Books like Born to Run

01

Chronicles: Volume One

Bob Dylan · Memoir

Chronicles: Volume One is the first installment of what Dylan announced as a multi-volume memoir, and it is one of the stranger and more rewarding books any major artist has written about their own formation.

Both dig into music.

02

Scar Tissue

Anthony Kiedis · Memoir

Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's account of his life from a chaotic childhood in Michigan through the formation and commercial peak of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with addiction and recovery as the book's spine.

Both dig into music.

03

Life

Keith Richards · Memoir

Keith Richards's Life was written with journalist James Fox and published when Richards was 66, after more than fifty years with the Rolling Stones.

Both dig into music.

04

Becoming

Michelle Obama · Memoir

Becoming is Michelle Obama's account of how a girl from a modest house on Chicago's South Side became one of the most recognized people in the world — and what that journey cost and revealed.

A kindred memoir read.

05

Open: An Autobiography

Andre Agassi · Memoir

Andre Agassi's autobiography opens with one of the most famous confessions in sports memoir: he hates tennis.

A kindred memoir read.

06

Born Standing Up

Steve Martin · Memoir

Born Standing Up is Steve Martin's account of the decade-long grind that preceded his sudden, seemingly overnight fame as America's biggest stand-up comedian of the late 1970s.

Shares family and ambition with Born to Run.

07

10% Happier

Dan Harris · Memoir

10% Happier is Dan Harris's account of discovering meditation after a panic attack live on Good Morning America in 2004 forced him to confront an anxiety problem he'd been managing with cocaine and a punishing work schedule.

Both dig into ambition.

08

Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · Memoir

Angela's Ashes is Frank McCourt's memoir of a catastrophically impoverished Irish Catholic childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Limerick, during the 1930s and 1940s.

Both dig into family.

09

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

David Sheff · Memoir

Beautiful Boy is David Sheff's account of watching his son Nic become addicted to methamphetamine through his late teens and early twenties, and of the years Sheff spent trying to understand it, respond to it, and survive it as a parent.

Both dig into family.

10

Bossypants

Tina Fey · Memoir

Bossypants is Tina Fey's memoir and comic essay collection about her upbringing in suburban Pennsylvania, her years doing improv comedy in Chicago, her time as a writer and head writer at Saturday Night Live, her creation of 30 Rock, and the experience of being a woman in charge in show business.

Both dig into ambition.

11

Boy Erased: A Memoir

Garrard Conley · Memoir

Boy Erased is Garrard Conley's memoir of attending Love in Action, a conversion therapy program in Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 2000s.

Both dig into family.

12

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama · Memoir

Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, before entering politics, after being elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Both dig into family.