Five inspirational autobiographies and memoirs for Christmas

I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll, Alan Edwards 

Edwards has been described as the godfather of modern music PR, but he could equally be seen as its Forrest Gump too. Personality-wise, the amiable and sharp-as-a-tack Edwards – credited with reinventing music PR with the Outside Organisation where he represented everybody from Bowie to Winehouse – couldn’t be further removed from the goofball Gump, but he shares the chocolate-box hero’s capacity for having a front-row seat at epochal moments in pop history. Edwards has done it all: played football with Bob Marley, partied with Blondie in disco-era New York, been mentored by Mick Jagger, helped launch the Spice Girls, brokered the £1m mag deal for Posh and Becks’ wedding, had meetings with Tony Blair and was phone-hacked by the tabloids. As much a Haynes manual for working in celebrity PR as it is an enthralling, access-all-areas read.

I Was There: Dispatches from a Life in Rock and Roll by Alan Edwards is published by Simon & Schuster

• Read Influence’s interview with Alan Edwards 

Leading from the Back, Steph Houghton 

Steph Houghton captained England’s Lionesses in three tournaments, winning 121 caps before hanging up her boots this year. If you’ve expecting another identikit sporting memoir, think again: Houghton comes across as a savvy operator off-the-pitch, especially when recounting her negotiations with the FA and sponsors over contracts and bonuses at a time when executives were disparaging about women’s football (even as an England player, her salary at Arsenal was only £4,000 a year). Have some tissues nearby when you read this: there are several harrowing chapters where Houghton talks about caring for her husband, former Bradford City footballer Stephen Darby, who she married in 2018 just three months before he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Leading from the Back by Steph Houghton is published by Sphere

Shattered, Hanif Kureishi 

On Boxing Day 2022 the writer Hanif Kureishi was sat at a table in his Rome apartment watching football on iPad when he suddenly felt dizzy. He stood up, fainted and landed on his neck. Since then, Kureishi has been paralysed, unable to walk, feed or wash himself or even scratch himself when he has an itch. The man responsible for masterworks Buddha of Suburbia and My Beautiful Laundrette can’t even hold a pen to write his own name. Shattered is Kureishi’s memoir of his first year of his new reality as tetraplegic. Having dictated in a series of dispatches to his wife and sons, his unflinching reflections on being newly-disabled are laced with his trademark dark humour too.

Shattered by Hanif Kureishi is published by Hamish Hamilton

A Beginner’s Guide to Dying, Simon Boas 

2024 has been a big year for high-profile cancer news, with Kate Middleton, King Charles, Chris Hoy (who has his own memoir All That Matters out this Christmas too), Lauren Laverne and Steve McQueen all having been diagnosed with or treated for the Big C. Amid all the grim news, aid worker Simon Boas died of throat cancer in summer 2024, aged just 47 (as he acknowledges in this book, smoking an estimated 200,000 cigarettes in 30 years may have contributed). As the tumours spread around his body, Boas penned three columns for the Jersey Evening Post, which soon went viral due to their unstinting optimism (as Boas explained, having lived longer than most humans in history, he really has no grounds for complaint). These articles have been expanded into a book which fuses thought-provoking reflections on “joining the choir invisible” (as Boas puts it), advice on behaving around the terminally-ill, along with a look-back on a life well-lived: Boa’s work took him to war zones from Bosnia to the Gaza Strip, seen him been shot in the leg, and get off on an attempted murder-charge in Vietnam.

A Beginner’s Guide to Dying by Simon Boas is published by Swift 

A Woman Like Me: A Memoir, Diane Abbott 

Abbott made history when she was elected the UK’s first Black female MP in 1987. Sadly, her career has constantly been dogged by racism, from the teachers who believed she couldn’t get into Cambridge (she did and graduated with a degree in history) to the bricks thrown through her window while standing as an MP in the 1980s to the horrific online abuse in recent years (in the run-up to 2017’s general election, Abbott was on the receiving-end of half of all abusive tweets sent to female MPs). Now mother of the House of Commons, she looks back with her trademark outspokenness, especially when discussing being a single mum in parliament or being cold-shouldered by Labour leaders Kinnock, Blair and Brown. Best bits? Her account of dating a young Jeremy Corbyn, including spending an alcohol-free Christmas of “true socialist frugality” in his parents’ freezing home and going on a ‘romantic’ date to Karl Marx’s tomb in Highgate cemetery.

A Woman Like Me by Diane Abbott is published by Viking

Christian Koch is an award-winning journalist, editor, content strategist and brand consultant.