It’s a been a bumper year for biographies and memoirs: here Ysenda Maxtone Graham has

 When The Going Was Good Graydon Carter Grove Press UK £20, 432pp

‘You never know when you’re in a golden age. You only realise it was golden when it’s over.’ So writes Graydon Carter, of the glittering world of Vanity Fair magazine in New York in the 1990s, when he was editor.

He recounts the lavish expenses handed to journalists in those carefree days: staff given interest-free loans to buy apartments; writers put up in luxury hotels for months while they researched pieces; a cosmetician coming into the office once a month to ‘do’ everyone’s eyebrows.

Working at Spy magazine in the 1980s, Carter took a vehement dislike to Donald Trump and branded him ‘the short-fingered vulgarian’. Trump has been defensive about his finger-length ever since.

The Heart-Shaped Tin Bee Wilson Fourth Estate £18.99, 320pp

One August day in 2020, food writer Bee Wilson was fetching clothes from the washing machine when a cake tin fell out of the cupboard at her feet. It was the heart-shaped tin she had used to bake her wedding cake in.

Two months previously, her husband of 22 years had walked out. The tin seemed imbued with their marriage, and with the loss of it. This was the catalyst for her moving book on the emotional power of inanimate objects.

She draws on her own family’s kitchen objects (a rotary whisk, a melon-baller) and interviews people from all over the world for whom humble kitchen objects have meant a great deal. They range from a beloved tomato-shaped salt-shaker in New York to a spoon secretly fashioned out of metal by a Jewish slave labourer in a Nazi factory.

Not That I’m Bitter Helen Lederer Mirror Books £20, 288pp

In her wonderfully funny, self-deprecating memoir, comedian Helen Lederer (who played Catriona in Absolutely Fabulous) describes growing up in south-east London, larking about with schoolfriends and dousing herself in Chic by Yardley. Via the Edinburgh Fringe, she worked her way to stardom when comedy was a male preserve.

She ascribes the fact that she had too much sex in her early 20s as ‘partly due to the middle-class upbringing of not knowing how to say no without sounding rude.’

She’s hilarious about her looks. When on steroids for asthma, her face was so puffy that ‘I looked like an emoji in a hairband’. She asked her boyfriend Dave if he thought her beautiful. He replied, ‘I’m an artist. I can see beauty in anything.’ She speaks for us all when she writes, ‘I needed counselling, so booked a session with my hairdresser.’

Funny Thing, Getting Older, And Other Reflections Michael Morpurgo Hodder Press £20, 336pp

Watching Great Expectations on Boxing Day 1961, Michael Morpurgo’s mother exclaimed, ‘Oh my God! It’s your father!’

The actor playing Magwitch was indeed Morpurgo’s estranged father, Tony Bridge. His mother had left him after the War, to marry Jack Morpurgo. Tony had played no part in Michael’s or his brother’s upbringing.

In his collation of articles and lectures, the children’s author describes experiences that inspired his stories. In a Devon pub he met a First World War veteran who described the trenches, saying, ‘My horse, he was my best friend.’

That was the seed for War Horse, which became a literary and theatrical sensation.

A Thousand Feasts Nigel Slater Fourth Estate £20, 368pp

Nigel Slater has come a long way since his childhood in a small house in the Midlands, where the kitchen ‘smelled of warm ironing and wet dog’.

Although he still loves a bacon sandwich, his gastronomic life is now mainly exquisite and exotic. In Japan, a tiny cube of tofu ‘sits in a clear, glistening moat of ponzu sauce on an old blue and white dish. I have genuinely never seen anything more beautiful.’

His daily habits, he tells us in his collection of culinary and domestic snapshots of his life, include rising before six every morning, two cups of green tea per day, the morning one from an ash-glaze mug and the afternoon one from one of his collection of tea bowls, and daily writing by candlelight with a fountain pen.

Electric Spark Frances Wilson Bloomsbury £25, 432pp

Muriel Spark was ‘the loneliest and most singular figure on the 20th-century literary landscape’, writes Frances Wilson in her penetrating, deeply thoughtful biography of the author of The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie and A Far Cry From Kensington.

Considered ‘almost untouchable’ for being a divorcee, a single mother (not that she was maternal; her son Robin was mainly brought up grandparents) and ambitious, Spark forged a career as an author and novelist, as her love affairs foundered.

But, Wilson writes, ‘she never understood how to be famous, how to present a public face at the same time as protecting the private artist’.

A Life And A Half Chris Bryant Bloomsbury £25, 336pp

In his scintillating memoir, Labour minister Chris Bryant recounts his journey from repressed gay Anglican priest to liberated MP, via the gay nightclubs of 1990s London.

The call to be ordained came when he was on tour with the National Theatre. ‘I didn’t suddenly get pious. Nor did I intend to join a monastery. In fact, that evening I went to bed with a member of the cast.’

You have to salute the voters of Rhonnda who elected him as an MP in 2001, not put off that he was English, gay, privately educated and a former Tory.

His aunt Jean Gracie left her multi-million-pound estate to him in her will, although he’d asked her not to, and he gave each of his cousins hefty sums from the estate, keeping just enough to look after his alcoholic mother.

The Slow Road North Rosie Schaap Mariner Books £20, 272pp

After her husband Frank died of cancer, 39-year-old New York author Rosie Schaap felt an urge to get away from Brooklyn, the epicentre of her grief.

‘Flight is my habitual response to unhappiness,’ she writes, in this clear-minded memoir of grief and healing.

The place she chose to move to was the tiny coastal village of Glenarm in Northern Ireland. She’d always felt an affinity with the country: its straight-speaking people and its natural beauty. As a new resident, she helped in the process of making Glenarm’s primary school the first Catholic school in Northern Ireland to become fully integrated, with Catholics and Protestants. ‘I felt I’d done something to help the village to heal. And I felt that I was healing too.’

Inside Boris Becker HarperCollins £22, 352pp

Just one postcode digit – SW19 to SW18 – separated Boris Becker from the lavish world of Wimbledon, where he’d won the Men’s Singles Championship aged 17 in 1985, and the fungus-sprouting cell in Wandsworth Prison where, aged 55, he spent the first month of his 2022 prison sentence for serious misconduct in his bankruptcy proceedings.

His unflinching memoir immerses us in the screams of men who he thought must be trying to kill themselves. All normal for night-time in jail, he’d soon find out.

Transferred to Huntercombe Prison, he was paid £1.05 per shift for cleaning floors and lavatories in the gym. Flashbacks to a glittering past life of success and extravagance form a riveting backdrop.

Becker is forensic about his naivety, and the mistakes he has made. He’s grateful to his girlfriend Lilian, when she could so easily have walked away.

Unbreakable Melvyn Downes Ebury Spotlight £22, 320pp

‘Never back down.’ That’s what Melvyn Downes’ father, a Windrush immigrant, said to Melvyn when he was bullied walking home from school to the council estate in Stoke-on-Trent.

That advice became Downes’ mantra. Encountering racism from other candidates when he applied to the SAS, he decided, ‘There’s no way in a million years I’m leaving this selection process before any of you.’

There’s a guilty pleasure in sitting on a sofa reading about the physical and mental challenges that push men to their limits in the trials for that elite corps. The racist candidates dropped out from exhaustion. Downes kept going. His visceral memoir takes us from Welsh marshes to sweaty jungles to the lawlessness of post-invasion Iraq.

Tart Slutty Cheff Bloomsbury £16.99, 336pp

Working 16-hour shifts in high-end London kitchens, the anonymous 20-something cook who goes by the name ‘Slutty Cheff’ is obsessed with both cooking and sex. They meld into one another in the sleepless exhilaration of her existence. Of one of her succession of casual lovers, she writes, ‘After a day handling dead meat in the kitchen we can’t wait to handle each other.’ Slutty Cheff’s uninhibited Instagram posts caused such a sensation last year that she was given her own column in Vogue. In her breathless, swear-word-riddled memoir, she throws us into her life of chilli-chopping, fish-deboning and orgasms.

Remember When Fiona Phillips Macmillan £22, 336pp

Of the million people with dementia in the UK, just 70,000 are aged under 65. The former GMTV presenter Fiona Phillips is one. She was diagnosed aged 61. And she of all people knew what a terrifying diagnosis it was. She’d seen both her parents ravaged by the incurable disease.

At first, unwilling to face the truth, she ascribed her symptoms to menopause. ‘There wasn’t one overnight descent into confusion or darkness, it was more like a never-ending trudge down a tunnel, each step taking me further from the light.’

Towards the end of her powerful book that begins with great positivity, Fiona has gone downhill so much that she’s unable to write. Her husband Martin takes over. ‘Bit by bit, it takes everything. Through time, even the most glamorous, glittering star – such as Fiona was – will be wiped away.’ Martin knows that new drugs allowed on to the market (as a result of drugs trials Fiona bravely took part in) will be too late to help her – and so many others.

Source Code Bill Gates Allen Lane £25, 336pp

‘Think smart, Trey, think smart.’ That was Bill Gates’s competitive grandmother Gami training young Bill (nicknamed Trey) in the art of card games. She never let him win. Gami was just one element of what Gates sees as the incredible luck of his childhood: ambitious, supportive parents who gave him space to be the unconventional boy he was; excellent teachers; a group of kindred-spirited friends – and access to a computer near his school in Seattle.

There’s lots to savour in this effervescent memoir of the boy who’d go on to found Microsoft while still a student at Harvard. It reminds us that in order to progress, the world needs geeky specialists so obsessed with their hobby that they work for 36 hours, forget to shower and sleep on the floor beside their desks.

Gates pays homage to his schoolfriend Kent Evans, who was born with a deformed mouth but did not let that hamper him in any way. Visionary and optimistic, he pushed Bill to think financially from an early age. Gates recalls the tragedy of Kent’s death in a mountaineering accident while still a teenager. ‘He had already had a profound effect on who I was.’

Me, You, Them Evie Sage Michael Joseph £20, 384pp

When Evie Sage (not her real name) and her husband can’t conceive a baby, the pain feels bottomless.

She goes right off sex. Her husband suggests they try a threesome.

They contact a stranger online, meet up with her, and have sex at a nearby Travelodge. Alongside their conventional life running a collection of holiday cottages in Scotland, Evie and her husband enter with gusto into a new existence of threesomes and foursomes.

They go to sex-themed events, where they watch each other at work in cages and hot tubs. ‘Dress code: black lingerie for the women with long black capes and masks. Black tie for the men.’

Their marriage is invigorated. ‘We are not foolish enough to think we can offer each other everything,’ Sage writes. But, goodness, it sounds exhausting.

Dave & Me Lili Myers Ebury Spotlight £22, 304pp

How can the irrepressible life force that was Hairy Biker Dave Myers be gone from this Earth? His widow Lili, in her beautiful memoir about their marriage and life after his death from cancer in 2024 aged 66, writes that he still had so many plans: for cooking, biking, making programmes with his fellow HB Si King, and (not least) being her adored husband, homemaker and stepfather of her two children.

Dave’s generous character zings off the pages of this book. ‘What are the chances that two people from such different backgrounds, such different countries and with such different experiences of life would meet and fall deeply in love?’ Lili grew up queuing for food in communist Romania; Dave grew up in Barrow-in-Furness. His first BBC job was as a make-up and prosthetics artist.

They met on location in Romania. Lili worked at the hotel he stayed in and became the interpreter. They had 20 years of happiness.

For Dave’s sake, we must live it up this Christmas, as he did. Put on the Father Christmas hats, get cooking, and serve ‘love on a plate’.

Hearth Of Darkness Matt Blake Elliott & Thompson £16.99, 256pp

Traumatised by divorce, Matt Blake was relieved to buy a small Victorian house in Walthamstow: a secure home for him and his four-year-old daughter Jasmine, of whom he had joint custody. ‘I’d imagined stepping from the shadow of divorce into a house wreathed in light and happiness.’

But the house had a creepy atmosphere. Weird things kept happening: the radio switching on in the middle of the night, tapping sounds, and the appearance of slugs. Matt discovered that the house had been lived in by a rapist and murderer known as ‘the E17 Nightstalker’.

In his highly readable and self-deprecating memoir, he recounts his obsession with the house’s past and his efforts to get to the bottom of the phenomena. Perhaps, he surmises, ‘the house was never haunted at all. Rather, it was me. Haunted by my own past, and by the past of this house, my anxiety took on a life of its own, turning the building into a mirror for my inner turmoil.’