What books a life-story coach is reading and reviewing into 2021
If you want to be a better writer try reading a book.
And if you want to be a truly better writer read the best books!
Indeed that’s the mission I’ve set myself for the latest Forever Young Autobiographies life-story reading list.
The best life stories of 2020 list features writers from Australia, United Kingdom and the USA.
And it includes first-time writers and bestsellers.
Plus the best bit is I’ll be writing a review for each book during 2021 with tips to help us all when we sit down to write.
So dive in and take a look at what autobiographies, memoirs, biographies and other life-stories made the cut for the best life stories of 2020 …
Related article – Best books of 2019: Must-read books about life stories to enjoy this summer
Related article – Best books of 2018: Must-read books about life stories to enjoy these holidays
Your Own Kind of Girl: The stories we tell ourselves and what happens when we believe them by Clare Bowditch, Allen & Unwin
Australian Book Industry Awards Matt Richell New Writer of the Year 2020
ARIA Award-winning singer and actress Clare Bowditch confronts her inner critic in this no-holds-barred memoir.
“This is the story I promised myself, aged twenty-one, that I would one day be brave enough – and well enough – to write.”
Clare Bowditch has always had a knack for telling stories.
Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives.
But what of the stories she used to tell herself?
That ‘real life’ only begins once you’re thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.
Your Own Kind of Girl reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare’s life for better and for worse.
Related article – Book review: Anxiousness, hope and Your Own Kind of Girl by musician Clare Bowditch
When All is Said & Done by Neale Daniher with Warwick Green, Pan Macmillan Australia
Australian Book Industry Awards Biography of the Year 2020
“A wise man said, ‘Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.’I understand the wisdom of this – right now, I don’t have much ‘forwards’ left.”
Neale Daniher sat down to pen a letter to the grandchildren he’ll never get to know.
And then he kept on writing …
In 2013, the Australian Football League legend was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease – a cruel and incurable condition.
He had a choice. He could spend his remaining time focused on himself, or he could seize the opportunity to make a better future for others.
From the hard-won wisdom of life on the land and the love of his family, to the triumphs and gutting lows of elite football, Neale has learnt to make the most of the cards he’s been dealt – to always live with purpose and to appreciate what he has.
Related article – Book review: AFL coach pens When All is Said and Done while fighting MND
Fallen: The inside story of the secret trial and conviction of Cardinal George Pell by Lucie Morris-Marr, Allen & Unwin
The Walkley Awards Book Award 2020
The dramatic story of the trial of ‘God’s treasurer’ for child sex abuse, and the conviction that sent ripples around the world.
There was an eerie silence in the packed courtroom as everyone looked towards the foreman of the jury.
‘Guilty’ he pronounced five times.
The third most senior Catholic cleric in the world had been found guilty of sex crimes against children, bringing shame to the Church on a scale never seen before in its history.
Investigative journalist Lucie Morris-Marr was the first to break the story that Cardinal George Pell was being investigated by the police.
In this riveting dispatch, she recounts how the cleric was trailed by a cloud of scandal as he rose to the most senior ranks of the church in Australia, all the way to his appointment by Pope Francis to the position of treasurer in the Vatican.
So take a front row seat in court with the author as she reveals the many intriguing developments in the secret legal proceedings which the media could not report at the time.
Related article – Book review: Walkley award-winning Fallen by investigative journalist Lucie Morris-Marr
Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, Bloomsbury Circus
British Book Awards Non-Fiction Narrative Book of the Year 2020
Lisa Taddeo spent eight years and thousands of hours tracking the women whose stories comprise Three Women, moving to the towns they lived in to better understand their lives.
All Lina wanted was to be desired. How did she end up in a marriage with two children and a husband who wouldn’t touch her?
All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court, a hated pariah in her small town?
All Sloane wanted was to be admired.
How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who liked to watch her have sex with other men and women?
Three Women is a record of unmet needs, unspoken thoughts, disappointments, hopes and unrelenting obsessions.
Related article – Book review: Love, desire and biography bestseller Three Women by Lisa Taddeo
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X by Les Payne and Tamara Payne, Liveright/ W. W. Norton & Company
Winner National Book Awards 2020 for Nonfiction and Winner 2021 Pulitzer Prize Biography
An epic biography of Malcolm X finally emerges, drawing on hundreds of hours of the author’s interviews, rewriting much of the known narrative.
Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly 30-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X – all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam figures, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the world.
His goal was ambitious: to transform what would become over a hundred hours of interviews into an unprecedented portrait of Malcolm X, one that would separate fact from fiction.
The result is this historic biography that conjures a never-before-seen world of its protagonist, a work whose title is inspired by a phrase Malcolm X used when he saw his Hartford followers stir with purpose, as if the dead were truly arising, to overcome the obstacles of racism.
Setting Malcolm’s life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century’s most politically relevant figures “from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary.”
Related article – Book review: Biography The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, a leader in racial equality
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser, Ecco/ HarperCollins Publishers
Pulitzer Prize in Biography 2020
The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face.
No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag.
Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture.
She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo.
She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money – and when many gave in.
No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers.
Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based.
Related article – Book review: Sontag: Her Life and Work, a biography of writer Susan Sontag
Final say: Best life stories of 2020
The Forever Young Autobiographies best life stories of 2020 book list is out and filled with great holiday reading.
Indeed it has life stories by footballers to singers and everything in between.
Certainly there is a book to interest you!
So let’s get reading together and be entertained and motivated by these award-winning books.
And watch out for my upcoming book reviews of the best life stories of 2020!
Happy writing and reading!
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Your say on the best life stories of 2020
What are you reading or planning to read over the holiday season? Will you pick one of the listed best life stories of 2020? I always love hearing from different people. So drop me an email or leave a reply in the comments section at the end of this article.
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This article first appeared on the website Forever Young Autobiographies.com.
