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.

Toward the end of Tom Coughlin’s new memoir about Super Bowl XLII, when his New York Giants defeated the previously unbeaten New England Patriots in arguably the greatest upset in pro-football history, he recalls the immediate aftermath of that 17–14 victory. “The moments afterward are kind of a blur,” he writes. “The confetti rains down, you raise the Lombardi trophy at a midfield podium, and for the next few hours it’s like you’re in a dream world, being taken from one place to the next, carried along by your happiness. It took forever to get to the locker room; I never actually got the opportunity to give that one speech to all the guys where I could say, We are world champions.”

Coughlin’s observation attests to more than his own state of mind. He has also identified the occupational hazard of the usual championship-season memoir by a player or coach: a lack of critical distance from the events. To that understandable myopia can be added another, commercial factor. The typical how-we-won-that-title book is produced in haste so it can be released before the next football (or baseball or basketball or whatever) season, which begins roughly six months ahead. The “writing process” generally involves the manager or coach or athlete being interviewed by a journalist co-author, who massages the transcripts into a publishable narrative.

Fittingly enough, the genre of the football autobiography began with the legendary Green Bay Packers, first with Run to Daylight!, the head coach Vince Lombardi’s diary about the 1962 NFL championship team. That was followed five years later by Instant Replay, the offensive lineman Jerry Kramer’s memoir of the Packers’ 1967 season, in which they held off the Dallas Cowboys in an NFL title game played in 13-below weather (remembered as the “Ice Bowl”) and then routed the Oakland Raiders in the second Super Bowl. So fresh did those books seem that the title of each became part of sports lexicon.

In the more than half a century since, though, what was once unique has become obligatory and rote. There are post–Super Bowl books by Bill Walsh, Jimmy Johnson, Bill Parcells, Jon Gruden, and Doug Pederson, among many others. I say this without disparagement. In a sense, these coaches are just doing what presidential candidates do when they crank out a first-person book in time for their primary campaign. And yet, from a literary standpoint, the risks are very evident.

[Read: I saw horrific things when I played in the NFL]

“In truth,” the author and former NFL player Pat Toomay told me, “it takes time for all of the disparate elements to rise up and assemble themselves into a cohesive whole.” Practically speaking,  the experienced co-author Nathan Whitaker explained in an email, “the typical championship memoir is … attempting to analyze the prior season, and synthesize those events into a narrative of ‘here’s how we did it,’ all the while attempting to do it again (for the next season). There’s an element of the Heisenberg principle.”

What immediately separates Coughlin’s A Giant Win is its timing. He wrote about the 2008 Super Bowl nearly 15 years after the fact. By then, he was in his mid-70s and retired. As odd as the comparison may be, Coughlin’s perspective, and his focus on a single game, made me think of Patti Smith’s luminous memoir Just Kids. Rather than recount her entire protean career, the middle-aged, widowed Smith looked back on a specific moment in time, when she and Robert Mapplethorpe were young artists trying to make their names in New York. And something else intrigued me about Coughlin’s decision to undertake his book when he did. During the summer of 2021, he wrote a wrenching and unflinching op-ed essay in The New York Times about his wife’s affliction with progressive supranuclear palsy—he described it as “a brain disorder that erodes an individual’s ability to walk, speak, think and control body movements”—and his physically and emotionally draining experience of serving as her caregiver. The article revealed a vulnerability, a nakedness, very different from Coughlin’s long-standing image as a rigid disciplinarian who was prone, paradoxically, to explosions of temper on the sideline.

The open question as I began reading my way into A Giant Win, though, was whether Coughlin and his co-author, Greg Hanlon, could transcend the limits of the championship memoir. Coughlin convincingly establishes the dramatic tension at the outset. The Giants had entered the 2007 season with fans and media exhausting their patience with Coughlin as head coach and Eli Manning as quarterback. In the pair’s three previous seasons together, the Giants had gone a mediocre 25–25, including two first-round losses in the playoffs. Manning had sealed his reputation as a wildly inconsistent player—equally capable of fourth-quarter comebacks and drive-killing interceptions—and Coughlin had cemented his as an irascible hard case known for demanding that team meetings start five minutes ahead of schedule. As he recounts in the book, New York’s tabloids were calling for his firing, star players such as the defensive end Michael Strahan were alienated, and even his family was deeply concerned; one son asked him, “Is it worth it?”

Ultimately, of course, Coughlin decided to stay at the Giants’ helm. Thanks to stalwart offensive and defensive lines, the team earned a wild-card playoff berth with its league-leading sacks and power running. Manning was Manning, mercurial as ever, winning 10 games even as he tied two other quarterbacks for the dubious honor of leading the NFL in interceptions. (In the one Giants game I attended that season, he tossed four, three of them returned for touchdowns, in a 41–17 humiliation by the Minnesota Vikings.) In the playoffs, however, Manning suddenly performed flawlessly as the Giants defeated favored Tampa Bay, Dallas, and Green Bay, all on the road.

Those improbable victories set up the seemingly impossible task of toppling the New England Patriots. The Patriots entered the Super Bowl unbeaten at 18–0 and had set what were then regular-season records for team points (589), Tom Brady’s touchdown passes (50), and Randy Moss’s TD catches (23). The team’s precision was computerlike, beyond human. If Manning and Coughlin, in their respective affects, brought to mind Dennis the Menace and Mr. Wilson, the scamp and the curmudgeon, then Brady and the Patriots head coach Bill Belichick were a matched set of cyborgs.

[Read: The bathos of Brady]

All of this exposition helps explain why A Giant Win has the potential to succeed as a gridiron page-turner. Within those pages, Coughlin effectively breaks down key plays. He shares inside details, such as the fact that the wide receiver Plaxico Burress sprained his knee slipping in the shower during game week and was barely able to play on an unstable leg. But those tidbits, however juicy, only hint at the deeper, more textured qualities that elevate A Giant Win from so many similar books.

The proximity of death and the prospect of failure recur in Coughlin’s narration: serving as an altar boy for funerals in the parish church; losing a favorite player, Jay McGillis, on his Boston College team to leukemia; having his own son, Tim, who worked for a financial-services company in the Twin Towers, evacuate just in time to survive on September 11, 2001.

Two of the most penetrating scenes featuring Giants players depict them at moments of personal crisis. During his rookie season, Manning panics against the Baltimore Ravens’ fierce defense and, after his team’s disastrous performance, shows up in Coughlin’s office “extremely emotional—near tears.” More like a son with his father than a player with his coach, Manning pleadingly promises, “I know I can be the quarterback of the New York Giants. And I know we can win.”

The other episode centers on David Tyree, a reserve wide receiver mostly used on special teams. Soon after Coughlin was hired by the Giants in 2004, Tyree was arrested for possession of half a pound of marijuana. Begging Coughlin not to cut him, Tyree “[broke] down in tears, asking for another chance. He owned up to everything he’d done, but said he’d changed. He said he had become religious and had dedicated himself to God.” Despite his own reputation for zero tolerance, Coughlin writes, “my intuition told me he was sincere.”

Coughlin’s emphasis on his bonds with Manning and Tyree fits masterfully into his retelling of the 2008 Super Bowl, because those two players were the leading actors in the game’s episode of highest drama. From the second after it happened until the present day, the play has been known as “the Helmet Catch,” and it has been rated by some sports journalists as the greatest play in Super Bowl history. Trailing the Patriots 14–10 with about 1:15 remaining, not even across midfield, the Giants had a third down with five yards to go. As soon as Manning took the snap, he was besieged by Patriots rushers. Hardly a scrambler by nature, Manning managed to tear himself away from two different defenders, retreat to an open spot, and heave a pass far downfield. Tyree leaped to grab it, protecting the ball from a Patriots defensive back by pinning it against his helmet. That 32-yard gain to the Patriots’ 24 set up the Giants for their final push toward Manning’s game-winning pass to Burress, with 39 seconds left.

The standard-issue Super Bowl book would wrap things up tidily from there. But after Coughlin devotes a few pages to the Giants’ victory parade in Lower Manhattan’s Canyon of Heroes and their celebratory visit to the White House, he turns to a somber epilogue, simply titled “Judy.” Judy is Coughlin’s wife, and he tenderly rolls time back to their courtship in high school and then forward through the adult years, when she forwent her own career as a teacher and a coach to be a mother and a wife, handling most of the domestic and emotional labor during her husband’s climb up the coaching ladder through Boston, Green Bay, Jacksonville, and New York.

“For decades, while I pursued my career and worked around the clock, Judy had been looking forward to a period in our lives where I’d be retired and we could enjoy our time together,” Coughlin writes with palpable remorse. “The disease has stolen that from her. As for me, the disease has stolen my wife from me while she’s still alive.” Instead of walking together on the beach, swimming in the ocean, and listening to Celine Dion albums, in their last years together, Tom guided Judy’s wheelchair and gazed into her eyes for a flicker of recognition. (Judy died in November 2022, when A Giant Win was in production and unable to be amended.)

[Read: The dark pageant of the NFL]

“The repetitiousness of everything is mind-numbing,” Coughlin admits of the toll of his caregiving. “I lose my sense of time and self. I’m mentally and physically exhausted.” And then, with painstaking understatement, Coughlin explains what compelled him to return in memory to a Super Bowl from 15 years earlier: “But as time has passed, I’ve been able to draw on some of the virtues I’ve tried to embody … Those are the same virtues shown by the 2007 Giants.”

I do not mean to oversell A Giant Win as a literary achievement. When it comes to memoir, Tom Coughlin is no Patti Smith. His language is plain, not poetic, and he reveals periodic weaknesses for clichés and sentimentality. Within the football canon, despite its gifted co-author, Coughlin’s book does not approach the stateliness and sweep of the genre’s masterpiece, When Pride Still Mattered, David Maraniss’s biography of Vince Lombardi.

Yet Coughlin has delivered far more than the norm: incisive analysis and description of the game itself, empathetic attention to human nature, and a moving comprehension of the tragic nature of life. It’s not only at the Super Bowl, you realize by the final pages, that the clock inexorably ticks down to zero.