The Best Nonfiction Books of 2025 So Far

Streaming has forever changed how we consume and share music—we know this, and yet the degree to which platforms like Spotify have altered the creation and distribution of one of our oldest and most important art forms is still murky, at best. For Mood Machine, music journalist Liz Pelly built on her years of industry knowledge with meticulous reporting to pull back the curtain on how this impenetrable business really works, with results that will enlighten and disturb you. Pelly lays out the ramifications of one major company becoming the arbiter of the music industry—from the loss of artist revenue to a lack of incentive for true creativity—and shares her suggestions for fighting back.

Art world fixture Sarah Hoover’s new memoir is a no-holds-barred account of her experience with post-partum depression: the good, the bad, and the ugly. Emphasis on bad and ugly. Hoover approaches the common yet still taboo topic with wit, vulnerability, and a true desire to share the reality of becoming a mother and the ways in which it deeply challenged her physically, mentally, emotionally, and within her marriage to the artist Tom Sachs. Despite her seemingly enviable and Instagrammable life—or maybe because of it—Hoover’s willingness to get real about the unexpected hard parts of new motherhood is a welcome moment of truth in a culture oversaturated with sunny platitudes about childbearing.

A year after releasing Pretty Baby, a revealing documentary about her rise from child model to global star, Brooke Shields is continuing to tell her story with a memoir. Where Pretty Baby focused on Shields’s early experiences in the entertainment industry (its title referencing the infamous 1978 film in which, at age 11, she appeared nude), her book takes on the other end of the age spectrum. Weaving in reporting with her own life experiences, Shields takes aim at the wall of negativity surrounding women’s aging, from physical beauty to internal vitality. As a 59-year-old woman with a lifetime in Hollywood under her belt, she’s uniquely positioned to address the topic.

Imani Perry is the rare writer who can turn thought-provoking, deeply reported nonfiction works into poetic prose. The MacArthur Fellow’s 2022 critically lauded book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for that very reason. Her newest work, Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, traces the history of the color blue and its unique relationship with the Black experience—from indigo plantations to the musical genre—offering profound revelations on spirituality, humanity, nature, and emotion along the way.

In a time where young people are supposedly squeamish about sex, Edmund White’s new memoir relishes in describing his seven-plus decades of explicit encounters. The celebrated 85-year-old writer’s humorous and revealing tour through his sexual and romantic past also functions as a unique oral history of queer culture, as he remembers intimate moments from his closeted youth in the 1950s Midwest, through the Stonewall era and height of HIV, to the thoroughly modern practice of app dating.

In this memoir-in-essays, Lola Kirke describes—with cutting humor—her sophisticated childhood in a West Village brownstone, where she was the youngest of four siblings (including actress Jemima and singer and doula Domino). With a rockstar dad and fashion designer mom, Kirke’s life included a revolving door of eccentric, glamorous people and parties—a curse and a blessing for a child. Wild West Village pulls back the curtain on the much mythologized nepo baby childhood, as envied as it is maligned, and the winding path toward self-discovery Kirke’s sent her on.

Josephine Baker’s candid memoir, Fearless and Free, has been translated into English for the first time since its publication in 1949. The book was initially released in France, where the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and activist spent most of her life. It includes Baker’s memories of becoming a style star of the Roaring Twenties with her infamous banana skirt, signature bob, and associations with artists like Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, her work as a spy for the French Resistance during WWII, and her participation in key moments of the American Civil Rights movement. Fearless and Free is both a close look at one woman’s prolific life and a walk through some of the most pivotal moments of 20th-century history.

Kelsey McKinney has made a career out of gossip—the culture writer launched a podcast dedicated to it, Normal Gossip, to fill the social void created by the pandemic, and her new book delves into the boundaries, history, and joys of the oft-maligned practice. If gossip is so bad, why have humans always done it, and what are the ways in which it actually binds communities together? You Didn’t Hear This From Me explores these questions through the lens of our social media, celebrity-obsessed culture with the same wit and candor that make McKinney’s podcast so popular.

Saturday Night Live celebrates 50 years on air this February, and a new biography about its singular creator, Lorne Michaels, hits shelves at the same time. Susan Morrison’s book draws on interviews with Michaels himself, as well as his friends, collaborators, and tons of SNL stars and writers—including Tina Fey, Dan Aykroyd, Will Ferrell, and John Mulaney—to give a raucous account of how he managed to sustain one of the most successful and impactful careers in showbiz for five decades. Despite the ubiquity of his output, Michaels himself is less understood. Morrison’s biography aims to give a clearer picture of the enigmatic man whose influence on American pop culture really can’t be overstated.

In her 2014 book Yes Please, Amy Poehler wrote of her divorce from fellow comedian Will Arnett: “When you are a person going through a divorce you feel incredibly alone, yet you are constantly reminded by society of how frequently divorce happens…You aren’t allowed to feel special, but no one knows the specific ways you are in pain.” Haley Mlotek’s No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce explores that painful fault line between the highly personal yet statistically common experience of ending a marriage. She weaves personal essays and social and literary commentary together to investigate the enduring institution of marriage and its purpose in the modern era—and her own particular journey toward reinventing herself as a millennial divorcée.

Actress Ione Skye has been a Gen X icon since playing high school valedictorian Diane Court in Cameron Crowe’s 1987 Say Anything, in which she’s the dreamy recipient of John Cusack’s infamous boombox stunt. But the real sixteen-year-old Skye was battling her own demons at the time. As the title suggests, in her new memoir, she reveals all of her vulnerable truths, from being abandoned by her folk music star father, Donovan, to dropping out of high school, to searching for love through a string of complicated relationships with musicians, including Red Hot Chili Pepper frontman Anthony Kiedis and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz. In the twisty coming-of-age memoir, Skye also writes of discovering her bisexuality, the implosion of her marriage, and her ultimate quest for self-acceptance outside of the golden cage of fame.

When Scaachi Koul set out to write her second book of essays, the writer and culture critic thought she’d be exploring her happy new marriage on the page. But, as the title of Sucker Punch, life had other plans, including the pandemic, divorce, job loss, and a cancer diagnosis for her mother. Instead of shying away from these more difficult topics, Koul covers them all in her new book with her signature incisive wit, giving a raw look at the messier side of life and, specifically, the ways in which we handle interpersonal conflict.

Amy Griffin is a successful businesswoman and mother who—despite appearing to have it all together in that picture-perfect way modern women are ‘supposed to’—found herself running from deeply repressed trauma. She was running literally and figuratively, busying herself in activity and seeking external validation to cover up a festering wound that she just couldn’t escape. The Tell follows Griffin’s journey to the heart of her pain, using modes of therapy like psychedelics to reconnect with and recover from her past.

Explorations of Joan Didion’s influence are never in short supply (just look to last year’s Didion & Babitz), but New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson trains a very specific lens on the storied writer in her new book. Playing off Didion’s famous White Album opener, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Wilkinson looks to mythmaking as the basis of her biography, focusing on Didion’s work in Los Angeles (and especially as a Hollywood screenwriter) to tell a broader story about the enduring power of American archetypes and mythos.

In 2020, chef-turned-mogul David Chang released his book Eat a Peach, which was part memoir, part apology for his notoriously explosive temper both in and outside the kitchen. It was received as one more revelation of bad behavior in a year of endless public reckoning, but more interesting was a viral response essay from Hannah Selinger, a former sommelier at Chang’s Michelin-starred Momofuku Ko. Now, the James Beard-winning writer has expanded that story into a memoir of her own, recalling her tenure in the volatile but often rewarding restaurant industry and what it took for her to finally leave it.

The name Graydon Carter is synonymous with the golden age of magazines; the Canadian journalist served two decades as the editor of Vanity Fair, co-founded Spy magazine in 1986, and currently helms Air Mail, a publication for the digital age. In his new memoir, When the Going Was Good, Carter recalls his time at VF, in some ways picking up where his predecessor Tina Brown left off with her 2017 tell-all The Vanity Fair Diaries, just as he did when he took over the glossy from her in 1992. It’s filled with details and anecdotes from the glory days of print publishing—from swanky dinners and the still influential Vanity Fair Oscars Party, to the complex decision-making that goes into creating a magazine.

When Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrea Long Chu drops a new essay, the internet pays attention. Now, there’s a whole collection of Chu’s smart, often-blistering brand of writing. Authority, a collection of Chu’s work on everything from novels and theater to video games, explores whether the concept of authority can still exist in a world where everyone has their own opinion-sharing platform. Chu makes the case that cultural criticism does still matter—and shares an example of how to do it right along the way.

Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, has played an outsized role in the success of her superstar daughter’s career and life. While the secretive pop star rarely gives a candid interview, Ms. Tina, as fans affectionately call her, has written a memoir telling her side of the story. Matriarch begins with Knowles’s upbringing in 1950s Galveston, Texas, as the youngest of seven, tracing her lineage—and work ethic—back through her matriarchal line, reflecting on the most impactful stories and traditions handed down to her. From there, it follows her life’s journey to becoming the globally influential figure she is today. While the Bey Hive will certainly love this one, there are lessons and stories beyond its Beyoncé lore.