Biography & Memoir

After defying her country's ban on woman drivers, Manal al Sharif was arrested. The outcry by people all over the world led to her release. She tells her story from growing up in Mecca, and adhering to the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to being a security engineer at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company.

Illustrator Marjane Satrapi is the author of the memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. The book is in the form of an illustrated comic. Satrapi was born in 1969 in Iran, and grew up in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution. One reviewer writes, "A triumph... Like Maus, Persepolis is one of those comic books capable of seducing even those most allergic to the genre."

David Sedaris' new book comes directly from his diaries from 1977-2002 and includes entries about everything from picking fruit and cleaning houses for a living, to going to art school, the life changing broadcast of his Santaland Diaries on Morning Edition, getting sober, and the deaths of his mother and sister.

Pamela Paul of The New York Times talks about her own new book, which chronicles every book she's read since she was 17 years old. Even if a work isn't great, she refuses to brush it aside cavalierly.

Actress Gabourey Sidibe made her acting debut playing a sexually and physically abused teenager in the film Precious. Since then she's co-starred in the TV series Empire, American Horror Story and The Big C. She has a new memoir.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist revisits the lives and deaths of his parents in his new memoir, Between Them. "As much as they loved me, an only child, they loved each other more," he says.

Comic W. Kamau Bell has spent much of his life feeling awkward. A self-described "tall, rangy black dude," Bell was often mistaken for a basketball player growing up — except that serious asthma and allergies meant he spent the bulk of his childhood indoors watching TV.

In her new memoir, "Sometimes Amazing Things Happen," psychiatrist Elizabeth Ford writes about the horror and the hope she found in treating Rikers inmates.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir by Dani Shapiro; it's her third memoir and it's about marriage. Her first two were best sellers.

Former Obama staffer Alyssa Mastromonaco is well acquainted with the privilege — and sleeplessness — of working in the White House: "I basically ran on adrenaline, almost, for six years," she says.

New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman's new novel, The Idiot, follows a young woman's first year at Harvard University, and how she finds love through email.

Jay Bakker is the son of televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. In 1989 his father, Jimmy, was convicted of defrauding his followers at the Praise The Lord ministry, and sent to prison. Then his parents divorced. Bakker was 13 years old at the time. In his new memoir, Son of a Preacher Man: My Search for Grace in the Shadows, (Harper), he writes of returning to faith after a long period of alcoholism and disillusionment. Jay Bakker now heads his own ministry, Revolution, in Atlanta, ministering to skateboarders, punk rockers, and hippies, and other neglected kids.

Buck's new memoir details his experiences in sports and life, including his addiction to hair-plug transplants. When it comes to announcing, he says, "I don't have a rooting interest for either side."

In addition to playing Princess Leia in the original Star Wars movies, Fisher was also the author of Postcards from the Edge and The Princess Diarist. Originally broadcast in 1990, 2004 and 2016.

Trevor Noah talks about growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa. His mother was black; his father white, and at the time Noah was born it was illegal for such couples to have intimate relations. His memoir is titled Born a Crime.

Lorraine Bracco's character on HBO's The Sopranos has the unenviable job of psychoanalyzing mob boss Tony Soprano. Bracco's career has plenty of mob connections: She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Now she has written a memoir, On the Couch.

Woodson won the National Book Award for young people's literature in 2014 for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and is a finalist for another NBA this year. Originally broadcast Dec. 20, 2014.

The 1960s show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In turned actress Goldie Hawn into a star. Later, she starred in the films Cactus Flower, Swing Shift, and Private Benjamin. Hawn's autobiography, written with Wendy Holden, is Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud.

Patti Niemi has been a percussionist for the San Francisco Opera Orchestra since 1992. She speaks with Fresh Air's Sam Briger about performance anxiety, muscle memory and her memoir, Sticking it Out.

As the wife of a Navy fighter pilot, memoirist Rachel Starnes has had much of her life — including where she lives and how often she gets to live with her husband — determined by his career.