5 Of The Best Memoirs Written By Female Musicians

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

The 2025 Grammy Awards made one thing clear: A shift in the music industry's center of gravity has arrived — undeniably, and at last. Beyoncé, who has spent a lifetime orbiting the summit of industry recognition, finally took home album of the year. In fact, of the eight nominees in the category, six were women. Doechii, with the swamp-pop surrealism of "Alligator Bites Never Heal," became just the third woman in history to win best rap album. Chappell Roan was anointed best new artist after her glitter-flecked year of drag revolution. The sugarcoated and steel-spined Sabrina Carpenter turned her "Short n' Sweet" era into chart-topping confection, taking home both best solo pop performance and best pop vocal album. Charli XCX, the perennial disruptor with a taste for chaos and club beats, waltzed into the dance categories and walked out with the trophies — smirking, one assumes, all the way. In other words, the girls were taking it.

This, arguably, wasn't incidental. The Recording Academy added over 3,000 female voters to its ranks before voting began — an overdue institutional correction that's effects are now palpably felt. But this cultural momentum didn't begin on the stage. Long before women artists began receiving their belated recognition, many female musicians had already turned inward. In memoirs that often rival their discographies for lyrical precision and tonal command, they've laid bare the contradictions of celebrity and the machinery of pop. We've rounded up some of the best from the women who laid the groundwork for everything the industry has become. Let these be a reminder that even before the Grammys caught up, many of these women had already claimed the last word for themselves.

Few memoirs have racked up as much A-list literary love as "Crying in H Mart," a chartreuse-helmed favorite with spots on Florence Welch's book club (which is full of hidden gem recommendations), Dua Lipa's Service95, and Natalie Portman's book club. With Olivia Rodrigo, too, calling it one of her all-time favourites in Rolling Stone, it's fair to say this one is in the top-tier.

Zauner is best known as the frontwoman of Japanese Breakfast. As its title suggests, "Crying in H Mart" exists in the fluorescent aisles of a Korean grocery store. For Zauner, this is where grief ambushes her, where she can no longer shop without breaking down in the wake of her mother's death to pancreatic cancer. Her relationship with her mother, Chongmi, was often fraught. It is only in the shadow of illness that they begin to find a shared language, most often through food.

Told in frank, plainspoken prose, "Crying in H Mart" moves between childhood summers in Seoul and hospital rooms in Oregon. On Goodreads, it remains a juggernaut, with many vouching for its power. Fellow musician Lucy Dacus called it "a bare and brutal memoir, full of truth and tenderness," whilst BookTok darling Taylor Jenkins Reid notes, "Its poignancy sneaks up on you. By the end, it packs a wallop." This is your sign to finally pick it up — and, if you can, to read it with something warm simmering on the stove.

Patti Smith's "Just Kids" is a dreamy, dirt-under-the-fingernails Künstlerroman of young love and art. It's a cult favorite for good reason: Few books have lodged themselves into the creative cultural imagination quite like it. It's one of Emma Watson's favorite books — she told Vogue, "I want to live like Patti. I want to write like Patti. The book was so honest and brave. I loved the way she sees the world. I really felt that life was more beautiful after I read it, and I felt more hopeful." It was also a top-shelf pick of Dua Lipa's book club, Service95, where the pop star mused, "I'd have loved to be part of such a cool era. Patti gives us the next best thing — possibly the most spellbinding account of New York in the '70s ever written."

"Just Kids" is framed as a promise kept, as Smith had vowed to tell the story of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe before he died, and the result is a portrait of two young artists bound by an evolving tether of friendship and desire. The backdrop is New York at its most mythologized: the Chelsea Hotel, the Max's Kansas City nightclub, and a city that hadn't yet priced out its poets. But for all its downtown glamor, Smith captures it with brutal honesty and crystal clarity. It's no surprise her story and writing style strike a chord, with over 162,000 five-star ratings on Goodreads.

Britney Spears may well be one of the most thoroughly constructed and deconstructed figures in pop culture. Idolized, infantilized, ridiculed, resurrected, impersonated, dissected, memed, and misunderstood. For two decades, she's been all things to all people: teen dream, ingénue, tabloid punchline, cautionary tale, tragic doll, feminist rallying cry. That she could be, for years, legally and personally constrained while remaining one of the most visible women on earth still feels surreal, and depressingly instructive.

It is this history that makes Spears' own account of her life — what really happened — all the more urgent. Trauma so characteristically strips you of coherence, which is why this reads like a loose framing of memory and affect. "The Woman in Me" reflects this disorientation, accompanied by a plainspoken style that corroborates the rawness of memory still being processed.

Beneath its understated tone lies a clear subtext: This is the origin of the turbulence, the emotional weight accrued over time, and the developmental milestones delayed or denied. There's a muted request for patience embedded in Spears' pages — just one of many reasons this memoir proves so affecting. Another lies in its resonance beyond the personal. As one Reddit user put it, "The book presented generational trauma to me in a way that was eye opening." Among the celebrity memoirs worth listening to on audiobook, this one gives voice to the woman behind the headlines and challenges the culture that gleefully consumed women's stories while denying them authorship.

What's more punk than an unfiltered, funny, and furious account of being in an all-female punk band at the height of the scene? After reading this, you'll find the answer is probably nothing. If you don't know who Viv Albertine is, that changes the minute you crack open "Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys." Best known as the guitarist of the Slits, Albertine helped redefine what women in music could look and sound like. With her memoir, she gives us a backstage pass to punk's golden age — and everything that, for her, came after.

Albertine covers everything from learning to play guitar in a landscape dominated by men to years spent navigating illness, IVF, divorce, filmmaking, motherhood, and creative intervention. It's a visceral, fearless, and enjoyable read. If you need a co-sign, consider this: the people who live and breathe music, industry titans MOJO and Rough Trade, both named it their book of the year. It continues to resonate — reflected, too, in its glowing average rating of 4.5 stars on Amazon.

TikTok introduced a new generation of fans to Carly Simon when "You're So Vain," her sly, swaggering signature track, resurfaced as a viral sound. Growing up both inside and outside the frame — she was the daughter of the Simon in publishing giant Simon & Schuster — this early proximity to storytelling seemed only to heighten her instinct for how it works and how to wield it. Her memoir, named after her seventh album, "Boys in the Trees," gives us an intimate look at this complex, self-questioning figure behind the hits.

The early sense of being miscast, it seems, would follow her throughout a life filled with beauty, talent, intelligence, and trauma. Simon is unsparing as she charts everything from childhood sexual abuse and a lifelong struggle with anxiety, to sexism in the studio and a marriage to troubled folk legend James Taylor that played out like a Greek tragedy. For every celebrity anecdote (and there are many), there's a gritty undercurrent of a woman constantly testing the limits of how much vulnerability the world will allow her.

This list is devoted to memoirs that hand the mic back to female musicians. We aimed to find stories told in their own words, on their own terms. Each title has earned its place through highly regarded critical acclaim and copious glowing reader reviews in online communities of readers (Goodreads, Reddit, and Amazon). The focus stayed on well-written words that told these women's stories in their own words, on their own terms. We wanted books that uniquely pull the curtain back on the myths of fame to reveal the defiant, complicated realities of the women behind the sound. Each one offers a different kind of access, but together, they form an inspirational chorus of icons who rewrote the rules.