Every memoir author eventually confronts the same question: Who cares?

Sometimes you hear that taunt in your head late at night as you try and fail to sleep. Maybe it’s the voice of an old acquaintance whose respect you once craved. Or worse, perhaps this voice sounds like your own, the most insecure and anxious version of you. The truth is, it’s never not a little embarrassing when someone hears that you’re writing a book and asks you what it’s about.

“Uhh … me … it’s about me … my life … it’s a memoir.”

If and when you venture down this particular writing path, you’ll quickly discover that memoirs are not diaries. The best don’t work solely from the author’s biased, Hollywood-style recollections, where every character is either “good” or “bad.” Lives, and memories, are more complicated than that.

Memories aren’t merely scenes; they’re microscopic moments: powder sticking to your fingers after scarfing a funnel cake; holding your right arm out of the passenger window to feel it bounce in the wind; the hilarious whine of middle-school voices singing along with Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder.

Some of the strongest memoirs don’t just describe how something happened; they reveal something larger about the world the author and the reader share—even if they don’t know they share it. Frequently, the writer’s biggest revelations uncover, or unlock, something the audience didn’t know was inside of them.

What does it take to try to bring those past events to life on a page? As I learned while writing my memoir, Life on Delay, it requires interrogating what we thought we knew, both through research and talking with other people—the nonfiction subgenre known as “reported memoirs.” These six books are some of the finest of the form.

Simon and Schuster

The Night of the Gun, by David Carr

Carr, the late New York Times media columnist, published the definitive reported memoir in 2008 when he set out to investigate his life—going straight at his history with substance abuse. Crucially, he probes the validity of his own memory: He uses his training as a journalist to interview individuals from all corners of his past. As you would imagine, these conversations are revelatory. Take the titular example: Carr recounts a particularly grim night when he showed up high at the house of his friend Donald, who was menacingly holding a gun. When he and Donald speak about this event decades later, Donald remembers it quite differently: “I never owned a gun … I think you might have had it.” Carr goes deep on the complexities of marriage and fatherhood, and offers a portrait of the ever-changing newspaper industry. The work is profoundly honest—he doesn’t exactly portray himself as a hero. This book influenced my own memoir in many ways. For starters, it gave me the inspiration to interview my kindergarten teacher, my sixth-grade girlfriend, and, later, my family.

[Read: Whatever you write, there you are]

Catapult

All You Can Ever Know, by Nicole Chung

Chung, an Atlantic contributing writer, tells her story of transracial adoption and reconnection with her biological family in her excellent debut memoir. Although Chung’s story is unique, her writing about belonging, parenting, and connection is widely relatable. Her prose is understated, unflinching, and flat-out fierce (in the best way). She poignantly describes how her early childhood peers—all white—viewed her, the only Korean girl in class, with confusion. Like many adoptees, she yearns for the real story of how she ended up as a member of a different family. Instead of a straightforward answer, she finds a set of competing narratives, but excavating her history reshapes—and ultimately strengthens—her own family bonds. I just started reading a galley of her next book, A Living Remedy, out this April: It’s about navigating loss, grief, family, and distance during the coronavirus pandemic. I can’t wait for it to reach the wider world.

Scribner

After Visiting Friends, by Michael Hainey

Certain questions haunt us for decades. For Hainey, a magazine journalist with stints at Esquire, GQ, and Spy, who’s now the deputy editor of Air Mail, that haunting involved a family ghost. He spent years wondering: How did his father die? After Visiting Friends is his intimate, noirish pursuit of the answer that his extended family and others close to his parents refused to give. The book’s subtitle is simple and artful: A Son’s Story. Hainey’s goal with this project is not merely to get to know the dad he lost when he was 6 years old but to find meaning and fulfillment in the search itself. Like Carr, he walks us through midwestern newsrooms and barrooms with crystalline detail and precise imagery. Although many will read it as a father-and-son book, in a major way, it’s really about Hainey and his mom. As he seeks an answer to his big question, he ends up posing another: What happens when you ask what you’re not supposed to ask?

[Read: She never meant to write a memoir]

Doubleday

Stay True, by Hua Hsu

You probably saw this book on virtually every 2022 best-of list, and rightfully so. Stay True packs so much heart and texture into its 208 pages that you may not even realize the depth of what you consume if you breeze through it. (It’s an impressively fast read.) Hsu has produced easily one of the best nonfiction books about friendship ever, right up there with Patti Smith’s Just Kids. Rather than telling his whole life story, Hsu zeroes in on his college years, specifically his life-changing relationship with Ken, a friend who was murdered before the two graduated. He turns to his enviable music library as a portal to these years. We don’t just picture Hsu goofing off in front of a video camera; we practically hear Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s canonical mid-’90s banger “Tha Crossroads” in the background. As a music obsessive, I was hooked on Stay True right from the epigraph page, which offers a couplet from Pavement’s 1994 slacker-rock anthem “Gold Soundz”: “Because you’re empty, and I’m empty / And you can never quarantine the past.” The back half of that lyric is Hsu’s thesis statement, as is the book’s cover (designed by The Atlantic’s Oliver Munday), which is a photo of Ken pointing a camera back at the photographer: Even when telling part of a friend or loved one’s story, we’re still setting out to tell our own.

Harper Perennial

The Art of Memoir, by Mary Karr

Karr’s name has been synonymous with “memoir” ever since her mega-bestseller The Liars’ Club helped solidify the so-called memoir boom three decades ago. I became a lifelong Karr fan back in college after reading her follow-up, Cherry, in a freshman-year creative-writing seminar. When I took a brief leave from The Atlantic to start writing my own memoir, my wife surprised me with a paperback of The Art of Memoir, Karr’s how-to guide; aptly, it is a quasi-memoir. Far from a textbook or self-help book, The Art of Memoir is a meditation on reading, craft, and revision. Karr teaches in the MFA program at Syracuse University and brings a professor’s warmth to the text. She doles out indispensable advice, such as how to let a single moment tell the story of a whole year of your life. More than anything, she shows you how to go to that place you’re probably too afraid to go when you sit down to write. I would recommend this book to any writer—fiction or nonfiction—at any stage of their career.

[Read: David Foster Wallace, Mary Karr, and the dangerous romance of male genius]

Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), by Jeff Tweedy

Dutton

It’s not fair when someone so good at one thing turns out to be so good at another thing. Tweedy, the Wilco frontman, released one of my favorite music memoirs of all time in 2018. Let’s Go credibly challenges Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Keith Richards’s Life, and Anthony Kiedis’s Scar Tissue, even if Tweedy is decidedly less famous than all three. He takes us through his formative years and deep inside the rise and fall of Uncle Tupelo, his old trio that more or less invented “alt-country.” In Carr–esque fashion, he also periodically passes the mic to his wife and others, offering interstitials and rebuttals to certain events. I’ve never read a book that elicited such a huge range of emotions in me as a reader. At times, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, such as when he recounts how, as a young boy, he tried to convince his childhood friends that he wrote a Bruce Springsteen song. Other times, it’s achingly sad, namely when he describes his journey through drug addiction and rehab and, more recently, the death of his father. This Atlantic story about some of Tweedy’s favorite song lyrics will give you an idea of how closely he pays attention to both rhythm and pithiness as a writer. His next book, World Within a Song, coming this fall, appears to set out to show how the music we love doesn’t merely provide a soundtrack to our existence; it actually shapes our life.

Let’s say you’re a politician in a close race and your opponent suffers a stroke. What do you do?

If you are Mehmet Oz running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania, what you do is mock your opponent’s affliction. In August, the Oz campaign released a list of “concessions” it would offer to the Democrat John Fetterman in a candidates’ debate, including:

“We will allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with an earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff, in real time.” And: “We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.”

Oz’s derision of his opponent’s medical condition continued right up until Oz lost the race by more than 250,000 votes. Oz’s defeat flipped the Pennsylvania seat from Republican to Democrat, dooming GOP hopes of a Senate majority in 2023.

A growing number of Republicans are now pointing their finger at Donald Trump for the party’s disappointments in the 2022 elections, with good reason. Trump elevated election denial as an issue and burdened his party with a lot of election-denying candidates—and voters decisively repudiated them.

But not all of Trump’s picks were obviously bad. Oz was for years a successful TV pitchman, trusted by millions of Americans for health advice. The first Muslim nominated for a Senate run by a major party, he advanced Republican claims to represent 21st-century America. Oz got himself tangled up between competing positions on abortion, sometimes in consecutive sentences, precisely because he hoped to position himself as moderate on such issues.

But Oz’s decision to campaign as a jerk hurt him. When his opponent got sick, Oz could have drawn on his own medical background for compassion and understanding. Before he succumbed to the allure of TV, Oz was an acclaimed doctor whose innovations transformed the treatment of heart disease. He could have reminded voters of his best human qualities rather than displaying his worst.

The choice to do the opposite was his, not Trump’s.

[Adam Serwer: The cruelty is the point]

And Oz was not unique. Many of the unsuccessful Republican candidates in 2022 offered voters weird, extreme, or obnoxious personas. Among the worst was Blake Masters, a candidate for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He released photos and campaign videos of himself playing with guns, looking like a sociopath. He lost by nearly five points. Trump endorsed Masters in the end, but Trump wasn’t the one who initially selected or funded him. That unsavory distinction belongs to the tech billionaire and Republican donor Peter Thiel, who invested big and early in the campaign of his former university student.

Performative trolling did not always lead to failure. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis indulged in obnoxious stunts in 2022. He promoted anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists. He used the power of government to punish corporations that dissented from his culture-war policies. He spent $1.5 million of taxpayer money to send asylum seekers to Martha’s Vineyard.

But DeSantis was an incumbent executive with a record of accomplishment. Antics intended to enrapture the national Fox News audience could be offset by actions to satisfy his local electorate: restoring the Everglades, raising teacher pay, and reopening public schools early despite COVID risks.

DeSantis’s many Republican supporters must now ponder: What happens when and if the governor takes his show on the road? “Pragmatic on state concerns, divisive on national issues!” plays a little differently in a presidential race than it does at the state level. But the early indications are that he’s sticking with divisiveness: A month after his reelection, DeSantis is bidding for the anti-vax vote by promoting extremist allegations from the far fringes that modern vaccines threaten public health.

A generation ago, politicians invested great effort in appearing agreeable: Ronald Reagan’s warm chuckle, Bill Clinton’s down-home charm, George W. Bush’s smiling affability. By contrast, Donald Trump delighted in name-calling, rudeness, and open disdain. Not even his supporters would have described Trump as an agreeable person. Yet he made it to the White House all the same—in part because of this trollish style of politics, which has encouraged others to emulate him.

[Ilana E. Strauss]: How science explains why some politicians are jerks

Has our hyper-polarized era changed the old rules of politics? James Poniewozik’s 2019 book, Audience of One, argues that Trump’s ascendancy was the product of a huge shift in media culture. The three big television networks of yore had sought to create “the least objectionable program”; they aimed to make shows that would offend the fewest viewers. As audiences fractured, however, the marketplace rewarded content that excited ever narrower segments of American society. Reagan and Clinton were replaced by Trump for much the same reason Walter Cronkite was replaced by Sean Hannity.

It’s an ingenious theory. But, as Poniewozik acknowledges, democratic politics in a two-party system remains an inescapably broadcast business. Trump’s material sold well enough in 2016 to win (with help from FBI Director James Comey’s intervention against Hillary Clinton, Russian hackers amplified by the Trump campaign, and the mechanics of the Electoral College). But in 2020, Trump met the political incarnation of the Least Objectionable Program: Joe Biden, who is to politics what Jay Leno was to late-night entertainment.

Trump-led Republicans have now endured four bad elections in a row. In 2018, they lost the House. In 2020, they lost the presidency. In 2021, they lost the Senate. In 2022, they won back the House—barely—but otherwise failed to score the gains one expects of the opposition party in a midterm. They suffered a net loss of one Senate seat and two governorships. They failed to flip a single chamber in any state legislature. In fact, the Democrats gained control of four: one each in Minnesota and Pennsylvania, and both in Michigan.

Plausible theories about why Republicans fared so badly in 2022 abound. The economy? Gas prices fell in the second half of 2022, while the economy continued to grow. Abortion? The Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June, and Republican officeholders began musing almost immediately about a national ban, while draconian restrictions began spreading through the states. Attacks on democracy? In contest after contest, Republicans expressed their contempt for free elections, and independent voters responded by rejecting them.

All of these factors clearly played a role. But don’t under-​weight the impact of the performative obnoxiousness that now pervades Republican messaging. Conservatives have built career paths for young people that start on extremist message boards and lead to jobs on Republican campaigns, then jobs in state and federal offices, and then jobs in conservative media.

Former top Trump-administration officials set up a well-funded dark-money group, Citizens for Sanity, that spent millions to post trolling messages on local TV in battleground states, intended to annoy viewers into voting Republican, such as “Protect pregnant men from climate discrimination.” The effect was just to make the Republicans seem juvenile.

In 2021, then–House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy posted a video of himself reading aloud from Dr. Seuss to protest the Seuss estate’s withdrawing some works for being racially insensitive (although he took care to read Green Eggs and Ham, not one of the withdrawn books).

Trump himself often seemed to borrow his scripts from a Borscht Belt insult comic—for instance, performing imagined dialogues making fun of his opponent’s adult children during the 2020 campaign.

This is not a “both sides” story. Democratic candidates don’t try to energize their base by “owning the conservatives”; that’s just not a phrase you hear. The Democratic coalition is bigger and looser than the Republican coalition, and it’s not clear that Democrats even have an obvious “base” the way that Republicans do. The people who heeded Representative Jim Clyburn’s endorsement of Joe Biden in South Carolina do not necessarily have much in common with those who knocked on doors for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign. Trying to energize all of the Democratic Party’s many different “bases” with deliberate offensiveness against perceived cultural adversaries would likely fizzle at best, and backfire at worst. On the Republican side, however, the politics of performance can be—or seem—rewarding, at least in the short run.

This pattern of behavior bids fair to repeat itself in 2024. As I write these words at the beginning of 2023, the conservative world is most excited not by the prospect of big legislative action from a Republican House majority, and not by Trump’s declared candidacy for president in 2024 or by DeSantis’s as-yet-undeclared one, but by the chance to repeat its 2020 attacks on the personal misconduct of President Biden’s son Hunter.

In the summer of 2019, the Trump administration put enormous pressure on the newly elected Zelensky administration in Ukraine to announce some kind of criminal investigation of the Biden family. This first round of Trump’s project to manufacture an anti-Biden scandal exploded into Trump’s first impeachment.

The failure of round one did not deter the Trump campaign. It tried again in 2020. This time, the scandal project was based on sexually explicit photographs and putatively compromising emails featuring Hunter Biden. The story the Trump campaign told about how it obtained these materials sounded dubious: Hunter Biden himself supposedly delivered his computer to a legally blind repairman in Delaware but never returned to retrieve it—so the repairman tracked down Rudy Giuliani and handed over a copy of the hard drive. The repairman had also previously given the laptop itself to the FBI. Far-fetched stories can sometimes prove true, and so might this one.

Whatever the origin of the Hunter Biden materials, the authenticity of at least some of which has been confirmed by reputable media outlets, there’s no dispute about their impact on the 2020 election. They flopped.

Pro-Trump Republicans could never accept that their go-to tactic had this time failed. Somebody or something else had to be to blame. They decided that this somebody or something was Twitter, which had briefly blocked links to the initial New York Post story on the laptop and its contents.

So now the new Twitter—and Elon Musk allies who have been offered privileged access to the company’s internal workings—is trying again to elevate the Hunter Biden laptop controversy, and to allege a cover-up involving the press, tech companies, and the national-security establishment. It’s all very exciting to the tiny minority of Americans who closely follow political schemes. And it’s all pushing conservatives and Republicans back onto the same doomed path they followed in the Trump years: stunts and memes and insults and fabricated controversies in place of practical solutions to the real problems everyday people face. The party has lost contact with the sensibility of mainstream America, a huge country full of decent people who are offended by bullying and cruelty.

There’s talk of some kind of review by the Republican National Committee of what went wrong in 2022. If it happens, it will likely focus on organization, fundraising, and technology. For any political operation, there is always room to improve in these areas. But if the party is to thrive in the post-Trump era, it needs to start with something more basic: at least pretend to be nice.

* Lead image source credits: Chris Graythen / Getty; Ed Jones / AFP / Getty; Drew Angerer / Getty; Paul Hennessy / SOPA Images / LightRocket / Getty; Michael M. Santiago / Getty; Brandon Bell / Getty; Win McNamee / Getty; Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty; Alex Wong / Getty

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Party of Trolls.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.