they’re writing on their own terms and in control of what’s committed to print. “I think it’s too easy to recount unhappy memories when you write about yourself,” Margo Jefferson says in her memoir Negroland. “You bask in your own innocence. You revere your grief. You arrange your angers at their most becoming angles. I don’t want this kind of indulgence.”

It’s not even compulsory to use the first person in memoir. In Bone Black bell hooks uses “she” and “we” as well as “I”. As one of six children, she has chapters written in a collective “we” voice. And in key emotive episodes, whether it’s masturbating or being beaten by her father, she presents herself, at a distance, in the third person, as if she were looking at another person, the self that hasn’t yet grown up to be bell hooks. Salman Rushdie uses “he” not “I” in his fatwa memoir, Joseph Anton, an expression of his weird displacement into a religious hate figure he doesn’t recognise; so does JM Coetzee in his two childhood memoirs (“Whoever he truly is, whoever the true ‘I’ is that ought to be rising out of the ashes of his childhood, is not being allowed to be born”). There’s even a case for “you”, which makes the reader complicit, as if what happened to the author could happen to anyone.

Such discretion is fine if it’s not evasion. There’s no point in telling a personal story if you censor yourself and hold back too much. Be brave, I’ve urged life-writing students terrified by what their ex will think, or their siblings, or their grouchy uncle: get that monkey off your back; it’s your version of events and if people close to you object, never mind – let them write their own memoir.

But candour takes art: what works as an anecdote told in the pub won’t work on the page. It needs compression, structure, the right tone of voice. The task is to set down what happened, not parade extremes of feeling. An author can be open without closing the space for readers, who need room to interpret and explore. Tara Westover’s Educated is a heartfelt account of a violently dysfunctional Mormon family in Idaho. But at the end she adds notes that acknowledge how other people in the family remember things differently.

Giving offence is always a risk. Readers are no less sensitive than they ever were, just sensitive about different things – racism, homophobia and child-beating, say, where a generation or two ago the stigma was around abortion, illegitimacy and homosexuality. Push it too far – My Life As a Drug Dealer, The Joys of Stalking, Confessions of a Copro-, Zoo-, Formico-, Stygio- or Necro-philiac – and there might be a social media storm and public backlash. It happened to Kate Clanchy, who wrote warmly in a memoir about the children she taught but who upset some readers because of alleged racist, classist and ableist tropes (the publisher recently apologised, four years on, for the “hurt” it caused her and “many others” in mishandling the row). Writers can’t afford to ignore the moral climate of the times. But they don’t have to kowtow. Someone on X might x-rate them. But if they’re writing truthfully, someone else will give them an A-star.

Truth-telling is the measure of memoir, and it’s not the same as autofiction. Readers will allow an author wriggle room, for comic exaggeration, say, but where there’s knowing fabrication they’ll feel cheated, even outraged. Hence the scandal last year following the Observer’s claims that Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path had omitted and obfuscated key material. Why no mention of the alleged embezzlement that lay behind the loss of her family home? Was her husband Moth’s condition (CBD, corticobasal degeneration, a rare degenerative brain disease) as serious as she claimed? Did she really undertake her 630-mile coastal walk in the manner described? Winn keeps going; her sales haven’t suffered; another memoir is scheduled for January 2028. But as I write she’s in trouble again for having claimed that The Salt Path was her debut (and for winning a £10,000 prize awarded to a first book) when she had written a previous one under a pseudonym. And since its honesty has been questioned can The Salt Path really be considered – as the Sunday Times acclaimed it – one of the top 100 books of the past 50 years? (Winn has published a response in which she denies many of the allegations.)

When readers feel that memoirs can’t be trusted, the genre suffers and the publishing industry comes under fire. Nonfiction sales slumped last year. Memoirs also now face the risk of being sidelined by social media outlets, not least Substack, which feeds the same market in smaller doses. If you want a quick fix, not to trawl through a whole book, it’s the ideal platform. And it aspires to the same kind of intimacy. As Naomi Alderman puts it: “I’m actually really surprised by the kind of writing Substack is unlocking in me, that I basically didn’t know I had in me before. And it’s the paid subscribers who make it possible: the fact that I don’t feel I’m shouting into the void but that there are people who are telling me that this work has value.”

Where Instagram highlights the glossy upsides of life, Substack memoirs acknowledge the down. The writers are troubled, not least about writing. They let you in on their woes, whether broken relationships or family trauma. A quick whiz-through brings me Ros Barber (“In the eighteen months after leaving my ex, I lived in a state of fear. I was tailed by a series of men that I suspected he had hired as part of his promise that I wouldn’t live very long if I left”), Kevin Jack McEnroe (“My mom was a heroin addict, and I always worried about her, and still do. I became one, too”), and Dorothy O’Donnell (“My daughter’s no stranger to depression. Or thoughts of suicide. She was in kindergarten the first time she told me she wanted to die”).

When writers like these hit their stride you want more than snippets. And there are cases of someone posting a full-length work on Substack, as Bowen Dwelle has done with the story of how he survived “growing up in San Francisco in the 80s, lived through years of depression and addiction, and eventually found my way back”. His 66,000-word piece comes in 28 chapters “as a work in process … in pre-publication form”. Many writers do use Substack as a pre-publication try-out, though as far as I know, Dwelle hasn’t yet had his memoir published, despite serialising it in 2023.

Is it better to keep try-outs under wraps rather than making them public? Perhaps not, if you’re already established with a terrifying story to tell. What became Hanif Kureishi’s book Shattered, chronicling his experience following the accident that left him quadriplegic, originally appeared on Substack, where it was less a rough draft made public than an earnest engagement with readers, made possible with the help of his son Carlo, who took dictation. Many other writers use Substack, including Margaret Atwood, George Saunders, Elif Shafak, Howard Jacobson and Miranda July. You can see why publishers regard the platform both as an opportunity (the chance to spot new talent) and as a threat. If memoirists can make a living through online snippets (with enough subscriptions, Substack pays well), why worry about publication in print? What’s so sacrosanct about a physical book?

For myself– no social media junkie – I think published memoirs have plenty to offer that social platforms can’t, not least the rewards of a full-length story with a narrative arc, a set of characters, and an approach that doesn’t depend on sensational self-exposure, allowing room for reversals, surprises, digressions, complications and a tussle between adversity and reprieve. At their best, memoirs develop with a subtlety unavailable in a short extract and the writer faces bigger issues than how much to share – which tense to use, what stretch of time to cover, how many points of view to accommodate, and what resolution to offer, if any, since a life story written by a living person won’t have ended. Far from exulting in the drama of the tale they’re telling, memoir writers face the worry that it’s humdrum and inconsequential. Success lies in the quality of the telling, not in the shamelessness of the tale. Can the life of a ghost writer be remotely interesting? Yes, Jennie Erdal’s Ghosting is a comic masterpiece. Can a book about immobility move readers? Josie George’s A Still Life does.

Maybe it’s a matter of two kinds of writing: flash nonfiction on one hand versus book-length memoir on the other. Under the tag “Memoir Junkie Someday Author”, Claire Tak writes well about this on – where else? – Substack, making the distinction between a “moment” and a “season”: “A writing ‘season’ means you’re in a stretch of time when writing is a big focus,” she says. “You’re in a groove, maybe working on a project, maybe just showing up regularly. There’s a rhythm and you know what you’re doing and where you’re headed.” At times when you’re less fluent, she observes, you have to rely on moments:

After giving myself a break from my memoir, it felt like I was falling behind, or like I had given up. But I’ve realized I don’t need to be in a full season to stay connected to writing. I just needed to pay attention and take the moments when they came.

What I’ve found is that those moments still move things forward. Not always in a linear way, but they add up. A Substack post here. A thought there. It’s slower, but it’s not wasted time … You don’t have to be in a full-on writing season to keep going. Pay attention to these moments and take what you can.

Moment v season. Episode v story. Online post v full-length book. There’s room in the world for both. Substack does well by memoir, including “a weekly curation of the best personal essays from around the web”, and I enjoy dipping in. But what would my life be without the memoirs published in recent years by (among others) Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, Hisham Matar, George Szirtes, Rebecca Stott, Maggie O’Farrell, Tabitha Lasley, Miriam Toews, Lea Ypi and Leslie Jamison?

O’Farrell’s story of her 17 brushes with mortality in I Am, I Am, I Am is at least as engaging as Hamnet, and Ernaux’s diaristic Getting Lost, an account of an affair she had, is more powerful than the brief fictional version of it she gives in Simple Passion. By the same token an online fragment from a journal can’t hope to rank with the 700-plus pages of journals in Helen Garner’s How to End a Story, which offer the ultimate justification for authorship: “writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it”.

Sure, when the author is a bumptious blabber or a catastrophiser loading every rift with gore, published memoirs can be as much a turn-off as online snippets. But where the self-disclosure is nuanced and the writing compelling, you go with the flow, happy to eavesdrop, willing to follow wherever the memoir takes you.

US vice-president JD Vance has announced a new memoir centred on his conversion to Catholicism, adding to mounting speculation about a potential 2028 presidential run.

The book, titled Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, will be published on 16 June by HarperCollins and is described as “a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian across the seasons of Vance’s life”.

In a post on X, Vance said he had been working on the project “for a long time” and described it as an account of rediscovering religion: “Communion is about my personal journey and how I found my way back to faith.”

According to the publisher, the book discusses Vance’s loss of faith and eventual return to Christianity. Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019 when he was 35, after being raised in a loosely evangelical family. His book, said the publisher, “reveals how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it informs his vision for the future”.

The news comes at a moment when Vance is increasingly viewed as an early frontrunner for the 2028 nomination to succeed Trump. Publishing a memoir ahead of a presidential run is a well-worn path in US politics. On the Democratic side, several potential 2028 contenders have recently released or announced books, including Kamala Harris, California governor Gavin Newsom, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear and Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro.

Vance’s emphasis on faith reflects a growing prominence of religion in his political identity. His Catholic conversion has informed his positions on issues such as abortion and family policy, and he has in the past justified the White House’s deportation policies with his interpretation of Catholicism, using ordo amoris – “order of love” – to defend prioritising obligations to fellow citizens over outsiders.

Those views have at times been criticised by senior figures in the Vatican. Before becoming Pope Leo XIV in May 2025, an X account apparently belonging to him shared criticism of the White House’s plans for mass deportations of migrants. The account also shared a link to an opinion piece titled ‘JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others’.

Without naming Vance directly, the late Pope Francis argued in a letter that “the true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ … that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”.

Communion follows the success of Vance’s first book, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, published in 2016. The memoir chronicled his upbringing in rural Ohio, and his journey from a troubled family background to Yale Law School. It became a bestseller, spending more than 200 weeks on the New York Times list and selling more than five million copies worldwide, and was later adapted into a film by Ron Howard starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams.

In the introduction to this new instalment of Alan Bennett’s diaries, which run from 2016 to 2024, the author worries about what to write: “I have said everything before. At 90 it’s impossible to avoid repetition.” And, indeed, I was halfway through the entries for 2020 before they started to seem familiar. It turns out that I had already reviewed Bennett’s pandemic diaries when they were released as a slim standalone volume in 2022.

Here they are again, then, this time embedded in a much longer stretch of journal-keeping, characterised by Bennett’s customary looping between past and present. The repetition turns out not to matter because the prose is sufficiently layered to take on new meanings as the context shifts. Bennett’s pandemic years read differently now that Covid is in the rearview mirror. The first time round, I got the impression that, devoted to the NHS though he is, the banging of pans on a Thursday evening struck him as a bit daft. Reading the section again, I’m convinced he detested the whole performative palaver.

There are other things I missed. Like just how much Bennett’s experience of two years’ national service stayed with him down the decades. He nearly always notes the anniversary: “8 August. 8/8/52. The day I was called up. A Thursday.” Especially intense are the memories of physical shame, such as the worry of undressing in front of others, something that Bennett manages to avoid entirely during conscription. This is despite yearning for the casually naked bodies all around him. On the one occasion when he manages a fumble with a fellow serviceman, he feels so awkward that he never refers to it again. “I am still embarrassed about incidents in my life of which all participants are long since dead. Embarrassment is eternal.”

Not so embarrassed, you can’t help noticing, that he feels obliged to conceal his cattier side. On 17 October 2024, Bennett greets the publication of Michael Palin’s fourth volume of diaries with a rivalrous side-eye. He can only get through it, he explains, “after much skipping” thanks to the overabundance of detail, which makes the volume “something of an animated desk diary”. Bennett never forgets that his journals are written – edited, certainly – to entertain.

There is real ambivalence, too, towards Jonathan Miller, who lives at Gloucester Crescent, the north London haut-bohemian enclave of which Bennett was once a resident. In 2016, Miller is not yet diagnosed with the Alzheimer’s that will kill him, and on 7 February 2016 he embarks on a monologue about how his famous production of The Mikado has been performed 300 times around the world, which makes it “a great success”. This leaves Bennett biting his tongue to avoid blurting out that his The History Boys has had 2,000 outings. “I say nothing, but without feeling any better for not doing so.”

There are, nonetheless, plenty of reasons to be cheerful. While Bennett is unflinching about his physical decline over the nine-year stretch of these diaries, his creative life flourishes. The 2018 stage play Allelujah!, a paean to the NHS, does good business and gets turned into a film starring Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Jennifer Saunders. And The Choral, his filmic tribute to Elgar and small-town Yorkshire during the first world war, is a delightful late-life hit. Both are directed by Nicholas Hytner, one of the two men who he says have changed his life (the other is his partner Rupert Thomas, distinguished magazine editor and eagle-eyed pan-handler who can spot aesthetic treasure in the most unpromising of junk shops).

The diaries’ tone never slips into sentimentality, though. Invited to the unveiling of Miller’s memorial stone in Highgate Cemetery in 2022, Bennett worries how he will manage the rutted terrain. His fear is that, once he finally reaches Miller’s monument, his physical frailty will oblige him to perch on it, a gesture that could so easily be misinterpreted as schadenfreude. He is, after all, the last man standing.

Liza Minnelli’s father, the film director Vincente Minnelli, used to joke that his daughter’s career in show business was preordained. She was certainly familiar with the dark side of the industry from a young age through her mother Judy Garland, who was on the MGM payroll aged 13, before shooting to fame as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Garland was famously depressive and addicted to prescription drugs and alcohol. When her daughter was six, she shut herself in the bathroom and made the first of many suicide attempts. Minnelli soon learned to monitor her mother and hide her pill bottles when she saw darkness descending. By 13, she was “my mother’s caretaker – a nurse, a doctor, pharmacologist and psychiatrist rolled into one … Just as the MGM studio system robbed Mama of her childhood, she robbed me of mine.”

In her memoir, Minnelli – who turns 80 this month – recounts how she broke free from her dysfunctional family at 16 and moved to New York to make it as a singer and actor. Little surprise, given her parentage, that her ascent was swift. “I was the original nepo baby,” she observes, gleefully. But if show business was in her DNA, so was addiction. In her 20s she became hooked on Valium, diet pills, cocaine and alcohol. Later, as her career faltered and her private life imploded, her sister Lorna staged an intervention and got her into the first of many rehab programmes.

The book is written with journalists Josh Getlin and Heidi Evans and drawn from extensive conversations between Minnelli and her close friend Michael Feinstein. If that sounds like too many cooks, the resulting book is surprisingly cohesive and spry. Beneath the classic arc of fame and success turned sour is a more unusual tale of a woman battling the trauma of her childhood and struggling to step out of the shadow of her unpredictable mother.

Most importantly, it captures Minnelli’s voice, which combines showbiz luvviness with winning vitality and charm. As the title suggests, Wait Till You Hear This! gives the inside scoop on the megastars in her orbit, including “Uncle Frank” Sinatra who would “give you the moon, but I don’t know anyone besides his children who ever heard him apologise for anything”. Minnelli is not averse to picking fights herself: she delivers a ferocious dressing down to Lady Gaga, her co-presenter for best picture at the 2022 Oscars. At the 11th hour, Minnelli was told she must sit in a wheelchair rather than the agreed director’s chair “because I might slip out of [it], which was bullshit”. She claims Gaga wouldn’t go onstage with her otherwise. This meant Minnelli was sitting too low to see the teleprompter and, without her glasses, couldn’t read the cue cards – hence her apparent befuddlement. “I had arrived at the Oscars thinking I was in the hands of wonderful colleagues and friends. Instead, I believe I was sabotaged,” she fumes.

But the most eyebrow-raising material concerns her tumultuous love life. Minnelli, who married four times, realised her first husband, Peter Allen, was gay after she found him in bed with another man; she later quipped that she would never again come home early – at least not without calling first. While still married to Allen, she announced her engagement to Peter Sellers a matter of days after meeting him in London, though their relationship quickly imploded, and not just because Minnelli was already engaged to Desi Arnaz Jr, son of Lucille Ball. She pulls no punches when discussing her fourth husband, David Gest, in a chapter titled The Marriage from Hell: “What in God’s name was I thinking? I clearly wasn’t sober when I married this clown.” Nearly 25 years later, the humiliation of her union with this “slight, pasty faced jerk with weird hair” still stings.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! naturally revels in its subject’s many career highs: the awards-festooned Cabaret; her 21-night run at Carnegie Hall, the longest in the venue’s history; her chart-busting version of Losing My Mind with the Pet Shop Boys; her knowing turn on TV’s Arrested Development. Neither does she miss a chance to recall a standing ovation, a glowing review or to list the stars attending an opening night or one of her legendary soirees.

Yet Minnelli understands that unchecked vanity has no place in a memoir. What elevates her book above the usual celebrity fare is her vulnerability and brutal candour in sharing her lowest moments, from the terrible marriages, to her mother’s manipulations, to the decades of substance abuse that once caused her to collapse in the street near her New York home, prompting pedestrians to step over her inert body. This 448-page doorstopper is a tell-all in the truest sense. It’s with characteristic breeziness that Minnelli concludes: “It’s been a lifetime of high notes and low notes, baby. And I want you to know … it’s been a life very well lived. I have no regrets. None.”

Happy Mondays and Black Grape frontman Shaun Ryder is publishing a new memoir and will personally sign every copy.

“I’ve done more books now, I think, than Shakespeare, sort of,” said Ryder, announcing the release of 24 Hour Party Person.

In the book, Ryder moves from his hedonistic Mondays era – recalling taking crack cocaine for the first time in New York while on tour – to his appearances on Celebrity Gogglebox alongside bandmate Bez. “Dodging bullets in Jamaica, surviving a gunpoint ordeal in New York and escaping kidnap in Amsterdam” are among the stories to appear in the memoir, according to publisher A Way With Media.

“I had a right laugh writing my first book, and people liked it, so when the chance to write another came up, I thought ‘why not?’” said Ryder. “I’ve got even more mad tales to tell.”

In the book, Ryder writes about “the studio sessions, the bust-ups, the benders, the making of era-defining albums”, as well as the importance of family, according to the publisher.

Ryder’s previous books include How to Be a Rock Star and Twisting My Melon. One of the madcap tales recounted in the latest book involves watching Watership Down with Bez in the 70s while on acid. “I’m telling you, when you’re on an acid trip, this hallucinogenic story about rabbits trying to escape destruction from human bulldozers is definitely not the fucking film to watch.”

Ryder formed Black Grape in 1993, shortly after the Happy Mondays disbanded (though they would go on to reform several times). The most recent Black Grape album, Orange Head, came out in 2024.

Ryder has been considered something of a national treasure since coming runner-up on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! behind Stacey Solomon in 2010. In a 2021 interview with the Guardian, he said that appearing on TV meant younger people would discover his music: “That’s how you bring the fans in now. A kid sees us on TV and the next minute he’s pressed his thumb and downloaded all the back catalogue and is looking at photos of when you was 18.”

Asked about the “national treasure” label in a 2024 Guardian interview, Ryder said: “I’ll take it. Better than being called a crackhead or a smackhead, innit?”

‘There is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and her husband to sit down before telling them their son, Vincent, has died by suicide. The couple hear the same line several years later when James, their other son, dies – also by suicide. “My husband and I had two children and lost them both,” Li states.

In this memoir, Li describes how Vincent, 16, enjoyed baking, while 19-year-old James was a brilliant linguist and a deep thinker. Shortly before Vincent’s death, Li had written a memoir about her depressive episodes which led to her own suicide attempts. She wonders if this contributed to both her sons’ sense that suicide could be a viable way out of difficulty.

All of this is contemplated in a blunt and stoic manner free of anger and regret. Li reveals how she and her husband have adopted a “radical acceptance”, which means living with the facts of their lives as they are now, however difficult.

The voice actor Suzanne Toren delivers a careful and sensitive reading, embodying the author’s calmly analytical mind, which is testament to the human ability to endure. “In the abyss that I call my life, facts, with their logic, meaning and weight, are what I hold on to,” she notes. “It’s not much, this holding on, and yet it’s the best I can do.”

Available via 4th Estate, 4hr 57min

Further listening

Long Island Compromise
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Wildfire, 15hr 23min
After the death of his mother, wealthy businessman Carl relives memories of the time he was snatched by kidnappers, held to ransom and later released. Edoardo Ballerini reads this family saga from the Fleishman Is in Trouble author.

Rumours of My Demise
Evan Dando, Faber, 8hr 15min
The leading light of the 90s alt-rock band the Lemonheads reads his wry and heady memoir about his adventures as musician and addict. The title is a nod to the stories that frequently circulated in his heyday about his premature death.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org

The title of The Uncool refers to rock critic Lester Bangs’s assessment of Cameron Crowe, whose adventures as a music journalist were loosely depicted in his 2000 movie, Almost Famous. Long before he became a film-maker, the teenage Crowe travelled around the US interviewing some of the biggest rocks acts of the era, among them Gram Parsons, Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, the Eagles and the Allman Brothers Band. Crowe’s memoir reveals him as the perennial outsider who, unlike his interviewees, cared little about sex, booze and drugs and who lacked a certain savoir-faire. Yet rock stars liked having him around, enjoying his sincerity and the fact that he was more admiring fan than dispassionate reporter.

Crowe is the reader, delivering a warm and vivacious narration that conveys the wide-eyed astonishment of his youthful self as he is thrust into the orbit of his heroes. He also paints a vivid picture of an era in which bands weren’t protected by gaggles of PR representatives and a writer could spend 18 months with an artist – as Crowe did with Bowie in the mid-1970s – to write a single profile.

The book draws to a close shortly after Crowe conducts a filmed interview with Tom Petty. With the video director gone awol, Petty instructs Crowe to pick up the camera and start shooting. In doing so, Crowe stumbles on what turns out to be his ideal medium: “I’d been a music journalist, translating time and space for others to savour. This was an exercise in cutting out the middleman. It was like writing without a pen.”

Available via 4th Estate, 9hr 18 min

Further listening

Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis
Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, Headline, 10hr 30min
In the follow-up to her 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me, the actor and activist tells of life after her tumultuous marriage, her screen career (on Dallas and the Naked Gun movies) and the grief that followed the deaths of her daughter and grandson. Read by the author.

Absolutely and Forever
Rose Tremain, Penguin Audio, 5hr 24min
Jane McDowell reads this tale of life and thwarted love in the 1950s. After 15-year-old Marianne falls in love with a handsome young man bound for Oxford, her plans to settle down with him are thwarted and she is forced to take a different path, enrolling at a secretarial college in London.

Gisèle Pelicot, who became a global symbol of courage during the trial of her ex-husband and the dozens of men who raped her while she was unconscious, has described her shock when police first showed her images of the crimes, likening herself to a “rag doll”.

In extracts from her forthcoming memoir, A Hymn to Life, Pelicot, 73, describes her shock when police told her of the actions of her ex-husband Dominique, whom she considered “a great guy” and had shared her life with for 50 years.

She tells of her world falling apart on 2 November 2020 when she was first told her then husband had been drugging and raping her and inviting strangers to rape her, in extracts in Le Monde from the French-language version of the book that will be published simultaneously across the world in 22 languages next week.

Dominique Pelicot had been summoned by police for questioning after a supermarket security guard caught him secretly filming up women’s skirts.

Gisèle Pelicot had accompanied him to the police station and was completely unprepared for the bombshell delivered by the officer, Laurent Perret. He said: “I am going to show you photos and videos that are not going to please you. That’s you in this photo.”

Pelicot said she did not believe the inert woman lying on the bed was her. “I didn’t recognise the individuals. Nor this woman. Her cheek was so flabby. Her mouth so limp. She was a rag doll,” she writes in the book.

“My brain stopped working in the office of Deputy Police Sergeant Perret.”

Pelicot became known internationally last year when she waived her right to anonymity in the trial that shocked the world.

Dominique Pelicot had for over almost a decade crushed sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication into her mashed potato, coffee or ice-cream and invited dozens of men to rape her in the village of Mazan in south-east France, where the couple had retired. She had been in a state akin to a coma. A total of 51 men were found guilty of rape or sexual assault.

In the book extracts, Pelicot describes her decision to make the trial public. She said if she had kept the trial behind closed doors – as usually happened in such cases – it would have protected her abusers and left her alone with them in court, “hostage to their looks, their lies, their cowardice and their scorn”.

She wrote: “No one would know what they had done to me. Not a single journalist would be there to write their names next to their crimes … Above all, not a single woman could walk in and sit in the courtroom to feel less alone.”

She said if she had been 20 years younger: “I might not have dared to refuse a closed-door hearing.

“I would have feared the stares. Those damned stares a woman of my generation has always had to contend with, those damned stares that make you hesitate in the morning between trousers and a dress, that follow you or ignore you, flatter you and embarrass you. Those damned stares that are supposed to tell you who you are, what you’re worth, and then abandon you as you grow older.”

The launch of Pelicot’s book, co-written with the French author Judith Perrignon, is considered a major publishing event as it is released simultaneously across the world on 17 February.

The British actor Emma Thompson will narrate the audiobook in English. In a social media post, Thompson said the “absolutely extraordinary” story was “difficult to read out loud” but that it inspired “courage and compassion but also crucially demands change”.