Someone already pointed out “Cash” by Johnny Cash, which was one of the first that came to mind. I like music biographies and autobiographies as it’s interesting to read the stories of how they became successful and what drove them to be who they became. In a wholly different genre of music, Boy George’s “Take It Like A Man” is a real thrill ride through the seedy side of life in the early 80s in Britain. Switching gears again, Marilyn Manson’s “The Long Hard Road out of Hell” actually makes you realize what a regular guy he is behind the facade. And in the biography (not autobiography) category for music bios, Christopher Anderson’s “Michael Jackson Unauthorized” biography sheds a lot of light on the child molestation allegations.
Crime and criminology are great topics for bios, and two of my favorites belong to a couple of very interesting men. First, John Douglas has written many books, his most memoir-like was probably “Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit.” Douglas was an FBI profiler who has helped bring down many serial killers. He was “profiled” himself, having had a character in Silence of the Lambs (Clarice’s FBI supervisor) modeled after him. The next book along this vein is “Dead Men Do Tell Tales: The Strange and Fascinating Cases of a Forensic Anthropologist” by William R. Maples and Michael Browning. It’s the autobiography of Maples, a man who has made his living reconstructing crime stories by looking at the smallest pieces of evidence (bones and the like).
The next would be literary biography, and I have two favorites here. One would be Augusten Burroughs, who has written 3 memoirs about his rather messed up upbringing, “Running With Scissors” (which is now a movie as well), “Dry”, and “A Wolf at the Table…A Memoir of my Father.” The other literary memoirs of which there are 3 are by far my favorites of the bunch as they are very humorous and very dark and full of fascinating stories. The author is Jim Knipfel, a former columnist for the New York Press, who wrote 3 memoirs…the first was called “Slackjaw” and was a very entertaining look at his rise to “fame” and the strange characters he met along the way. Next came “Quitting the Nairobi Trio”, which was specifically about the 6 weeks he spent in a mental hospital after a suicide attempt. The final memoir was called “Ruining it for Everybody”, a memoir about going blind (he has been going blind from a rare disease called retinitis pigmentosa and is now almost completely blind). He also writes fiction now, but these were absolutely fascinating looks at the kinds of people you might otherwise cross the street to avoid.