# List of memoirs by first ladies of the United States

Fourteen first ladies of the United States have written a total of twenty-three memoirs. The first lady is the hostess of the White House, and the position is traditionally filled by the wife of the president of the United States, with some historical exceptions. Every memoir by a first lady published in the 20th and 21st centuries has been a bestseller, at times outselling those of their presidential husbands.
In the early 1800s, Abigail Adams had her correspondence published as Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, and Louisa Adams "made several attempts at an autobiography", though she never sought to publish them. The Memoirs and Letters of Dolley Madison, Wife of James Madison, President of the United States were published in 1886 but were actually edited by Lucia Cutts and written by Dolley Madison's niece Mary Cutts.
Julia Grant was the first to write and attempt to publish her memoirs, writing The Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant in the 1890s after the death of her husband Ulysses S. Grant. However, she never found a suitable publisher for them before her death in 1902, in part because she had unrealistic expectations of their value. The memoirs were eventually published in 1975. Helen Taft was the first to have memoirs published during her lifetime, in 1914. Memoirs by presidential spouses were uncommon until the 1970s; in the decades after Taft, only Edith Wilson, Grace Coolidge, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lady Bird Johnson wrote and published their memoirs. Coolidge had her memoirs published in the 1930s as several articles in The American Magazine. Most first ladies have written and published at least one memoir about their life since Betty Ford's publication of her first memoir in the late 1970s.
Early published memoirs focused on relatively trivial matters, often largely focusing on the first lady's personal life. Helen Taft's memoirs were described by The New York Sun as "bright, witty, delightfully entertaining reminiscences" upon publication, and Edith Wilson's My Memoir was criticized by contemporary reviewers such as The New York Times for excessively focusing on clothing and social events. Eleanor Roosevelt, who wrote four autobiographies, marked a shift in the content of the memoirs, writing more about political issues and less on her personal life. Lady Bird Johnson condensed a dictated two-million-word transcript into 300,000 for A White House Diary, which outsold her husband Lyndon B. Johnson's memoir. In the 1960s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was involved in editing two books by Molly Thayer, Jacqueline Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years.
Memoirs written by Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter and Barbara Bush also outsold the memoirs of their husbands. My Turn by Nancy Reagan, published in 1989, was nicknamed My Burn for its "vengeful" coverage of Reagan's life, particularly in the White House. The book sold very well, remaining on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than three months. Michelle Obama's memoir Becoming was published in 2018. She received over $60 million in advance of publication, and the book had sold over 11.5 million copies as of November 2019. Melania Trump published her memoir Melania in 2024.

## Memoirs

| Title | First lady | Publisher | Year | Identifier |
| Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant | Julia Grant | Putnam Publishing Group | 1975 | ISBN 978-0-399-11386-4 OCLC 1362819 |
| Recollections of Full Years | Helen Taft | Dodd, Mead & Company | 1914 | OCLC 1071952821 |
| My Memoir | Edith Wilson | Bobbs-Merrill Company | 1939 | OCLC 300015696 |
| This is My Story | Eleanor Roosevelt | Harper & Brothers | 1937 | OCLC 1222392544 |
| This I Remember | Eleanor Roosevelt | Harper & Brothers | 1949 | OCLC 1222358304 |
| On My Own: The Years since the White House | Eleanor Roosevelt | Harper & Brothers | 1958 | OCLC 1007583041 |
| The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt | Eleanor Roosevelt | Harper & Brothers | 1961 | OCLC 241967 |
| A White House Diary | Lady Bird Johnson | Holt, Rinehart & Winston | 1970 | ISBN 978-0-03-085254-1 OCLC 247688211 |
| The Times of My Life | Betty Ford | Harper & Row | 1978 | ISBN 978-0-06-011298-1 OCLC 1089520085 |
| Betty: A Glad Awakening | Betty Ford | Doubleday | 1987 | ISBN 978-0-385-23502-0 OCLC 624464837 |
| First Lady from Plains | Rosalynn Carter | Houghton Mifflin | 1984 | ISBN 978-0-395-35294-6 OCLC 608350043 |
| Everything to Gain: Making the Most of the Rest of Your Life | Rosalynn Carter | Random House | 1987 | ISBN 978-0-394-55858-5 OCLC 1020180943 |
| Nancy: The Autobiography of America's First Lady | Nancy Reagan | HarperCollins | 1980 | ISBN 978-0-688-03533-4 OCLC 5613799 |
| My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan | Nancy Reagan | Random House | 1989 | ISBN 978-0-394-56368-8 OCLC 19921006 |
| Barbara Bush: A Memoir | Barbara Bush | Scribner | 1994 | ISBN 978-0-02-519635-3 OCLC 733651482 |
| Reflections: Life After the White House | Barbara Bush | Scribner | 2004 | ISBN 978-0-7432-5582-0 OCLC 57355785 |
| Living History | Hillary Clinton | Simon & Schuster | 2003 | ISBN 978-0-7432-2224-2 OCLC 961885123 |
| Hard Choices | Hillary Clinton | Simon & Schuster | 2014 | ISBN 978-1-4767-5144-3 OCLC 900303720 |
| What Happened | Hillary Clinton | Simon & Schuster | 2017 | ISBN 978-1-5011-7556-5 OCLC 1003606642 |
| Spoken from the Heart | Laura Bush | Scribner | 2010 | ISBN 978-1-4391-5520-2 OCLC 669262090 |
| Becoming | Michelle Obama | Crown Publishing Group | 2018 | ISBN 978-1-5247-6313-8 OCLC 1079014347 |
| Where the Light Enters: Building a Family, Discovering Myself | Jill Biden | Flatiron Books | 2019 | ISBN 978-1-250-18234-0 OCLC 1198401967 |
| Melania | Melania Trump | Skyhorse Publishing | 2024 | ISBN 978-1-5107-8269-3 OCLC 1456034308 |