Alicia Keys

More Myself is built partly as oral history: Keys tells her own story, then hands the microphone to her mother, her husband, Oprah Winfrey and others, so a reader gets the version she believes alongside the version people around her saw. Her childhood was Hell's Kitchen in New York, her training classical piano, signed at fifteen to a deal that went badly, and fought her way out of it to make Songs in A Minor. The book is candid about the years spent performing a version of herself she thought the industry wanted, and about deciding to stop wearing makeup in public, which drew more comment that year than anything musical she did.