Matt Knott’s Choice Of Favourite Memoirs

passing a room with an exercise bike that I imagined Carolyn punishing herself on each morning. Horace was chubby and chirpy, with a weird familiarity which made me wonder if he had got me confused with another tutor. But no—it was that upper class confidence again. Beyond that, Horace didn’t present much evidence of his heady days in the lower end of the top third. He was keen to get this over with, but appeared to think it was something that would happen without any input from him.

‘What did you think of the text?’ I asked.

‘I haven’t read it,’ Horace said cheerily. ‘But I’ve seen the film.’

‘Oh, OK. What did you think of that?’

Horace stared at me as if this question couldn’t possibly have been anticipated.

‘To be honest, I wasn’t really watching.’

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood. One of the most eccentric and hilarious books about family I have ever read, Lockwood clearly adores her parents as much as they confound her.

Heartburn by Nora Ephron. Technically a novel, this is a thinly veiled account of Ephron’s split from her husband Carl Bernstein. Rarely has anyone been so savagely funny about their enemies.

Who Killed My Father by Édouard Louis. A brief, heart-stopping book about Louis’s relationship with his (still living) father and the social policies that failed them both.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. An unsparing memoir of grief which makes room for moments of grace such as

Didion’s morning strolls around Central Park with her husband, sometimes walking together, sometimes going their separate ways.

Dress Your Family In Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris. I’ve read all of Sedaris, but this was the book that first introduced me to his unique blend of selfdeprecation and grotesque ego.