Looking for literary agents for your memoir? Here’s a list of agencies that sold a client’s memoir to a publishing house in 2024. That means the deal was closed in 2024. It’s likely the memoir itself may not be published for 12-18 months after its acquisition.

I created the list to save time for people writing memoir who are not celebrities and who are seeking an agent despite all the experts opinionating about how this is a difficult if not impossible task in today’s publishing environment. The list proves that memoirs continue to appear, which means that a decent number of them continue to sell. And despite protestations to the contrary, agents who have sold one memoir are all on the lookout for the next great memoir that seems to come from nowhere. Publishing phenomena such as the first three that popped into my head: Educated. Untamed. The Glass Castle.

If you’re serious about appealing to at least one of the agencies in my list of literary agents for memoir, you need to do your research and prepare thoroughly. For example:

• Study the memoirs the agent represents. Are they all by women authors? Are they all sports-related? In other words, are the stories they tell similar in some way? If yours is similar in the same or clearly adjacent way, then that agent is a possibility. If yours is not, then don’t waste time—yours or theirs.
• Does your manuscript address a bigger theme or question? It’s no longer enough to write a brilliant account of the events and emotional trajectory of your personal story. Today’s memoirs need to bring a fresh perspective on a broader issue—economic, racial, geographical, cultural, as diverse examples—and ideally speak to a larger truth about the human condition.
• If the agent’s memoir writers are all celebrities and/or have their own TV show or hit podcast, move on.
• Make sure your comparison titles are all memoirs. You must stay in your publishing lane. Also, make sure most (if not all) of your comp titles have been published within the past five years. This establishes that there’s an active market of potential buyers of your book. See my guidelines to writing comp titles.
• I’ll come out and name the elephant in the endless room of online publishing advice: make sure your writing is publisher-ready. Literary agents for memoir are spoiled by choice, so can afford to be highly selective. Good books are built from the sentence up, and too many aspiring authors of memoir rush into literary agent submissions without sufficient attention to the quality of the writing itself. Word choice, tone, mood, story—these are the things that captivate a reader, professional or otherwise, and keep them reading.
• When seeking third-party help to improve your writing, submissions materials, or manuscript as a whole, please do not waste money on folks who do not have commercial (trade) publishing experience as an author or editor. They are likely well meaning but simply not equipped to assist you get your work to the standard expected.