A Celebration of
Great Opening Lines
in World Literature

Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court (2017)

Memoirs from sports figures rarely begin with memorable openings, but this first sentence from one of the sports world’s most interesting and articulate figures is a refreshing exception. It begins the book’s first chapter, titled “How I Discovered I was Black.“

Abdul-Jabaar continued: “Although I was born in the predominantly black community of Harlem in 1947, I was raised in a multiethnic housing project in the Inwood section of Manhattan. Our project consisted of seven buildings, each fourteen stories tall, with twelve apartments on each floor. That totaled 1,176 apartments. Basically, a small, crowded city.“

Murder & Madness: The Secret Life of Jack the Ripper (1992)

Abrahamsen continued: “Mary Anne Nichols was found dead, lying in a back street named Buck’s Row. Murders connected to theft or rape were common occurrences, and under ordinary circumstances the death of a prostitute would cause no more than a momentary ripple in the dark pool that was the East End. But these circumstances were not ordinary.”

Lincoln’s Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency (2018)

Abrams and Fisher continued in the first paragraph: “The Alton Express had covered the two hundred miles from Chicago in a quite acceptable nine hours. Hitt had tried with limited success to practice his shorthand on the ever-shaking rails. It had not surprised young Hitt that the carriage was far more crowded than he had previously experienced: the Peachy Quinn Harrison murder trial had attracted considerably more attention than might otherwise have been expected once it became known that Abe Lincoln was going to defend the accused killer.”

An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain (2004)

Ackerman’s opening words are a metaphorical tour de force, providing readers with a satisfying taste of what awaits them in the rest of the book. In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“The neocortex has ridges, valleys, and folds because the brain kept remodeling itself though space was tight. We take for granted the ridiculous-sounding yet undeniable fact that each person carries around atop the body a complete universe in which trillions of sensations, thoughts, and desires stream.”

“After the Laughs,” in The New Yorker (Aug. 16, 1993)

“The Hunger Artist,” in The New Yorker (Feb. 27, 2000)

“How Martin Luther Changed the World,” in The New Yorker (Oct. 23, 2017)

Acocella demonstrates here that a great opening line does not have to be short and punchy, it simply has to be well written. Her article was written to celebrate the five-hundredth anniversary of “Luther’s famous action,” which she quickly—and happily, I think—reminded us never actually happened.

“Heartbeats in the Night,” in Last Chance to See (1990)

This is the spectacular opening paragraph of one of the best travel essays I’ve ever read—Adam’s account of his visit to the Fiordland region of New Zealand in the late 1980s. This is writing at the level of virtuosity, and an extremely satisfying experience for any reader, and especially connoisseurs of travel writing.

Just when you think an essay’s opening words couldn’t get much better, Adams continues in the second paragraph: “Fiordland, a vast tract of mountainous terrain that occupies the southwest corner of South Island, New Zealand, is one of the most astounding pieces of land anywhere on God’s earth, and one’s first impulse, standing on a clifftop surveying it all, is simply to burst into spontaneous applause.”

And, remarkably, it gets even better as we move into the essay’s third paragraph: “It is magnificent. It is awe-inspiring. The land is folded and twisted and broken on such a scale that it makes your brain quiver and sing in your skull just trying to comprehend what it is looking at.”

Last Chance to See is a book of travel essays written by Adams as he and zoologist Mark Carwardine traveled the world in search of such exotic, endangered species as kakapos in New Zealand, komodo dragons in Indonesia, and white rhinos in Zaire. If you’re a fan of travel books and have not yet seen this one, make every effort to rectify the unfortunate situation as soon as you can. Adams’ writing skills are on dazzling display on almost every page, and you will never again look at some of the animals in the same way (about the kakapo, for example, Adams wrote: “You want to hug it and tell it everything will be all right, although you know that it probably won’t be”).

“Blind Panic,” in Last Chance to See (1990)

Twenty Years at Hull House (1910)

Some modern readers may find these words a bit too formal or old-fashioned, but I can’t read them without admiring the beautiful phrasing. Read it again—slowly this time, and pausing after each comma to let the words sink in—and I think you will know what I mean. I first read this opening paragraph many, many decades ago, and one phrase in particular—where character is formless but nevertheless settling into lines of future development—still comes to mind when I observe prepubescent children.

When We Walk By: Forgotten Humanity, Broken Systems, and the Role We Can Each Play in Ending Homelessness in America (2023

When I first read these opening words, I felt as if I’d been slapped on the side of the head. Like a new meme that had taken occupancy in my mind, the impossible-to-forget first sentence reverberated in my thoughts for days.

The words come from senior author Kevin Adler, who was thinking about his uncle Mark—a man who died at age fifty after spending over three decades struggling on and off the streets of Santa Cruz, California.

The haunting first sentence—and the rest of the book that followed—not only profoundly affected the way I viewed homeless people on the streets in my town, it inspired me to take some proactive steps I’d never taken before.

In a review of the book, Publisher’s Weekly said: “It’s a must-read for anyone interested in solving the problem of homelessness.” I was also pleased to include Adler’s first sentence in my Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (to be seen here).

“How to Mark a Book,” in The Saturday Review of Literature (July 6, 1940)

Prior to 1940, books were considered prize possessions, and it was uncommon for people to underline passages or scribble notes in the margins. Many, indeed, considered such actions to be a defacing of books. Adler, who was thrilled by the appearance of new, inexpensive reprint editions of classic books, directly challenged this viewpoint by writing in the second paragraph: “I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.”

The Angels and Us (1982)

How to Speak, How to Listen (1983)

I've got to be honest, I can't think of a better opening sentence for a book on the twin subjects of how to speak and how to listen.

Ten Philosophical Mistakes (1985)

These are the opening words of the Prologue to the book. Adler continued in the second paragraph: “Sixteen centuries later Thomas Aquinas echoed this observation. Paraphrasing it, he said in effect that little errors in the beginning lead to serious consequences in the end.“

Tuesdays with Morrie (1997)

This is a wonderful opening paragraph to what many people regard as the best non-fiction book of 1997—and one of the most touching and inspirational books of all time. In 1995, Albom was an acclaimed sports reporter at the Detroit Free Press when he learned that one of his favorite Brandeis University professors, Morrie Schwartz, was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease. The two men had been close in the 1970s, and Albom felt guilty about letting sixteen years pass with no contact. After reaching out to his former professor, Albom flew every week from Detroit to Boston to visit the 78-year-old Schwartz at his home (a newspaper strike in Detroit dictated the timing of the visits: every Tuesday for fourteen weeks).

Albom hoped the proceeds from an anticipated book might help to pay Schwartz’s medical bills, but he didn’t expect much. But after Tuesdays with Morrie was published in 1997, it spent four years on The New York Times Best Seller list, selling nearly twenty million copies (it was adapted into a popular 1999 made-for-tv film, with Jack Lemmon as Schwartz and Hank Azaria as Albom. The film received four Emmy nominations, winning three (Best Motion Picture Made for Television, Best Actor in a Motion Picture for Lemmon, and Best Supporting Actor for Azaria).

Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003)

In this simple but compelling opening sentence, Albright was referring to her term as U.S. President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, which was cut short after George H. W. Bush defeated Vice-President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. In the second paragraph, she continued: “Hoping to freeze time, I thought back to the phone ringing one December morning and the words, ‘I want you to be my Secretary of State,’ and to the swearing-in ceremony where my eagle pin came unstuck.”

Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948 (2012; with Bill Woodward)

A common gambit in the world of great opening lines is to begin by confidently walking down a path of certitude, and then abruptly changing course with a frank admission that you were wrong. Albright does that very nicely here, introducing the greatest surprise of her life. She continued in the second paragraph:

“I had no idea that my family heritage was Jewish or that more than twenty of my relatives had died in the Holocaust. I had been brought up to believe in a history of my Czechoslovak homeland that was less tangled and more straightforward than the reality. I had much still to learn about the complex moral choices that my parents and others in their generation had been called on to make—choices that were still shaping my life and also that of the world.”

“The Beckham of the Barre,” in London’s Telegraph (Jan. 4, 2003)

It’s rare for a newspaper’s book review to contain a world-class opening paragraph, but that’s exactly what happened in Allardice’s review of Colum McCann’s 2003 biographical novel, Dancer. For those not in-the-know, the catchy Beckham of the barre phrase was an allusion to David Beckham, one of the greatest professional soccer players of all time, and a true cultural icon in Britain.

“Merle Haggard: A Good ’Ol Boy Lets his Hair Hang Down,“ in Esquire (Sep. 1, 1981)

Allen continued, “That one innocent line sparked a mysterious alchemy that instantly shook Haggard—whose own parents had migrated from East Oklahoma to California in 1934—and the boys out of their road-weary doldrums. Hooting, howling, they just kept coming up with line after line. And thus was born what would ultimately become Haggard’s signature song, ’Okie from Muskogee.’“

As a Man Thinketh (1903)

Opening a book—especially a non-fiction work—with a great quotation is a time-honored practice, and it is especially effective when the quotation updates a legendary biblical passage (Proverbs 23:7). In the opening paragraph, Allen continued with one of his most widely quoted thoughts: “ A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts.“

It is not a stretch to regard Allen’s book as the father of modern self-help books, and one can see key elements of it in later works by Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, Og Mandino, and other giants of the genre. It is also a small irony that the great American self-help book publishing empire all began with a small book by an English philosophical writer.

Apropos of Nothing (2020)

In beginning his autobiography, Allen was inspired by the legendary opening line from Holden Caulfield in Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951): "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

In Apropos of Nothing, Allen continued with a lovely description of his father. And, as is typically the case with a man who is well known for his creative self-absorption, he found a way of bringing it all back to himself:

"Like my father, born in Brooklyn when it was all farms, ball boy for the early Brooklyn Dodgers, a pool hustler, a bookmaker, a small man but a tough Jew in fancy shirts with slicked-back patent leather hair a la George Raft. No high school, the Navy at sixteen, on a firing squad in France when they killed an American sailor for raping a local girl. A medal-winning marksman, always loved pulling a trigger and carried a pistol till the day he died with a full head of silver hair and twenty-twenty eyesight at a hundred. One night during World War I his boat got hit by a shell somewhere off the coast in the icy waters of Europe. It sank. Everyone drowned except for three guys who made the miles-long swim to shore. He was one of the three that could handle the Atlantic. But that's how close I came to never being born."

Paula: A Memoir (1994)

Allende began the book as a letter to her 28-year-old daughter Paula. In 1991, she was suffering from a serious liver disorder when a medication error put her into a drug-induced coma. Expecting an eventual recovery, Allende’s plan was to write her daughter a long letter describing everything she missed during her coma. When Paula died in 1992, Allende turned the book into a memoir.

Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses (1998)

Allende continued: “Walking through the gardens of memory, I discover that my recollections are associated with the senses.

My Invented Country: A Memoir (2003)

The Sum of Our Days: A Memoir (2008)

On January 8, 1981, Allende wrote a letter to her dying grandfather, a first cousin of Salvador Allende, the president of Chile from 1970-73. That letter would ultimately turn into her first novel, The House of the Spirits (1982). Ever since, Allende has officially started every one of her subsequent twenty-four books on January 8th. She went on to explain: “For twenty-five years, I have begun a book on that date, more from superstition than discipline. I’m afraid that if I begin on any other day the book will be a failure and if I let an eighth of January go by without writing, I’ll not be able to start for the rest of the year.“

The Soul of a Woman: On Impatient Love, Long Life, and Good Witches (2021)

This opening line—from Allende’s fifth memoir—is a nice reminder that many of our most important guiding beliefs were formed well before we developed a capacity for critical thinking. Allende continued: “I was born in 1942, so we are talking remote antiquity. I believe that the situation of my mother, Panchita, triggered my rebellion against male authority. Her husband abandoned her in Peru with two toddlers in diapers and a newborn baby. Panchita was forced to return to her parents’ home in Chile, where I spent the first years of my childhood.“

My Cross to Bear (2012)

These are the first words a reader sees after opening the book, and they appear on an enigmatic page that is simply titled “September 2001” (the words appear in italics in the book). After opening with this impressive “hook,” Allman also began the formal Prologue to the book quite memorably:

“It should have been the greatest week of my life, but instead I hit an all-time low. The Allman Brothers Band, the band my brother started, the band with our name on it, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I flat-out missed it. I was physically there, but otherwise I was out of it—mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You might say that I had the experience but missed the meaning. Why? The answer is plain and simple—alcohol. I was drunk, man, just shitfaced drunk, the entire time.”

Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (2014)

Books about the parallel lives of famous figures have been around since the Greeks (the first was Plutarch’s Parallel Lives in the 1st c. A.D.), but few have begun with a better opening sentence. Ambrose continued in the first paragraph:

“They were both war lovers, men of aggression with a deeply rooted instinct to charge the enemy, rout him, kill him. Men of supreme courage, they were natural-born leaders in a combat crisis, the type to whom others instinctively looked for guidance and inspiration. They were always the first to charge the enemy, and the last to retreat.”

The Cat Who Came for Christmas (1987)

The Cat and the Curmudgeon (1990)

In the book’s second paragraph, Amory continued: “Actually, Shakespeare didn’t say that about cats, he said it about people. And I suppose there will be some purists out there who will take me up on it. Technically they would have a point, but, frankly, it has always seemed to me that Shakespeare was overly concerned with people.”

Getting What You Want (1993)

These are legitimate words of wisdom—expressed eloquently, I might add—and I was delighted to discover them at the beginning of the Preface to Anderson’s book. These two sentences illustrate something I’ve often said about Great Opening Lines in non-fiction books: the best way to begin is to say something important, and to say it well.

A few pages later, in the opening sentence of Chapter One, Anderson also began nicely by employing the time-honored practice of posing a question that attempts to “frame” the matter under discussion: “Do you ever avoid saying what you want or how you feel for fear of how someone will react?”

Moving From Me to We (2012)

This is an unusual—and intriguing—way to begin a self-help book, and it turns out to be 100% true. Anderson continued: “In fact what she did was turned into a Showtime TV series. She wanted to step into a dramatically different adventure for the next chapter of her life story. She was moved to express another side of herself, and then write about it. You see, in her other life, she’s ‘a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology.’”

The woman’s real name was Dr. Brooke Magnanti, a highly trained English medical professional. In 2003, under the nom de plume Belle de Jour, she began writing a blog about her secret life as a sex worker. After receiving the Guardian’s Best Blog Award, de Jour’s profile increased dramatically, and she went on to write a number of bestselling books, some with terrific opening lines (see them here).

Mutuality Matters (2018)

After piquing our curiosity in her opening words, Anderson continued: “Santana explained, ‘To a greater degree over time, these friends, musical or not, seem to infuse my music and my life. And my friends say the same has happened to them.’ Then looking gently at the reporter, Santana asked, ‘Have you had that gratifying feeling of mutuality?’”

“Box Scores,“ in The Summer Game (1972)

Angell, often called “The poet laureate of sportswriters” (although he does not like the designation), continued: “The view from my city window still yields only frozen tundras of trash, but now spring is guaranteed and one of my favorite urban flowers, the baseball box score, will burgeon and flourish through the warm, languid, information-packed weeks and months just ahead.“

“Swingtime,“ in The New Yorker (Aug. 2, 1993)

Angell continued: “The batter’s box was his prize ring, and once he’d dug in there—with those gauntleted arms, the squashed-down helmet, the shades and the shoulders—all hearts beat faster.“

Let Me Finish (2006)

“This Old Man: Life in the Nineties,“ in The New Yorker (Feb. 9, 2014)

Angell wrote this when he was ninety-three years old, nicely demonstrating that he still possessed the writing chops of his younger years.

In the essay’s second paragraph, he continued: “Now, still facing you, if I cover my left, or better, eye with one hand, what I see is a blurry encircling version of the ceiling and floor and walls or windows to our right and left but no sign of your face or head: nothing in the middle. But cheer up: if I reverse things and cover my right eye, there you are, back again. If I take my hand away and look at you with both eyes, the empty hole disappears and you’re in 3-D, and actually looking pretty terrific today. Macular degeneration.”

Letter to My Daughter (2008)

This is a modest beginning, but it clearly telegraphs what is to follow. It is what is contained in the second paragraph that makes Angelou’s opening words memorable. There, she continued with an observation that encapsulated what went on to become one of her most popular quotations (I’ve presented it in italics to make it more obvious): “My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring, still.”

Prior to the book’s publication, many Angelou fans were puzzled by the title, for it was well known that her only child was a boy that she had given birth to at age seventeen. Angelou quickly cleared the matter up by dedicating the book to the daughter she never had. She also brought her introductory words to a close by writing:

“I gave birth to one child, a son, but I have thousands of daughters. You are Black and White, Jewish and Muslim, Asian, Spanish-speaking, Native American and Aleut. You are fat and thin and pretty and plain, gay and straight, educated and unlettered, and I am speaking to you all. Here is my offering to you.”

"Men, Women, Sex and Darwin," in The New York Times Magazine (Feb. 21, 1999)

"Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate," in The New York Times (July 23, 2002)

Angier continued: "Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious greed and sabers unsheathed, scientists have discovered that the small brave act of cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy."

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 (2012)

Applebaum continued: “All across the continent, hundreds of thousands of people were returning from Soviet exile, from forced labor in Germany, from concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps, from hiding places and refuges of all kinds. The roads, footpaths, tracks, and trains were crammed full of ragged, hungry, dirty people.“

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017)

Reading these dramatic opening words from one of America’s most respected historians, we quickly learn that the people of Ukraine have had a long history of suffering at the hands of authoritarian Soviet leaders. She continued: “Secret police reports and letters from the grain-growing districts all across the Soviet Union—The North Caucases, the Volga region, western Siberia—spoke of children swollen with hunger; of families eating grass and acorns; of peasants fleeing their homes in search of food. In March a medical commission found corpses lying on the street in a village near Odessa. No one was strong enough to bury them.“

Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery (1981)

A History of God (1993)

Armstrong begins by memorably reversing the conventional “In the beginning” narrative of the Old Testament—and then goes on to suggest that a primitive monotheism actually preceded the well-known polytheism of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. She continued: “He was not represented by images and had no temple or priests in his service. He was too exalted for an inadequate human cult. Gradually he faded from the consciousness of his people. He had become so remote that they decided that they did not want him anymore. Eventually he was said to have disappeared.”

Buddha (2001)

Armstrong continued: “In their view, no authority should be revered, however august; Buddhists must motivate themselves and rely on their own efforts, not on a charismatic leader. One ninth-century master even went so far as to command his disciples, ’If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha!’ to emphasize the importance of maintaining this independence from authority figures. Gotama might not have approved of the violence of this sentiment, but throughout his life he fought against the cult of personality, and endlessly deflected the attention of his disciples from himself.“

The Bible: A Biography (2006)

Mary Kay (Rev. Ed.; 1987)

The first edition of Ash’s memoir, originally published in 1981, opened in a very different way: “When I was seven years old, my daddy came home from the sanatorium. His tuberculosis had been arrested but not completely cured in his three years there, and he remained an invalid for the rest of my years at home, in need of a great deal of tender, loving care.”

In the revised edition, the paragraph about her father was retained, but placed a few paragraphs later—after she clearly took someone’s advice to open with words that would better convey her trademark wit and charm.

The Roving Mind (1983)

“Farewell—Farewell,” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (August 1992)

This is the dramatic opening paragraph of Asimov’s final published article, written just before his death at age 72 on April 6, 1992 (it was formally published six months later). In the second paragraph, he continued:

“It has always been my ambition to die in harness with my head face down on a keyboard and my nose caught between two of the keys, but that’s not the way it worked out.”

After writing more than 500 books and thousands of essays and articles, Asimov had no desire to ever retire—and there is no way he could have foreseen the circumstances surrounding his own death. While the official cause of death was listed as heart and kidney failure, it wasn’t until a decade later that his widow and other family members revealed that his heart and liver problems were the result of an HIV infection contracted from a blood transfusion during a 1988 triple bypass surgery.

I, Asimov: A Memoir (1994)

In every one of his 500-plus books, Asimov found a way to express his wry sense of humor—and in this one, it shows up in the very first sentence.

“Stranger Than Fiction,“ in The New York Times (June 23, 1991)

Atlas begins his powerful essay on the elusive nature of truth by doing what many writers in history have done: offering a quotable quotation from a familiar or famous figure. Atlas continued in the first paragraph: “Trying to establish the age of Hogarth House, where he and Virginia Woolf once lived, Woolf unearthed such a tangle of contradictory evidence that he was left marveling at ’the impossibility of telling the truth, the extraordinary difficulty of unearthing facts.’“

Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Prose, Poetry, and Eureka (1950)

Auden continued: “Next to oblivion, the two fates which he most fears are becoming the name attached to two or three famous pieces while the rest of his work is unread and becoming the idol of a small circle which reads every word he wrote with the same uncritical reverence.“

“One of the Family,“ in The New Yorker (Oct. 23, 1965)

Auden was referring to David Cecil’s 1964 biography of Max Beerbohm.

"Shakespeare's Sonnets" (1964), in Forewords and Afterwards (1973)

"Werther and Novella" (1971), in Forewords and Afterwards (1973)

“A Marriage of True Minds” (1961),“ in Forewords and Afterwards (1973)

Burning Boy: The Life and Work of Stephen Crane (2021)

When one brilliant writer chooses to write a biography of another brilliant writer, readers can legitimately expect an extraordinary work, and Burning Boy is just that. The book also begins with a tour de force of an opening sentence—all 104 words of it. For reasons I’m sure you will understand, this was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

A bit later in the book, Auster also captured Crane’s pivotal role in American letters: “Crane’s work, which shunned the traditions of nearly everything that had come before him, was so radical for its time that he can be regarded now as the first American modernist, the man most responsible for changing the way we see the world through the lens of the written word.”

A House of Sticks: Memoirs of a Bigamist’s Daughter (2016)

Language, Truth, and Logic (1936)

In a 2014 Independent article, writer John Rentoul revealed that the legendary artist Man Ray had nominated this opening line for consideration as one of history’s best first sentences from non-fiction works.

“Of Revenge,” in Essays (1625)

In Praise of Love (2009; with Nicholas Truong)

Badio, a well-known contemporary French philosopher, continued in the opening paragraph:

“There is, after all, a stock stage character, the philosopher in love, whose Stoic wisdom and well-rehearsed distrust of passion evaporate in their entirety the moment a dazzlingly beautiful woman sweeps into the room and blows him away forever.”

And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir (1987)

Typically, readers might be turned off by someone who starts off by saying, “I was born gifted,“ but Baez quickly forestalls such a reaction by clarifying what a gift actually means—something given to people, and, therefore, not something they can take credit for.

In her second paragraph, Baez continued: “My greatest gift, given to me by forces which confound genetics, environment, race, or ambition, is a singing voice. My second greatest gift, without which I would be an entirely different person with an entirely different story to tell, is a desire to share that voice, and the bounties it has heaped upon me, with others. From that combination of gifts has developed an immeasurable wealth—a wealth of adventures, of friendships, and of plain joys.“

What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (2005)

The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World (2016)

Baggini, a professor of philosophy at the University of Kent and author of more than twenty books of philosophy aimed at a general audience, continued: “Gradually, the contemporary West has become more and more dismissive of the power of reason. Caring for it less, we often find we have carelessly left it behind. When we do try to use it, we’re not quite sure how to do so. We have become suspicious of its claims, unwilling to believe that it can lead us to anything worthy of the name ’truth.’“

“It is Happening Again,” in N + 1 Magazine (Feb. 17, 2023)

It happens rarely, but magazine articles about recent news events occasionally begin with a genuine literary flourish—and we certainly see that here. In his opening paragraph, Baker continued:

“Some of them, it was said, were carrying toxic materials. The train had almost reached its destination, the Norfolk Southern freight yard in Conway, Pennsylvania, on the evening of February 3, but catastrophe struck just across the state line. Most accidents happen close to home—in East Palestine, Ohio, in this case, a name that hearkened to a different site of devastation a world away.“

Growing Up (1982)

In “In the Beginning: Creating Dynamic, Meaningful & Compelling Openings,” an October 2012 article in The Writer’s Chronicle, University of New Orleans professor Richard Goodman offered a beautifully phrased assessment of Baker’s opening paragraph: “Sometimes an opening gives you a kind of fair warning, a little bit like those road signs we are so familiar with: ‘Winding Road Ahead.’”

Goodman went on to add: “This book centers on Baker’s mother—with strong appearances from his aunts and uncles and, in the end, from his future wife. So the promise he’s making here, with the spotlight entirely on his mother, is more than fulfilled later. The book is at its core about women much more than it is about men. It is his mother, his aunts, his future wife, and, to a certain degree, his sister who are at the artistic core of this book. Baker is also doing something else, though. He is addressing the issue of time directly. He is saying to us, through his mother’s dementia, that I, the writer, will travel freely through time, too. For one thing, I have to follow my mother. For another, it’s the best way for me to tell my story. By facing this issue directly, Baker prepares us for shifts and abrupt changes in time where they’re needed.”

My Animals and Other Family (2013)

Describing that first meeting with her mother’s pet boxer a few days after her own birth, Balding continued: “I looked into her big brown eyes, pushed my pudgy fingers into her cavernous wrinkles and smelled her stale breath. It was an all-in sensory experience. I was home.” Balding’s heartwarming memoir went on to win the 2012 British Book Awards Autobiography of the Year.

“Autobiographical Notes,“ in Notes of a Native Son (1955)

Baldwin had published his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, two years earlier, but he was still working hard to establish a reputation as an important American thinker. The remainder of the book consisted of ten essays he had written for such publications as Harper’s Magazine, Partisan Review, and The New Leader.

Baldwin continued: “The story of my childhood is the usual bleak fantasy, and we can dismiss it with the restrained observation that I certainly would not consider living it again. In those days my mother was given to the exasperating and mysterious habit of having babies.“

Dave Barry Talks Back (1991)

In a 2005 Slate article (titled “Elegy for the Humorist”), Bryan Curtis wrote: “Barry writes some of the jazziest opening lines in the business.” He certainly demonstrates that in these opening words, and he continued the riff this way:

“This kind of thoughtless remark really gets my dander up. Because although the reading public sees only the end product of my work, the truth is that I often spend many hours researching a particular topic before I make booger jokes about it.”

“A Journey Into My Colon—and Yours,” in The Miami Herald (Feb. 22, 2008)

One of Barry’s most effective opening line strategies was to begin with a preposterous exaggeration, but one that—at least on some level—felt vaguely true. Barry continued:

“Let’s examine these reasons one at a time. No, wait, let’s not. Because you and I both know that the only real reason is No. 4. This is natural. The idea of having another human, even a medical human, becoming deeply involved in what is technically known as your ‘behindular zone’ gives you the creeping willies.”

We Barrymores: As Told to Cameron Shiff (1951)

Barrymore’s opening words make it immediately clear that his autobiography is going to shun the kind of self-puffery found in most celebrity memoirs. Barrymore continued with this candid self-assessment: “This leads always to the conclusion that I have managed to get along all these years through a series of undeserved promotions and by fraud. As an actor, I resemble an amateur fireman who got thrown in with the professionals early, failed to find his métier anywhere else, and had to keep running to various theatrical conflagrations because he couldn’t get out of the way.”

Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being (2023)

It’s extremely rare for an “Author’s Note” at the beginning of a book to begin with a spectacular first sentence, but Beauchemin—a renowned French-Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist—does exactly that here.

“On Being a Black Male, Six Feet Four Inches Tall, in America in 2014,” in Vanity Fair (Nov. 26, 2014)

This is an arresting—no pun intended—opening paragraph, and it’s hard to imagine readers not feeling a desire to read on. And when they do, Bell’s compelling narrative will most certainly keep them reading:

“Simply put, I am afraid of the cops because I am black. To raise the stakes even further, I am male. And to go all in on this pot of fear, I am six foot four, and weigh 250 pounds. Michael Brown, the unarmed Missouri 18-year-old shot dead by police this summer, was also six foot four. Depending on your perspective, I could be described as a ‘gentle giant,’ the way that teachers described Brown. Or I could be described as a ‘demon,’ the way that Officer Darren Wilson described Michael Brown in his grand-jury testimony.

The entire article is as relevant today as when it was first written in 2014, and I’m fairly certain Bell would describe himself the same way today as he did back then: “I’ve been endowed with the triple crown of being killed for no good reason: big, black, and male.”

A Condition of Doubt: The Meanings of Hypochondria (2012)

Belling continued: “If a doctor examines such a patient and announces that no evidence of disease can be found, the patient (who would love to be able to believe the doctor) is not finally convinced. The patient concludes that this particular doctor is just not good enough to have found the horror that must—surely?—be hidden somewhere within.”

Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir (2013)

Bellow, who had recently retired from a four-decade career as a psychotherapist, continued: “As Saul’s firstborn, I believed our relationship to be sacrosanct until his funeral, an event filled with tributes to his literary accomplishments and anecdotes about his personal influence on those in attendance that set in motion my reconsideration of that long-held but unexamined belief.“

Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (2020)

This is a highly unusual way for a serious scholar to begin a serious book about modern autocratic leaders, but I think you will agree that it is also highly effective in achieving two of the goals of all Great Opening Lines: (1) to “frame” the story about to be told, and (2) to get the reader to continue reading.

The book continues with a brief discussion between Berlusconi and one of his many mistresses, Patrizia D’Addario, about which bed they will be using that night. He replies that it will be a bed he received as a gift from his strongman pal, Vladimir Putin. Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University, went on to explain: “Berlusconi’s ‘Putin bed’ symbolized the intimacy of a friendship sustained by the leaders’ common drive to exercise as much personal power as their political systems allowed and to appear to the world—and each other—as virile.”

I’ll Be Seeing You: A Memoir (2020)

Berg’s opening words capture the experience of so many people—a sense of disbelief that such a large number as seventy (or more) could be applied to themselves. She continued: “I remind myself of the two old ladies (as I thought of them) I saw in the grocery store one day, their carts angled companionably next to each other. They were enjoying a nice chat, and as I passed them, I heard one say to the other, ’I still feel like a girl inside.’“

A Fine Romance (2015)

There are few better ways of beginning a memoir than with a humorous self-deprecating anecdote, as Bergen so cleverly demonstrates here.

The Rose’s Kiss: A Natural History of Flowers (1999)

Bernhardt, a trained botanist and popular science writer, continued in the first paragraph: “High school students give and receive corsages before the prom. Courtships, weddings, and anniversaries must have their bouquets. Mourners hope that floral tributes and wreaths will lend grace to a funeral and help ease the immediate burden of grief.”

Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times (2018)

Beschloss continued: “It was after midnight on Wednesday, August 24, 1814, and Madison was a fugitive, escaping the Capital—first by ferry, then by galloping horse—for the dark wilderness of Virginia.“

In the book’s second paragraph, Beschloss continued the gripping narrative: “Still wearing formal knee breeches and buckled shoes, the sixty-three-year-old Madison knew that the invader-incendiaries from Great Britain were out for his capture and arrest, which might force him to be hanged. But he kept dismounting his horse to stare, with those intelligent blue eyes that ‘sprinkled like stars,’ at the inferno across the Potomac. He could not help himself.”

T. H. Huxley: Scientist, Humanist and Educator (1959)

Genesis 1.1

There are many throughout the world who consider this the most famous opening line in history, and they are probably right.

Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics (2007)

It is extremely rare for political memoirs to begin with such candor, or with such an impressive literary flourish. And, of course, it immediately brings to the fore the impediment that would become the struggle of young Joe Biden’s life.

Biden continued: “So I was Joe Impedimenta. Or Dash. A lot of people thought they called me Dash because of football. I was fast, and I scored my share of touchdowns. But the guys at an all-boys Catholic school usually don’t give you nicknames to make you feel better about yourself. They didn’t call me Dash because of what I could do on the football field; they called me Dash because of what I could not do in the classroom. I talked like Morse code. Dot-dot-dot-dot-dash-dash-dash-dash. “You gu-gu-gu-gu-guys sh-sh-sh-sh-shut up!“ My impedimenta was a stutter.“

Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults (1909)

I believe this is the first appearance in print of the idea that clear writing is clear thinking. Bierce continued on the subject of precision: “It is attained by choice of the word that accurately and adequately expresses what the writer has in mind, and by exclusion of that which either denotes or connotes something else.”

“Getting to the ‘Click’: Teaching the MFA at Bennington,” in Los Angeles Review of Books (Oct. 12, 2021)

Birket’s powerful opening sentence opened my eyes about the teaching of writing, and helped me see it in a whole new way. With all the emphasis on style, technique, mechanics, and craft, it turns out that the most important thing about the teaching of writing is the personal relationship between the teacher and the student, and what the teacher is able to bring out in the aspiring writer.

The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration (2023)

These are powerful opening words, and a perfect way to begin a book outlining the imminent danger of climate change in America and around the world. In a New York Times review, David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth and other works) said of the book:

“Jake Bittle’s The Great Displacement is a bracing, vivid tour of the new human geography just coming into view and warning us of what’s to come.”

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U. S. History (2023)

In a major new historical work that won the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Blackhawk—a professor of history and American Studies at Yale University—opens with a provocative and powerful question. He continued with a partial, but poignant, answer:

“This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations. Among historians, silence, rather than engagement has been the most common response, together with a continued unwillingness to see America’s diversity from the vantage point of those most impacted by the expansion of the United States.”

The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder (2010)

In the Introduction to her debut book, Blakemore begins by advancing an argument that she goes on to completely demolish: “Call me a coward if you will, but when the line between duty and sanity blurs, you can usually find me curled up with a battered book, reading as if my mental health depended on it. And it does, for inside the books I love I find good, respite, escape and perspective. I find something else, too: heroines and authors, hundreds of them, women whose real and fictitious lives have covered the terrain I too must tread.”

Continuing on the theme of Great Opening Lines, you will also enjoy the first sentence of Chapter One of Blakemore’s book—a magnificent tweak of Jane Austen’s classic opening:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that going back on a proposal of marriage isn’t the best way to start the day.”

Out of Africa (1937)

Part of the appeal of this opening line is that much can be deduced about the author from the first thirteen words, especially the word had. Clearly, Blixen no longer has the farm, and the entire first sentence contains a strong hint of wistfulness. There is also the clear suggestion that she is not a native of Africa, but someone who moved there from someplace else—and then grew to love the place.

In a 2017 “The Art of the Tale” blog post, the discerning eye of writer and editor Mary Dalton helped me see something in the opening line I had not seen before. Picking up on Blixen’s famous self-description that “I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller,” Dalton viewed the opening line as more befitting a story, not a memoir. She wrote:

“Out of Africa doesn’t read like your average memoir. Rather, it’s life spun into a fantastic tale, where supernatural forces coexist with the everyday. The opening line…has the invoking nature of a prayer or chant, all round vowels and whispering consonants.”

Blixen, a beloved Danish writer who wrote fictional tales under the pen name Isak Dinesen, continued in the opening paragraph: “The equator runs across these highlands. A hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet. In the day-time you felt that you had got high up, near to the sun, but the early mornings and evenings were limpid and restful, and the nights were cold.”

In 1985, Out of Africa was loosely adapted into a Sydney Pollack film starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford. One of the year’s most acclaimed films, it was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning seven, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own (2015)

Bolick continued with a one-sentence second paragraph: “Men have their own problems; this isn’t one of them.“

The Crime of Our Lives (2015)

Lawrence Block is one of the modern era’s most prolific crime/mystery authors, and this is the marvelous opening paragraph of a compilation of Introductions he wrote throughout his career.

“Yea, Mr. Mays,” in Sports Illustrated (July 27, 1970)

Mays, in his 20th baseball season, was approaching a record reached by only sixteen previous players. Blount continued: “In harsh heat and foggy chill, and under the intense scrutiny such a situation demanded, he chased after his 3,000th hit—and seemed to blossom rather than wilt under the pressure.”

”Reading and Nothingness: Of Proust in the Summer Sun,” in The New York Times (June 2, 1985)

Blount continued: “The truth about summer is this. There are an enormous number of hours in it—slow hours—and yet, before you know it, somehow it is over. So all you have to do is to start reading Heidegger, say, on the first day of summer. One day you look up and both summer and Heidegger are done.“

“Another Round?“ in Garden & Gun (Feb./March 2017)

It takes great skill to begin with an everyday, even banal, interaction and transform it into a great opening line—as Blount does here. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“I dread being asked this question by a complete stranger, because my response, if truthful and factual, will be complex, and complete strangers who are quick to ask this question, cold, do not have time for complexity.“

Fire Shut Up in My Bones: A Memoir (2014)

These are powerful opening words, and the intensity increases as Blow continued: “It was the gun my mother had insisted I take with me to college, ‘just in case.’ I had grabbed it from beneath my seat when I jumped into the car. I cast glances at it is I drove. I had to convince myself that I was indeed about to use it.“

“The ridges of the gas pedal pressed into the flesh of my foot as I raced down Interstate 20 toward my mother’s house, just twenty-five miles away. I had driven this lonely stretch of North Louisiana road from college to home a hundred times. It had never gone so slowly; I had never driven so fast.“

“I began to scream as a fresh round of tears erupted. ‘Motherfucker!’ I slammed my fists down on the steering wheel over and over. ’No! No!…Ah! Ah!’ In part I was letting it out. In part I was pumping myself up. I had never thought myself capable of killing. I was a twenty-year-old college student. But I was about to kill a man. My own cousin. Chester.”

What stimulated this volcano of emotion and anguish and deadly rage? In a phone call with his mother only a few minutes earlier, she said a family visitor wanted to say hello. When his older cousin Chester got on the line and said “What’s going on, boy?” Blow was immediately transported back in time to age seven, and overcome with a torrent of long-repressed memories of Chester—a teenager at the time—sexually abusing him. It’s a longer-than-typical opening to a memoir, but few can rival it in drama and power. About the book, writer Michaela Angela Davis said it was “A modern memoir that reads like a great classic novel.”

“The Eyes of a Killer,” in Air Mail magazine (January 7, 2023)

It happens infrequently, but every now and then a magazine article about a recent news event begins with an impressive literary flourish—and that is exactly what we see in Blum’s article about the gruesome stabbing-deaths of four University of Idaho students on November 13, 2022. In the world of journalism, an opener like this is called a lede, and this was one of the best of the year. In his article, Blum continued at an equally impressive level:

Then there’s the really big obstacle: you want to get away with it. You’re determined to stab four people living in a single home in the still of the night and then disappear without leaving a clue to your identity. Now that’s a more difficult challenge.

But you did it. You have everybody stumped. It’s the perfect crime.

After a six-week national manhunt, Bryan Kohberger, a 28-year-old Ph.D. student at Washington State University, was arrested at the Pennsylvania home of his parents. As of this writing, the case is still being adjudicated.

I was pleased to include Blum’s lede in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023“ (see the full list here).

Just Wait Until You Have Children of Your Own (1971; with Bill Keane)

With some books, it takes a few paragraphs to effectively get the ball rolling. Such is the case here. Bombeck continued:

“Young boys would pinch me in the swimming pool and exclaim, ‘Gee, ma’am, I’m sorry. I thought you were your sensuous daughter, Dale.’

“The entire family would gather around the piano and sing songs from the King Family album. And on Friday nights, we’d have a family council meeting to decide what flavor of ice cream their father, Ozzie, would bring home from the ice-cream parlor.

“It never worked out that way,”

“Paint Tint Caper,” syndicated column (Sep. 4, 1965); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

Bombeck published more than 4,000 syndicated columns in her career (the first appeared in 1965, the last in the year she died, 1996. All forms of writing benefit from great opening lines, but given the competition for reader’s eyes, they may be more important in newspaper columns and magazine articles than in books.

“A Mother’s Eye,” syndicated column (Aug. 18, 1968); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

In her opening paragraph, Bombeck continued: “Or, as we say, one glance is worth a thousand punches in the mouth.”

“Car Hits a Tree,” syndicated column (Jan. 24, 1971); reprinted in Forever, Erma (1996)

Ball Four (1970)

Ball Four is one of the most influential “sports bios” ever written, and a true classic of sports literature. David Halberstam sensed the book’s greatness almost immediately after it was published, writing in a 1970 Harper’s magazine article: “He has written the best sports book in years, a book deep in the American vein, so deep it is by no means a sports book.”

In the second paragraph of the book, Bouton continued: “I dream my knuckleball is jumping around like a Ping-Pong ball in the wind and I pitch a two-hit shutout against my old team, the New York Yankees, single home the winning run in the ninth inning and, when the game is over, take a big bow on the mound in Yankee stadium with 60,000 people cheering wildly. After the game reporters crowd around my locker room asking me to explain how I did it. I don’t mind telling them.”

“The Army Mule is Back,” in Supthai Sentinel (August 23, 1968)

Boyd’s clever nostalgic lead began a story about how the U.S. Army and Royal Thai Army joined forces to train 140 mules to provide support to troops in remote areas of Thailand during the Vietnam conflict.

The I Hate to Cook Book (1960)

I always enjoy a book—especially a non-fiction book—in which the author gets straight to the point. Bracken, one of her era’s most respected humorous writers, went on to explain:

“This book is for those of us who hate to, who have learned, through hard experience, that some activities become no less painful through repetition: childbearing, paying taxes, cooking. This book is for those of us who want to fold our big dishwater hands around a dry Martini instead of a wet flounder, come the end of a long day.”

A Window Over the Sink: A Mainly Affectionate Memoir (1981)

Flags of Our Fathers: Heroes of Iwo Jima (2000; with Ron Powers)

It’s a simple, straightforward, and immensely powerful first sentence. The gripping quality of the opening words continued as Bradley went on in the opening paragraph:

“For a few days I set aside my comfortable life—my business concerns, my life in Rye, New York—and made a pilgrimage to the other side of the world, to a primitive flyspeck island in the Pacific. There, waiting for me, was the mountain the boys had climbed in the midst of a terrible battle half a century earlier. One of them was my father. The mountain was called Suribachi; the island Iwo Jima.”

Bradley’s father John, a U.S. Navy corpsman, was identified as one of the six soldiers who raised the American flag at The Battle of Iwo Jima. The dramatic scene was captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal, and it went one to win him a 1945 Pulitzer Prize (fittingly, the photograph graced the cover of the book).

After Bradley returned home from the war, he never said a word about the famous photograph or his other wartime experiences. But when he died at age 70 in 1994, his family found boxes of letters, photographs, and other items. That discovery triggered something in son James, who soon began working on a book that ultimately led to his personal pilgrimage to the site. In a New York Times review, Richard Bernstein hailed Flags of Our Fathers as “a touching eulogy” and “one of the most instructive and moving books on war and its aftermath that we are likely to see.” The bestselling book went on to be adapted into a 2006 film directed and scored (yes, scored) by Clint Eastwood.

In a stunning historical footnote, the U.S. Navy announced in 2016 that two of the six soldiers in the iconic 1945 photograph were wrongly identified, including John Bradley. In a New York Times article on the news, journalist Michael S. Schmidt wrote that James Bradley concurred with the assessment, adding that Bradley “said that his father had participated in an earlier flag-raising and mistakenly believed that it had been the one captured by Mr. Rosenthal.”

What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love (2023)

Primarily because of the magnificent phrase, “draped like hormonal Dalí clocks,” these opening words of the Prologue are so delicious that we feel compelled to read on in hopes of finding similar tasty morsels in what is to come. And, believe me, they do come.

Utopia for Realists (2016)

I have a weakness for books that begin with a Grand Declaration, whether simply stated, like this one, or eloquently phrased, like the opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or axiomatically expressed, like the first sentence of C. Northcote Parkinson’s Parkinson’s Law.

In Bregman’s second paragraph, he continued: “For roughly 99% of the world’s history, 99% of humanity was poor, hungry, dirty, afraid, stupid, sick and ugly.”

Humankind: A Hopeful History (2019)

The Power of Crisis (2022)

Opening a non-fiction book with a little-known anecdote involving famous figures is always a good idea, and this one is particularly impressive. It is almost unbelievable that a summit conference of the American and Russian leaders would begin in this way, and I was delighted to honor the intriguing opener in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In the opening paragraph, Bremmer, one of America’s leading political scientists, continued:

“Gorbachev didn’t hesitate. ‘No doubt about it,’ he replied. ‘We would too,’ Reagan assured him. That moment took place in a cabin in Geneva on November 19, 1985, but it wasn’t publicly known until Gorbachev told the story in front of a live audience at the Rainbow Room in New York City in March 2009. Only Reagan, Gorbachev, and their interpreters were present when that first exchange took place.”

The Physiology of Taste (1825)

Brillat-Savarin—one of the most influential figures in culinary history—began his classic work with a series of twenty aphorisms, and this is the first one. Some of the sayings went on to achieve legendary status, most notably “Tell me what kind of food you eat, and I will tell you what kind of man you are.”

Brillat-Savarin’s observations have been translated in various ways, but these come from the first English language version of the book, translated by Fayette Robinson and published in 1854.

“The Real Life of a Sugar Daddy,” in Gentleman’s Quarterly (August 27, 2015)

When Jacob Feldman, editor of The Sunday Long Read, was asked by editors of The Electric Typewriter to select “10 of his all-time favorite articles,” he included this one, adding about the piece: “To put it simply, this was the best written story of 2015, starting with the first line.”

In the opening paragraph of her article, Brodesser-Akner continued: “He had arranged to meet her so that he might size her up and determine whether he wanted to give her a monthly stipend in exchange for regular sex and sometimes maybe dinner. In other words: Was there chemistry? Was she blonde and blue-eyed, the way he liked them? Was she thin “but not anorexic, a shapely body, you know?” Could he talk to her? That was very important. It was a little important. It wasn’t that important. Anyway, she asked for money up front, and he sent her $800. She didn’t show to the meet, and that’s the last time Thurston Von Moneybags ever got hustled again. Now he meets the girls for lunch before he offers them an ahem arrangement, and he is very clear. He doesn’t give them money until their second date, when they’re in the bedroom.”

Feldman went on to add about the article: “It only gets better from [the first line]. In investigating the love-for-money economy budding on sites like SeekingArrangement, Taffy Brodesser-Akner not only entertained us, she made us think about what it means to ‘get what you want in this world.’”

“Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle,“ in The New York Times (Feb. 8, 2018)

The notion of a panic suggests something pretty serious, so this first sentence immediately gets our attention. Brodesser-Akner continued in the piece’s opening paragraph: “His new Broadway musical, “Escape to Margaritaville,” was coming along nicely, but something was off.“

As it turns, out Buffett was worried about Paul Alexander Nolan, the Canadian singer who had been cast in the role of Tully Mars, a singer at a rundown Caribbean hotel called Margaritaville. So what was the source of Buffet’s concern? Was it Nolan’s voice? His look? His acting chops? Nope, none of these. Buffett was concerned that he didn’t have a tan.

“Get to a tanning salon,” Mr. Buffett told Mr. Nolan the very next day, adding, “To me, it’s essential to the part. Tourists in Margaritaville are white and turn red. You need to be tan.” Happily, Mr. Nolan immediately complied—and Buffett’s panic attack came to an end.

The Road to Character (2015)

Brooks continued: “The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being—whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.“

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen (2023)

I’m a sucker for openers that begin by taking readers down a certain path—and then abruptly moving in another, completely unexpected direction. In the book’s third paragraph, Brooks continued:

“The culture of my upbringing should be summed up by the phrase ‘Think Yiddish, act British.’ We were reserved, stiff-upper-lip types.”

I enjoyed Brook’s opening words so much that they came very close to making my end-of-year compilation of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (sadly, it got nosed out at the last minute). See the full list here).

All About Me! My Remarkable Life in Show Business (2021)

One could call this a “Just kidding” type of opening. Brooks continued:

“So let me revise what I just told you: Don’t keep it under your hat. Spill the beans! Spread the word. Let the secrets out! Tell all! Tell everybody! Let everybody you know hear all the terrible things I’ve done. Everything I didn’t want the world to know—shout it from the rooftops! (Because I think I’m gonna need a couple of million confidants to make any money on this book.)“

“Adventure Made Painless,” in Pieces of Hate and Other Enthusiasms (1922)

Broun, an Algonquin Round Table member who became one of the most popular newspaper columnists in the early decades of the twentieth century, continued in the opening paragraph:

“I believe that I glory in D’Artagnan because of my own utter inability to do anything with a sword. Beyond self-inflicted razor wounds, no blood has been shed by me.”

Sex and the Single Girl: The Unmarried Woman’s Guide to Men (1962)

These are the opening words of a book that exploded on the publishing scene, selling well over two million books in the month after it was published. The book remained on all the major bestseller lists for over a year, and in 1964 was loosely adapted into a popular film, starring Natalie Wood. Published a year before The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Sex and the Single Girl is now regarded as a ground-breaking work in women’s literature.

In the book, after describing the couple’s glamorous, upscale life, Brown sent an important If-I-can-do-it-so-can-you message to her female readers: “I am not beautiful, or even pretty. I once had the world’s worst case of acne. I am not bosomy or brilliant. I grew up in a small town. I didn’t go to college. My family was, and is, desperately poor and I have always helped support them. I’m an introvert and I am sometimes mean and cranky. But I don’t think it’s a miracle that I married my husband. I think I deserved him!”

After graduating from secretarial school in 1941, Brown worked as a secretary for well over a decade before finally landing a job as a copywriter for a Los Angeles advertising agency. Within a few years, she became the highest paid female copywriter on the West Coast, and in 1959 married the successful Hollywood film producer David Brown. It was Brown’s idea for her to write Sex and the Single Girl, but, as Dwight Garner put it in a New York Times article, “It was her bright, no-nonsense voice that brought the book to life.”

“Miss Lachrymose,“ in London Review of Books (Sep., 2008)

This was the first line of Brown’s review of David Kaufman’s 2008 biography, Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door. Brown went on: “It was in her hometown of Cincinnati in 1927. She was five years old and not yet Doris Day. She was still Doris Kappelhoff and the red satin pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her. It’s tempting to see this as a primal scene for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang.“

Starting From Scratch: A Different Kind of Writer’s Manual (1988)

Brown’s helpful—and entertaining—guide for writers begins with a clever tweak of an old English proverb: “Accidents will happen in the best regulated families” (Charles Dickens put a version of the saying into the mouth of Mrs. Micawber in David Copperfield).

The American humorist Oliver Herford also piggybacked on the saying, writing in The Entirely New Cynic’s Calendar (1905): “Actresses will happen in the best regulated families.”

Rita Will: Memoirs of a Literary Rabble-Rouser (1997)

In her career, Brown has been so adept at crafting opening lines, I was almost certain she’d come up with a winner when she decided to pen a memoir. I wasn’t disappointed. In the opening paragraph, she continued in fine form:

“Perhaps I came into the world knowing Jesus had already done that, and since he suffered for all of us I saw no reason to be redundant.”

In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (1999)

These opening words beautifully capture the early history of the women’s movement, and the author’s role in it. Brownmiller, who helped propel the movement forward with her pioneering 1975 book Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, continued in the opening paragraph:

“This is how things happen in movements for social change, in revolutions. They start small and curiously, an unexpected flutter that is not without precedence, a barely observable ripple that heralds a return to the unfinished business of prior generations. If conditions are right, if the anger of enough people has reached the boiling point, the exploding passion can ignite a societal transformation. So it was with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the latter half of the twentieth century.”

The Beauty of Dusk: On Vision Lost and Found (2022)

In 2017, New York Times columnist Bruni woke up one morning with significantly blurred vision in his right eye, the result of a stroke that had cut off the blood supply to one of his optic nerves. Rendered functionally blind in that eye, he soon learned that he was in danger of losing sight in the left eye as well. In the memoir’s second paragraph, Bruni continued about the life-altering event:

“I went to bed believing that I was more or less in control of my life—that the unfinished business, unrealized dreams and other disappointments were essentially failures of industry and imagination and could probably be redeemed with a fierce enough effort. I woke up to the realization of how ludicrous that was.”

“If Only Trump Had Been Stopped From Grabbing America’s Steering Wheel,” in The New York Times (June 28, 2022)

This is the dramatic opening line of an opinion piece Bruni wrote just after Cassidy Hutchinson’s compelling testimony before the January 6 Committee on June 28, 2022. In her testimony, Hutchinson reported that Trump instructed the Secret Service to turn off the magnetometers so that more of his supporters—even those who were armed—could make it into his Jan. 6, 2021 rally at the Ellipse. According to Hutchinson, Trump said, “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away.”

In Bruni’s second paragraph, he continued: “There may be no better distillation of Donald Trump’s narcissism.”

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

Bryson begins his collection of travel essays with a snappy one-liner that would make a stand-up comic proud. In a 2022 ShortList.com post, writer Marc Chacksfield ranked this Number Three on his list of thirty of “The Funniest-Ever Opening Lines.”

In the essay, Bryson continued: “When you come from Des Moines you either accept the fact without question and settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever, or you spend your adolescence moaning at length about what a dump it is and how you can’t wait to get out, and then you settle down with a local girl named Bobbi and get a job at the Firestone factory and live there forever and ever.”

The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way (1990)

Bryson continued in the book’s second paragraph: “Consider this hearty announcement in a Yugoslavian hotel: ‘The flattening of underwear with pleasure is the job of the chambermaid. Turn to her straightaway.’ Or this warning to motorists in Tokyo: ‘When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.’”

When many foreigners attempt to write in English, Bryson wrote that they often aren’t hampered in the least by their ignorance of the language—and he expressed his opinion in a most delightful way: “It would appear that one of the beauties of the English language is that with even the most tenuous grasp you can speak volumes if you show enough enthusiasm—a willingness to tootle with vigor, as it were.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)

Bryson continued in the second paragraph: “To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.”

The Body: A Guide for Occupants (2019)

In his opening paragraph, Bryson continued: “I don’t recall the actual sum. It might have been $2.97 or $13.50, but it was certainly very little even in 1960s money, and I remember being astounded at the thought that you could make a slouched and pimply thing such as me for practically nothing.”

Too Soon to Say Goodbye (2006)

And write a book he did. Or more precisely, dictated a book. In the last year of his life, while sitting in a comfortable chair in his hospice room, Buchwald dictated the entire memoir—the last of his thirty books—to his associate Cathy Crowley.

Buchwald retained his trademark sense of humor right up to the end. After his death at age 81 from kidney failure on January 17, 2007, the New York Times website posted a video obituary which began with Buchwald saying, “Hi. I’m Art Buchwald, and I just died.”

Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir (2009)

Buckley, the only child of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Patricia Taylor Buckley, continued: “Perhaps I’m outsmarting myself by writing this book at all. I’d pretty much resolved not to write a book about my famous parents. But I’m a writer, for better or worse, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it seems either a waste or a conscious act of evasion.”

“Fish Story,” in Forbes Life (November 2012); reprinted in But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

In the second paragraph, Buckley continued: “I did not utter aloud the next sentence that formed in my mind: ‘How convenient for flushing them down the toilet after they have lived to the ripe old age of forty-eight hours.’”

“Dogged Pursuit,” in Forbes Life (December 2009); reprinted in But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

In the opening paragraph, Buckley continued: “Fog and terrain—the latter is disturbing because it is at eye level. Nor is it reassuring that the automatic warning keeps announcing in computer deadpan voice: ‘Caution, terrain. Caution, terrain.’ At such moments one asks oneself, What am I doing here?”

“Hoof in Mouth,” in Forbes FYI (May 1998); reprinted in But Enough About You: Essays (2014)

Buckley continued: “The Japanese are so much more efficient about this: you chop off the little finger and present it neatly wrapped in a pocket handkerchief to the offended party. If you really screw up, use a bigger knife and disembowel yourself. You have to admire a culture that has ritualized shame into a performance art.”

Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith (1997)

The book opens with a dramatic statement, but the dreadful news, as it turned out, was only dreadful from the perspective of an adolescent boy. At age thirteen, Buckley had just been informed by his parents that the enjoyable life he knew—in an affluent, and even somewhat aristocratic home in Connecticut—was about to end, and he would soon be enrolled in a boarding school near London.

Telling Secrets (1991)

This is one of the most powerful opening paragraphs I have ever read. Rarely have I seen such a grim—or even tragic—story begun in such a straightforward, matter-of-fact way. In the opening paragraph, Buechner (whose name is pronounced BEEK-nuhr) continued:

“Except for a memorial service for his Princeton class the next spring, by which time we had moved away to another part of the world altogether, there was no funeral because on both my mother’s side and my father’s there was no church connection and funerals were simply not part of the tradition.”

A Pirate Looks at Fifty (1998)

Buffett continued: "To make matters worse, the first thing the nuns would make us all do on the first day back was to write about what we had done that summer. Having to recall it all while sitting in the antiseptic atmosphere of a classroom was like staring at the goodies in a bakery window with no money in your pocket."

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders (1974, with Curt Gentry)

These are the dramatic opening words to the bestselling true-crime book of all time, with over seven million copies sold. In the second paragraph, Bugliosi—the Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney who successfully prosecuted Manson and his “family” members—continued:

“The canyons above Hollywood and Beverly Hills play tricks with sounds. A noise clearly audible a mile away may be indistinguishable at a few hundred feet.”

A book’s opening words can have multiple purposes, but one of the most common is to “establish an atmosphere”—and few non-fiction books can rival Helter Skelter when it comes to opening atmospherics. After describing the three-day heat wave that preceded the murders of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, who was eight-months pregnant with husband Roman Polanski’s child, Bugliosi capped off his opening remarks with three simple but haunting sentences:

“All things considered, it’s surprising that more people didn’t hear something.

“But then it was late, just after midnight, and 10050 Cielo Drive was secluded.

“Being secluded, it was also vulnerable.”

Helter Skelter was an immediate success, jumping to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and winning the 1975 Edgar Award for the best true-crime book of the year.

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (2021)

Some opening lines are like a whack on the side of the head, and Burkeman does his best here to grab—or better, to arrest—the reader’s attention.

In the opening paragraph, he continued: “Here’s one way of putting things in perspective: the first modern humans appeared on the plains of Africa at least 200,000 years ago, and scientists estimate that life, in some form, will persist for another 1.5 billion years or more, until the intensifying heat of the sun condemns the last organism to death. But you? Assuming you live to be eighty, you’ll have had about four thousand weeks.”

The idea about whacking readers with an opening sentence was first advanced by H. G. Wells in an 1898 essay on the subject of writing essays (see the Wells entry here).

Lincoln and the Civil War (2011)

In the opening paragraph, Burlingame continued: “As historian William Hanchett has cogently argued, ‘Contrary to the conventional assumption, the North, not the South, was the underdog in the Civil War.’”

An American Marriage: The Untold Story of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd (2021)

In the book’s opening paragraph, Burlingame—described by Time magazine as “a towering figure in Lincoln scholarship”—continued with this revealing anecdote: “During the Civil War, he pardoned a Union soldier who had deserted to return home and wed his sweetheart, who reportedly had been flirting with another swain in his absence. As the president signed the necessary document sparing the miscreant’s life, he said: ‘I want to punish the young man—probably in less than a year he will wish I had withheld the pardon.’” This was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

In his book, Burlingame attempted to set the historical record straight by telling the unvarnished truth about Lincoln’s notoriously unhappy marriage. On top of the countless monumental problems the 16th U.S. President wrestled with, Burlingame wrote that “he had to cohabit the White House with a psychologically unbalanced woman whose indiscrete and abusive behavior taxed his legendary patience and forbearance to the limit.”

Gracie: A Love Story (1988)

Few memoirs in history have opened more poignantly. Burns continued: “Her real name was Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen. Gracie Allen. But for those forty years audiences in small-time and big-time vaudeville houses and movie theaters and at home listening to their radios or watching television knew her, and loved her, simply as Gracie. Just Gracie. She was on a first-name basis with America.

Living, Loving & Learning (1982)

Living, Loving & Learning is a collection of speeches from earlier in Buscaglia’s career, and these opening words from the book’s Foreword eloquently captured how Buscaglia viewed them.

How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995)

Cahill continued: “When we think of peoples as civilized or civilizing, the Egyptians and the Greeks, the Italians and the French, The Chinese and the Jews may all come to mind. The Irish are wild, feckless, and charming, or morose, repressed, and corrupt, but not especially civilized.“

The Gifts of the Jews (1998)

Cahill, whose book was subtitled How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, continued: “Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings.“

What’s It All About? (1992)

With this wonderful opening paragraph, Caine gets his memoir off to a great start— and it only gets better. He continued:

“As I stood there with my mouth open he caught my eye and altered his course to come over to me. ‘What’s your name, kid?’ he asked.

‘Michael Caine,’ I managed to croak.

‘That’s right,’ he agreed, with a tilt of his head. ‘You were in that movie Alfie.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I wasn’t really keeping up my end of the conversation.

‘You’re gonna be a star, kid,’ he drawled, draping his arm around my shoulders. ‘But if you want to stay one, remember this: talk low, talk slow, and don’t say too much.’

‘Thank you, Mr. Wayne,’ I said.

‘Call me Duke.’ He gave me a chuck on the arm, turned around and swaggered off.”

The Elephant to Hollywood (2010)

Doris Lessing once described an autobiography as “an interim report,” and that certainly applies to Caine. He continued: “Eighteen years ago I thought that my career as an actor was over, so I wrote my autobiography, What’s It All About? to round off my professional life; and that, as far as I was concerned, was that. Fortunately, and not for the first time in my life, I was wrong. Very wrong. The best was yet to come—which, when I look back at my life—the crazy 1960s, the stardom, the glitz and glamour of Hollywood—is really saying something.“

My Time To Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race (2020)

Calderón, an Emmy Award–winning journalist and popular host at Univision, began her memoir with this raw—or perhaps more accurately, gut-wrenching—description of her first encounter with Chris Barker, the newly elected Imperial Wizard of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan. In July of 2017, after weeks of negotiation, Calderón’s Unvision bosses arranged a sit-down interview with Barker at an isolated setting on his Yanceyville, North Carolina property.

A Latina woman of color, Calderón did everything she could to prepare for the interview, but when he used the N-word to describe her (as well as the word mongrel), she was chilled by such a pure display of racial hatred. In a Smerconish.com post, I selected her opening paragraph as one of the Twenty Best Opening Lines of 2020 (to be seen here).

“The Emergence of Mankind” (1960); reprinted in Myths to Live By (1972)

It’s rare to find a highly unusual word in a great opening line (coeval means “having the same age or date of origin”), but Joseph Campbell was a highly unusual man—a classical scholar with one foot in antiquity and the other in the modern world. After his death at age 83 in 1987, a Newsweek obituary said he’d “become one of the rarest intellectuals in American life: a serious thinker who has been embraced by the popular culture.“ In his opening paragraph, he continued:

“As far back, that is to say, as we have been able to follow the broken, scattered, earliest evidences of the emergence of our species, signs have been found which indicate that mythological aims and concerns were already shaping the arts and world of Homo Sapiens.”

“The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)

“An Absurd Reasoning,“ in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (1955)

These are the powerful opening words of the first essay in the collection. Camus continued: “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards.“

The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography (1971)

These are the first words of the book’s Preface, and they capture Capra’s deep desire—you could almost say, his obsession—to escape from a condition he found intolerable for as long as he could remember

Capra also began Chapter One of his book memorably, writing: “It all began with a letter. A letter from America—when I was a big-eyed child of five. It was the first letter Papa, my forty-seven-year-old peasant father, Salvatore Capra, had received from anywhere. In Papa’s old cracked house of stone and mortar, clinging by its toenails to the rocks in the village of Bisaquino, Sicily, the local priest read the letter to a houseful of gaping relatives. Papa, Mama, six ragged children; Papa’s four brothers and their families: and all of Mama’s kinfolk.”

The Meaning of Mariah Carey (2020; with Michaela Angela Davis)

In her dramatic opening sentence, Carey is referring to the “little Mariah” of her early years, and readers will shortly learn that “much of this will be her story.”

Carey continued in the second paragraph: “For many years, she’s been locked away inside of me—always alone, hidden in plain sight before masses of people.”

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and It’s All Small Stuff (1997)

Carlson’s opening paragraph couldn’t be more straightforward—when things go bad, people often do things to make matters worse. When I read the words for the first time, I found myself nodding in agreement, for they comported with what I had long observed in my therapy practice. Some people have such poor coping skills that almost every problematic situation that presents itself is made worse by the questionable methods they employ to deal with it.

As soon as Carlson’s book was published, his many thought-provoking observations struck a major chord with readers. The book remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 101 weeks, spawned a host of similarly-titled spinoffs (for moms, dads, teens, and others), and made Carlson one of the era’s most popular self-help writers.

In 2006, after the 45-year-old Carlson died unexpectedly of a heart attack, his former literary agent Patti Breitman said of him: “He preached what the Buddha preached, but without the preaching.”

Master of the Senate [Book 3 of The Years of Lyndon Johnson] (2002)

GUEST COMMENTARY from Jeff Jacoby, American journalist and Boston Globe Op-Ed columnist: “I nominate this opening line from Caro’s Master of the Senate (2002), the third volume in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, and to my mind the best of them so far. The very first sentence establishes a tone of moral seriousness and gripping narrative power. Eufaula, Alabama is far removed from LBJ’s native Texas, and even farther from the U.S. Senate chamber where he became such an influential national figure. But Caro’s first line aptly foreshadows the immense struggle over black civil rights that would be the backdrop to Johnson’s rise to power. With four volumes in his “Years of Lyndon Johnson” series now published, Caro is only up to 1964—and his legions of fans are hoping that he lives long enough to get through Volume 5.”

Jacoby has also penned some masterful opening lines. To view them, start here.

The Sea Around Us (1951)

A relatively unknown marine biologist at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, Carson became a major voice for conservation as a result of The Sea Around Us. The book, which remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks, also won the 1952 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Carson continued: “Many people have debated how and when the earth got its ocean, and it is not surprising that their explanations do not always agree. For the plain and inescapable truth is that no one was there to see, and in the absence of eyewitness accounts there is bound to be a certain amount of disagreement.“

“Introduction,” to Expletives Deleted: Selected Writing (1992)

A candid bit of self-disclosure is always a good way to begin a work of non-fiction—and Carter does it very nicely in the Introduction to a collection of her book reviews. She continued:

“I blame my father, who was neither English nor a gentleman but Scottish and a journalist, who bequeathed me bad language and a taste for the print, so that his daughter, for the last fifteen-odd years, has been writing book reviews and then conscientiously blue-pencilling out her first guy reactions—‘bloody awful’, ‘fucking dire’—in order to give a more balanced and objective overview.”

The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to 45472 (1974)

This is a wonderful opening paragraph, and things only got better as Carter continued in the next three paragraphs:

“HURRICANE is the professional name that I acquired later on in life. It provides an accurate description of the destructive forces that rage within my soul.

“CARTER is the slave name that was given to my forefathers who worked in the cotton fields of Alabama and Georgia, and was passed on to me. The name is like any other—worthless—but it’s the one that appears on my birth certificate.

“The kindest thing that I can say about my childhood is that I survived it.”

Carter was an outstanding middleweight boxer who was wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1967. These are the opening words of his autobiography, written while he was in prison, and published in 1974. The story inspired Bob Dylan to write the song “Hurricane” in 1975, and that song, in turn, helped mobilize a “Free Rubin” movement all around the country.

After serving eighteen years in prison, Carter’s sentence was overturned by a federal judge in 1985. Carter’s story was brought to the big screen in the 1999 film Hurricane, with Denzel Washington playing Carter. The opening words above are so exceptional that, in the film, Washington repeated them exactly as you see them here.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee (2019)

This is an elegant opening line for one of the best non-fiction books of 2020. In a review in Southern Living, Caroline Rogers wrote: “Furious Hours is a compelling hybrid of a novel, at once a true-crime thriller, courtroom drama, and miniature biography of Harper Lee.”

In his opening paragraph, Cep continued: “A hundred years ago, in the place presently occupied by the largest lake in Alabama, there was a region of hills and hollers and hardscrabble communities with a pretty little river running through it.”

“Edward Gorey’s Toys,” in The New Yorker (July 12, 2021)

It’s rare for a short piece about an upcoming art exhibition to have a great opening line, but New Yorker staff writer Cep convincingly demonstrates it can be done. In her brief article about two exhibitions at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, Cep continued: “He squashed them with trains, fed them to bears, poisoned them with lye, forced them to swallow tacks, watched them waste away, and burned them in fires; on his watch, they died of everything from fits to flying into bits.”

“Kindred Spirits,” in The New Yorker (May 31, 2021)

Cep continued: “Almost a third of Americans say they have communicated with someone who has died, and they collectively spend more than two billion dollars a year for psychic services on platforms old and new. Facebook, Tik Tok, television: whatever the medium, there’s a medium.“ This was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

Try and Stop Me (1944)

Cerf continued: “In the mind of my wife, who has had to listen to the same yarns a hundred times, it has inspired justifiable thoughts of mayhem.”

The Laugh’s on Me (1959)

Cerf continued: “Nobody is a ‘born’ storyteller. The art of squeezing the ultimate drop of laughter from a droll tale must—and can—be learned.”

At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (1977)

Cerf continued: “My father’s family were of Alsatian extraction and my mother’s family were Germans named Wise. My father’s father, Marcel Cerf, was a jeweler. The Cerf family was loaded with charm but little money, while the Wise family had very little charm but a lot of money.”

Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story (1916)

This is the first of Chaplin’s autobiographies, published when he was 27-years-old, and shortly after he had signed a $670,000 film contract—an astronomical sum at the time—with the Mutual Film Corporation. While the book was almost certainly a promotional tool that was written with the aid of ghostwriters, it was “accurate in spirit if not in detail,” according to Chaplin biographer John McCabe.

In the book, Chaplin continued: “You reach to get the thing you want—slap! bang! It’s gone. You strike at your enemy and hit a friend. You walk confidently and fall. Whether it is tragedy or comedy depends on how you look at it. There is not a hair’s breadth between them.”

My Father, Charlie Chaplin (1960; with N. And M. Rau)

This powerful opening line reads more like an autobiography of a son than a biography of the father—and that simple fact makes us want to read on. The author continued: “And then suddenly there was the light. There were people caressing me, putting cold compresses on my head, for I was almost rigid in my terror.”

Chaplain goes on to list the people who were around to comfort him during his night terrors: “My grandmother, my great-grandmother, my mother, and sometimes even my great-grandfather.” Notably missing from the list—it is quite apparent—is his father.

Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning (2023)

It’s rare for the opening sentence of a nonfiction book to be both compelling and historically significant, but that is certainly the case here. Phrased as if the disastrous event has already occurred, the line is something one would expect to find in a futuristic novel about a dystopian future. In her opening paragraph, Cheney went on to add:

“It is the story of the men and women who fought to save it, and of the enablers and collaborators whose actions ensured the threat would grow and metastasize. It is the story of the most dangerous man ever to inhabit the Oval Office, and of the many steps he took to subvert our Constitution.”

About Cheney’s opening words, Fred Shapiro, editor of the authoritative New Yale Book of Quotations, said: “Cheney’s riveting first sentence is a deeply sobering summation of the current state of American politics.” I was delighted to feature the haunting first sentence in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

Manic: A Memoir (2008)

Cheney, a successful Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer, continued: “It doesn’t go from Point A to Point B in a familiar, friendly pattern. It’s chaotic, unpredictable. You never know where you’re headed next. I wanted this book to mirror the disease, to give the reader a visceral experience.”

Modern Madness: An Owner’s Manual (2020)

In this sequel to Manic, a 2008 bestselling memoir detailing her lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder, Cheney’s first paragraph goes on to offer a few more details about the superstar athlete’s physical appearance and persona. It is in the second paragraph where the book really begins to take off:

“Looking back, there was indeed something extraordinary in that room, only it had nothing to do with Michael Jackson’s feet. It was the mere fact that I was sitting there as one of his attorneys, representing him in a big, messy lawsuit involving one of the most successful albums of all time. That was me, all right—counselor to the stars. The voice of reason and restraint, in a gray Armani suit and a gorgeous white silk shirt I’d bought especially for the deposition, because it had these long, elegant French cuffs that would just about hide the virulent red slashes across my wrists I’d acquired from a recent suicide attempt.”

The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable German Family (1993)

This is a compelling opening line in its own right, and the beginning of an equally compelling first paragraph. Describing German Jews just prior to the Nazis, Chernow continued: “Arguably the most productive group of Jews in history, they were also, in many ways, the least typical. Few groups have been so admired for their achievements or so maligned for their attitudes. Persecuted by other Germans as too Jewish, they were often scorned by other Jews as too German. Their existence rested on a tenuous illusion of acceptance until the Nazis came along and tore the dream to tatters. People still puzzle over why these bright, industrious people were so blind to a mortal threat to their existence. In frustration, some Jews deny them the dignity of their tragedy.”

About this oft-mentioned blindness to an existential threat, Chernow wrote that a major purpose of the book was his attempt to “clarify the mystery” through an examination of one of history’s most illustrious Jewish families, the Warburgs.

Washington: A Life (2010)

It’s unusual for a biography begin by focusing on a person other than the subject of the work, but Chernow’s selection of Stuart—the painter whose legendary Washington portrait has been immortalized on American one-dollar bills—turns out to be inspired.

By describing Stuart’s view of Washington as a portrait subject—as well as how Washington interacted with his portraitist—Chernow found a way of shining a new light on a U.S. President he described as “the most famously elusive figure in American history, a remote, enigmatic personage more revered than truly loved.” Chernow’s book went on to win the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Grant (2017)

When Chernow was asked by Brian Lamb in a C-Span interview why he chose to start his book with these words, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian replied: “When I started working on the book...I ran into a friend who said to me, ‘Ron, how can you write a great biography of someone who wrote a great autobiography?’ And that really kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. I thought about that comment for many days. And then I realized that it actually helped to define the direction of my book because I realized that what my job was as a biographer was to zero in on the silences and the evasions in Grant’s memoirs.” And, a moment later, he added, “I ended up…zeroing in on those things that Grant did not want to talk about, particularly his lifelong struggle with alcoholism and his repeated business failures.”

In the opening paragraph, Chernow followed up on his opening words this way: “The son of an incorrigible small-town braggart, the unassuming general and two-time president harbored a lifelong aversion to boasting. He was content to march to his grave in dignified silence, letting his extraordinary wartime record speak for itself.

In a 2017 New York Times interview, Chernow was asked which of his books was his favorite. He replied that he’d always avoided the question in the past, but no more: “Grant is my favorite book,“ he announced, “and not just because it’s wall-to-wall drama. Some quality of pathos in this story of a defeated man, ground down by failure, who then soars into the firmament got under my skin and haunted me all the way through the telling.“

The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (1936)

“How I Learned to Speak My Truth at a Silent Meditation Retreat,” in Time magazine (Jan. 12, 2024)

Chevlen’s unforgettable opening words about a rarely discussed topic will resonate deeply with everyone who’s experienced a similar bathroom crisis—and the even larger number who can easily imagine it happening to them. In the opening paragraph, she continued:

“But there’s always an audience: in this case, three women sitting on the other side of the thin bathroom door waiting for their turn to use a toilet which was now horribly, hopelessly clogged.”

Chevlen’s bathroom problem occurred on the third day of a ten-day silent meditation retreat. Clearly, though, this situation needed to be voiced. She continued:

“‘Sorry to break the noble silence,’ I finally told my fellow meditators. ‘But that toilet is clogged.’ It was the first thing I’d said in three days. The words felt like poetry on my lips.”

Unbought and Unbossed (1970)

Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress, represented New York’s 12th congressional district from 1969 to 1983. She continued: “That makes me a celebrity, a kind of side show attraction. I was the first American citizen to be elected to Congress in spite of the double drawbacks of being female and having skin darkened by melanin.”

Diaghilev’s Empire: How the Ballet Russes Enthralled the World (2022)

The addiction, in this case, is to the world of dance and, more specifically, the ballet. It’s rare for a book on a relatively esoteric topic to be celebrated for its opening line, but the author of this one—an internationally-celebrated dance, opera, and art critic—also happens to be a very talented writer. I was delighted to honor his opener in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In the book’s second paragraph, Christiansen continued:

“I confess to being an incurable balletomane—a morbid affliction of which the chief symptom is the daily expense of an unconscionable amount of time watching, thinking or dreaming about classical dance and dancers. I don’t merely like, appreciate or enjoy ballet; I deeply and secretly need it, as irrationally infatuated with my home team (the Royal Ballet, to which I have been wedded for over half a century) as others are to the spurs or the Red Sox.”

Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (1977)

Christie continued: “I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood.” The book was published posthumously, a little over a year after Christie’s death at age 85 in 1976. It also won the 1978 Edgar Award for Best Critical/Biographical Work.

“Some Blind Alleys: A Letter,” in Phillip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay (1994)

Right out of the gate, Cioran helps us see a familiar topic in a whole new way. A first-class first sentence.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

These are the opening words to the book’s Foreword. Clarke, who wrote the novel as a companion volume to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film by the same title, continued: “Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe there shines a star.”

Chapter One of the novel actually begins this way: “The drought had lasted now for ten million years, and the reign of the terrible lizards had long since ended. Here on the Equator, in the continent which would one day be known as Africa, the battle for existence had reached a new climax of ferocity, and the victor was not yet in sight.”

“A Personal Tribute to Mothers and Role Models,” in OpEdNews.com (May 7, 2022)

In this beautiful—and bittersweet—opener, Clift leads readers down an idyllic path until, at the end, she ingeniously departs from it. Later this year, when I compile my annual list of “Twenty-Two of the Best Opening Lines of 2022,” this one will certainly be in contention.

Clift’s essay explored a painful theme in human life—many mothers are painfully deficient in meeting the needs of their children, and when our own falls short, we look for great mother-figures in other families. In the article, Clift, a New England journalist, writer, and political activist, continued:

“I lived across the street in a house that became a place of illness, loneliness, and ‘quiet despair.’ My mother’s chronic depression began there as my father’s tense nature worsened when business failures mounted. So I began to virtually reside in the perfect Cape Cod cottage and to make of myself a part of that Dick-and-Jane family, to internalize their traditions, to survive my childhood pain.”

What Happened (2017)

In her opening words, Clinton was describing what was going through her mind just before she and husband Bill joined other dignitaries at the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as 45th President of the United States on January 20, 2017. She continued: “I’m standing just inside the door at the top of the steps leading down to the inaugural platform, waiting for the announcer to call Bill and me to our seats. I’m imagining I’m anywhere but here. Bali maybe. Bali would be good.”

The Stars at Noon (1954)

Cochran—the first female pilot to break the sound barrier—was one of the most celebrated women in aviation history. By placing her real North Florida birthplace near one of history’s most famous—or infamous—literary locations, she found an extremely creative way to set the stage for her incredible life story.

In her memoir’s second paragraph, Cochran continued: “Until I was eight years old, I had no shoes. My bed was usually a pallet on the floor and sometimes just the floor. Food at best consisted of the barest essentials—sometimes nothing except what I foraged for myself in the woods or in the waters of the nearby bayou....“

I Am America (And So Can You) (2007)

America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t (2012)

Colbert continued: “You see, everywhere I go I hear bellyaching about how we as a nation have lost it. Now sure, we’ve taken some shots lately. We’re feeling beat up, and why shouldn’t we? It’s like after 235 years as King of the Monkey Bars, the other kids have held us down and made us eat a bug.”

Sweet Judy Blue Eyes: My Life in Music (2011)

Collins continued: “‘Suite: Judy Blue Eyes’ is playing on the radio, softly, but I hear it through the steady sound of rain and the hiss of the tires on the road. Unmistakable, Stephen Stills’ voice floats above the harmonies of David Crosby and Graham Nash. Stephen’s guitar cuts into my heart like an emotional arrow. Whenever I hear the song—in a grocery store, in an airport, on my own CD player—it resounds like a call from mystic lakes. It pierces the heart of this girl and all the other grown-up girls who think it tells their story. All great songs make you feel that way, as though they were written especially for you.”

God Knows: It’s Not About Us (2005)

I Reserve the Right to be Terrified: A Long Life (2022)

It’s common for memoirs to begin with a dramatic childhood memory—often a life-threatening one—and that’s exactly how I viewed this opening anecdote. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found out that this terrifying bicycle accident happened when Colmore was seventy-five!

“Martini Madness,” in Cigar Aficionado (Spring 1996)

This was the brilliant opening line of Conrad’s article about “The Great Martini Revival” of the mid-1990s. He continued: “It’s a nostalgic passport to another era—when automobiles had curves like Mae West, when women were either ladies or dames, when men were gentlemen or cads, and when a ‘relationship’ was true romance or a steamy affair.”

My Losing Season: A Memoir (2002)

With a first sentence like this, you just know there’s more great stuff to come—and you won’t be disappointed.

“Barbara Warley Was Loved by Everyone,” in A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life (2016)

Conroy was sixty-eight when he wrote these words, the opening sentence of a eulogy he was delivering for the wife of one of his best friends from college. When I first read the opening sentence, I was immediately reminded of something May Sarton wrote in her 1984 memoir At Seventy: “I suppose real old age begins when one looks backward rather than forward.“

Over the years, I’ve noticed that eulogies penned by writers are often as much about the people writing the eulogy as those they are eulogizing—and that is certainly the case here. In reflecting back to when he first met Warley, for example, Conroy wrote: “Instinctively, we identified ourselves as members of the unhappy tribe who come from troubled and deeply flawed families.”

Two years after Warley’s death, Conroy himself died, at age 70, of a fast-spreading pancreatic cancer.

“Robert Frost,” in Talk About America (1973)

“Frank Lloyd Wright,” in America Observed (1989)

Wright had such a hallowed reputation when Cooke first met him that the British visitor to America resorted to liturgical imagery to describe him: “I pressed the electric button at first timorously, then boldly, then incessantly, and was about to turn away when the door was opened by a pretty young woman, a secretary, or granddaughter, or vestal virgin perhaps, who beckoned me into the hushed gloom behind her through which I expected to see sacramental tapers.”

The Middle Place (2008)

Glitter and Glue: A Memoir (2013)

Corrigan continued: “Consequently, we were never one of those Mommy & Me pairs who sat close or giggled. She didn’t wink at me or gush about how pretty I looked or rub my back to help me fall asleep. She was not a big fan of deep conversation, and she still doesn’t go for a lot of physical contact. She looked at motherhood as less a joy to be relished than as a job to be done, serious work with serious repercussions, and I left childhood assuming our way of being with each other, adversarial but functional, was as it would be.”

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books (2005)

I love this opening paragraph for a bunch of reasons, but principally because I might have written the same thing about myself (and, dear reader, there’s a good chance that, if you’re reading these words right now, you might be thinking the same thing).

In her book’s second paragraph, Corrigan continued: “And, for many hours of almost every day, that’s what I’m doing. I have a great job—or, to be accurate, cluster of jobs—for a bookworm. I read for a living.”

In addition to her professorship at Georgetown University, Corrigan is also the longtime book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, the author of a regular “Mysteries” column for The Washington Post, and a freelance book reviewer for many other publications.

Anatomy of an Illness: As Perceived by the Patient (1979)

In many non-fiction works, the best beginnings are often simple and straightforward—and that is certainly true with Cousins’s account of his famous attempt to treat a serious connective tissue disease with massive amounts of Vitamin C and systematic viewing of episodes of the TV-show Candid Camera (a method he called “laugh therapy”).

Cousins continued: “However, references to the illness surfaced from time to time in the general and medical press. People wrote to ask whether it was true that I ‘laughed’ my way out of a crippling disease that doctors believed to be irreversible.

The Pathology of Power (1987)

Present Indicative (1937)

A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978; re-isssued 2022)

These are the intriguing opening words of a memoir that was described by The New Yorker’s Casey Cep as “One of the finest memoirs ever written.” About the meaning that the opening line had for Crews, Cep wrote: “He knew that history, even our own personal history, can take the form of myth if we let it, and he hints at this in the memoir’s opening…. What he then recounts is something he was once told.” Cep then helpfully added:

“Much of what we know about the world is secondhand, as is everything we know about the past, and we demonize or mythologize it at our peril. Find a way to cherish it, sure, but Crews knew better than to reject the world that made him or to romanticize what he barely survived.”

“Cadaver,” in Travels (1988)

Crichton is best known for his novels—so many of which have been adapted in classic American films—but he was also a skilled non-fiction writer, as he demonstrates in this “hook” he wrote for a piece on his experiences as a student at the Harvard Medical School.

Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys? (2013)

Crystal continued: “I looked at Janice for an encouraging word, for a hug, for an ‘It’s okay, Billy, you look great. It’s an old mirror.’ All she did was glance down at my robe, which had opened up, and ask: ‘When did your pubic hair turn gray?’”

The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942)

Dalí was one of history’s most flamboyant artists, and it was only fitting that the Prologue to his first memoir began with a statement fitting the persona he so carefully cultivated.

Diary of a Genius (1966)

Few memoirs in history have been more provocatively titled, and those who knew Dalí well would expect him to quickly make his first words all about him. And so he did, continuing in the opening paragraph: “And if it is false when applied to me, the genius of the greatest spiritual order of our day, a true modern genius, it is even more false when applied to those who, like the almost divine Raphael, embodied the very genius of the Renaissance.”

In the second paragraph, Dalí succinctly stated his memoir’s thesis: “This book will prove that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.“

Two Years Before the Mast (1840)

In 1834, Dana was a Harvard undergraduate who—after a severe case of measles had threatened his vision—dropped out of college and enlisted as a common sailor on a brig departing Boston Harbor for California, then a part of Mexico. A diary he kept during the two-year voyage eventually resulted in a book that became an American classic.

In his memoir, Dana continued: “As she was to get under way early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o’clock, in full sea-rig, with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years’ voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books, with a plenty of hard work, plain food, and open air, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my studies, and which no medical aid seemed likely to remedy.“

“Prince Harry and the Value of Silence,” in The New York Times (Jan. 7, 2023)

Davis, the daughter of Ronald and Nancy Reagan, was referring to her 1992 autobiography The Way I See It (a no-holds-barred memoir that was described by J. D. Podolsky in People magazine as “The work of an angry daughter with scores still to settle”).

Davis decided to revisit the whole idea of “writing a book I now wish I hadn’t written” after reading Prince Harry’s controversial new memoir Spare (2023). Reflecting on what she learned after her own unfortunate “tell-all” memoir, she went on to write:

“Of course, people generally don’t respond well to being embarrassed and exposed in public. And in the ensuing years, I’ve learned something about truth: It’s way more complicated than it seems when we’re young. There isn’t just one truth, our truth—the other people who inhabit our story have their truths as well.”

Yes I Can (1965; with Jane and Burt Boyar)

The Prologue to Davis’s autobiography opens with a fond memory—and he found an unforgettable way to capture the experience. It was at Las Vegas’s Frontier Hotel in 1954, and Davis was the 29-year-old “kid in the middle” of The Will Mastin Trio. Davis had been performing with the singing-dancing troupe since he was three years old (the other members were his father and Will Mastin).

Davis was harkening back to an era when black entertainers were not allowed to lodge in the hotels that booked them, and he sensed something important about his future in that special moment. When he acknowledged the audience’s enthusiastic response, he said he was thanking them not so much for the applause as “For making it possible for me to walk through the world through the front door.” Yes I Can starts off at a high level and doesn’t let up. A review in The New York Times called it “One of the most candid, engrossing, and important autobiographies of our time.”

The Selfish Gene (1976)

Highly quotable opening lines are relatively rare in non-fiction writing, and this is especially true in science writing. In a refreshing exception to the rule, Dawkins begins his classic 1976 book with an observation we want to linger over—even savor—for a few moments before reading on. In the rest of the opening paragraph, Dawkins continued:

“If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.”

Near the end of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the word meme, a cultural analog to the concept of a gene in biology. The coinage quickly became a meme in itself, and life in The Internet Age would never be the same. Twenty-three years later, in 1999, Dawkins returned to the subject of memes in a Time magazine essay—and he introduced the subject in an interesting and effective way. See the entry below.

Unweaving the Rainbow (1998)

I love all great opening lines, but paradoxical openers have a special place in my heart (or, perhaps I should say, in my mind). This one is a doozie, ingeniously bringing together two highly incongruous elements in a single statement.

In The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014 ), Steven Pinker wrote: “Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché…not with a banality…but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity.” He went on to write about Dawkins’s first sentence:

“The reader of Unweaving the Rainbow opens the book and is walloped with a reminder of the most dreadful fact we know, and on its heels a paradoxical elaboration. We’re lucky because we’ll die? Who wouldn’t want to know how this mystery will be solved? The starkness of the paradox is reinforced by the diction and meter: short, simple words, a stressed monosyllable followed by six iambic feet.”

In the remainder of what becomes an enlightening opening paragraph, Dawkins continued:

“Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include poets greater than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

Given these additional thoughts, how can we best explain the paradox laid out in the first sentence? I’d say it this way. We’re lucky to die because it means we were fortunate enough to have beaten the odds by simply having been born.

In his Sense of Style book, Pinker went on to do a sentence-by-sentence analysis of the entire first paragraph seen above. I won’t go into the details here, but it’s worth a look if you get the chance. And the concluding tribute Pinker paid to Dawkins’s opening words was truly special:

“Good writing can flip the way the world is perceived, like the silhouette in psychology textbooks which oscillates between a goblet and two faces. In six sentences Dawkins has flipped the way we think of death, and has stated a rationalist’s case for an appreciation of life in words so stirring that many humanists I know have asked that it be read at their funerals.”

“The Selfish Meme,” in Time magazine (April 11, 1999)

In the essay’s opening paragraph, Dawkins continued: “I was amused by this and did an imitation of it to divert my colleagues after dinner. Among them was a distinguished Oxford philosopher. As soon as he saw my imitation, he immediately said, ‘That’s Wittgenstein! Is her surname ____ by any chance?’ Taken aback, I said that it was. ‘I thought so,’ said my colleague. ‘Both her parents are professional philosophers and devoted followers of Wittgenstein.’ The gesture had passed from the great philosopher, via one or both of her parents, to my pupil.”

Here, Dawkins nicely demonstrates how a well-chosen anecdote can achieve two important goals at the same time—engaging the reader and illustrating the topic under discussion. He continued in the second paragraph:

“Our cultural life is full of things that seem to propagate virus-like from one mind to another: tunes, ideas, catchphrases, fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. In 1976 I coined the word meme (rhymes with cream) for these self-replicating units of culture that have a life of their own.”

The Second Sex, Vol. 2 (1949)

Epigrammatic opening lines have always been popular with readers, and this one has become de Beauvoir’s most famous observation (one could almost argue that it is her signature line). In nine simple words, she encapsulated her groundbreaking thesis that being female is a cultural rather than a biological construct. It’s a perfect opening line, in my opinion, and I only wish she had used it to begin the first volume of her classic work, not the second. Volume I opened memorably, but I think you will agree that it isn’t in the same league:

“Woman? Very simple, say the fanciers of simple formulas: she is a womb, an ovary; she is a female—this word is sufficient to define her. In the mouth of a man the epithet female has the sound of an insult….”

The Autobiography of Simone de Beauvoir: Hard Times: Force of Circumstance (1963)

When those same young women arrive at forty, de Beauvoir went on to explain, they end up doing what they said they’d never do—bleaching their hair, wearing bikinis, and flirting with men. She ended her first paragraph by confessing that she was no exception to the rule, writing about her older self: “When the opportunity arose of coming back to life, I seized it gladly.”

The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence (1997)

These opening words look a lot like the beginning of a suspense thriller, but they actually opened a non-fiction book that has become a classic in the literature on violence against women.

In his book, de Becker went well beyond the cliche of learning to trust one’s “gut instincts” by pinpointing a number of key warning signs—he called them pre-incident indicators, or PINS—that were precursors to violence.

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl (2005)

In early 2003, Dr. Brooke Magnanti, an American-born British medical professional (Ph.D. in forensic pathology) began writing a blog detailing her secret life as a sex worker. Writing under the name Belle de Jour, she won the Guardian’s Best Blog Award at the end of the year.

In choosing her nom de plume (which translates into “Beauty of the Day”), Magnanti was inspired by the title of Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film starring Catherine Deneuve as a French housewife who secretly worked in a high-class brothel while her husband was at work (Buñuel’s film, in turn, was an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 novel by the same title).

The Guardian award dramatically increased interest in the blog and soon resulted in this 2005 book—with the jarring, but almost perfect, opening sentence you see above. An immediate bestseller in England, the book was soon adapted by ITV into the British television series “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” starring Billie Piper. After an enormously successful airing in England, the series was picked up by Showtime for an American audience. Not surprisingly, de Jour went on to write a number of sequels, some of which also had memorable openings (you’ll see them below).

The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl (2006)

Belle de Jour’s Guide to Men (2009)

With the “teaser” comment at the end, we wonder where, exactly, de Jour is going—but we’re damn sure going to continue reading to find out.

Take Me Home: An Autobiography (1994; with Arthur Robier)

In his delightful opening paragraph, Denver continued: “Her folks, Peter and Mattie Swope, had a nightclub out near the airport, where Dad’s barracks were, and he came in one night for a sandwich and a beer. She and her sister worked there as waitresses, and danced with the boys who came by.”

A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter (2011)

In a 2011 review in The New York Times, writer Miranda Seymour described these opening words as “endearingly self-effacing,” and I would concur. After such a delightful opening paragraph, it’s almost impossible to imagine any reader who wouldn’t be eager to read on. Deresiewicz, a former Yale University English professor and respected book critic, continued in the first paragraph: “Her name was Jane Austen, and she would teach me everything I know about everything that matters.”

Darwin’s Sacred Cause: Race, Slavery, and the Quest for Human Origins (2009)

In their biography, Desmond and Moore continued: “He is the grizzled grandfather peering from book jackets and billboards, from textbooks and TV—the sage on greeting cards, postage stamps, and commemorative coins. Darwin’s head on ₤10 notes radiates imperturbability, mocking those who would doubt his science. Hallow him or hoot at him, Darwin cannot be ignored.”

The Price of My Soul (1969)

These are the opening words of the Foreword to the book, and they clearly express Devlin’s desire to tell the world about what she regarded as the civil rights movement of her lifetime: removing “the bonds of economic slavery” from the people of Northern Ireland. About the title, she went on to explain: “The Price of My Soul refers not to the price for which I would be prepared to sell out, but rather to the price we all must pay in life to preserve our own integrity.”

Devlin’s Foreword is significant for two other reasons. First, she reveals that her mother had always dreamed of writing an autobiography titled The Price of My Soul, but never got around to it. And the second is that it concludes with her most widely quoted observation: “To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.”

Snapshots of My Father, John Silber (2022)

When I first came upon this forthright opening line, I thought to myself, “I’m sure this candid admission will resonate with countless other authors as well.” In Devlin’s intimate portrait of her father, the long-time president of Boston University, she continued about her mother:

“Did I not learn anything from her example? She would see telling our family’s story as akin to undressing in front of a picture window and parading back and forth, making a spectacle of myself. There could be no good reason for doing so.”

Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy (2023)

This intriguing—and exceedingly timely— opening sentence is the book’s entire first paragraph. In the second, Dickey, a cultural historian at National University in Los Angeles, explained:

“It has been with this country from the very beginning, shadowing it ever since. From the earliest European settlers to reach this land to the present day, we have mused about secret plots, hidden conspirators, invisible groups that threaten to control us.”

“The Women’s Movement,” in The New York Times (July 30, 1972)

“White Album,” title essay from The White Album (1979)

These words—which have become something of a signature line for Didion—begin an acclaimed autobiographical essay about her life in San Francisco in the 1960s. In a 2012 Publisher’s Weekly article, Robert Atwan included it in “The Top Ten Essays Since 1950.”

The Year of Magical Thinking (2006)

The “it” here was the 2003 death of Didion’s husband John Gregory Dunn—from a sudden heart attack while the couple were seated at the dinner table in their home. The remainder of the book chronicled Didion’s attempts over the next year to live and function without a man she’d been married to for nearly forty years. The book went on to win the 2005 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

Didion’s coping efforts were severely affected by the illness of her adult daughter, who was lying unconscious—from a serious case of pneumonia—in a New York hospital at the time of her father’s death (she died of pancreatitis in 2005). Didion wrote about the loss of her daughter in yet another book of mourning and grieving, Blue Nights, published in 2011.

The Writing Life (1989)

This is a lovely metaphor, and an almost perfect way to begin a book on The Writing Life. Dillard continued: “Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.”

An Open Book: Chapters from a Reader’s Life (2003)

The job of an opening line is to seduce the reader or, at the very least, to lure them further into the book—and this one does that very nicely. In the remainder of the opening paragraph, Dirda found a creative—and quite beautiful—way to express the conventional notion that he learned to read in his mother’s lap:

“I have now and again tried to imagine the perfect environment, the ideal conditions for reading: A worn leather armchair on a rainy night? A hammock in a freshly mowed backyard? A verandah overlooking some summer sea? Good choices, every one. But I have no doubt that they are all merely displacements, sentimental attempts to replicate the warmth and snugness of my mother’s lap.”

Classics for Pleasure (2007)

From the opening paragraph, readers immediately grasp what’s in store for them: a “no-nonsense”—and possibly even enjoyable—walk down a path they might ordinarily view as arduous.

Dirda, the Washington Post book critic described by writer Michael Kinsley as “the best-read person in America,” continued in the book’s second paragraph: “I sympathize with this common view, even if it is quite wrong. Classics are classics not because they are educational, but because people have found them worth reading, generation after generation, century after century. More than anything else, great books speak to us of our own very real feelings and failings, of our all-too-human daydreams and confusions.”

“The Hard Choices of Elizabeth Hardwick,” in The New Yorker (Nov. 15, 2021)

A moment later, after ticking off several examples of great opening lines from Hardwick, Doherty wrote: “Her friend Susan Sontag said that she wrote ‘the most beautiful sentences, more beautiful sentences than any living American writer.’”

The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things: Fourteen Natural Steps to Health and Happiness (2007)

We’ve seen many times in these pages how effective it is to open a book—especially a non-fiction book—with a powerful quotation, biblical passage, or proverbial saying, and Dossey demonstrates that very nicely here. He continued in the second paragraph: “In the pages that follow, we will explore things that are in plain sight, but whose healing power and ability to add to life’s fulfillment have been overlooked or forgotten.”

The Power of Premonitions (2009)

Dossey continued in the first paragraph: “That’s what it’s been like with premonitions for me. I’ve been wrestling with them for a long time, unable to detach, rather like Jacob’s struggle with the angel in the Old Testament. The main difference is that Jacob’s brawl lasted only one night. My tussle with premonitions has persisted for more than three decades and shows no signs of ending.“

Reinventing Medicine: Beyond Mind-Body to a New Era of Healing (2009)

Go ahead, with the book in your hand, read this opening sentence—and try not to read on.

“Spirituality, Healing and Science,” in Ervin Laszlo and Kingsley L. Dennis, The New Science and Spirituality Reader (2012)

Dossey continued: “I distinguish spirituality from religion, which is a codified system of beliefs, practices, and behaviors that usually take place in a community of like-minded believers. Religion may or may not include a sense of the spiritual, and spiritual individuals may or may not be religious.”

“Insatiable,“ in Granta magazine (Autumn 2011)

In a 2018 ThoughtCo.com article on “Eight Great Opening Lines,” literary scholar Richard Nordquist selected Doty’s first sentence as an example of an opening that illustrates H. G. Wells 1898 advice on the importance of “whacking” readers at the beginning of an essay.

Wells’s complete advice went as follows: “So long as you do not begin with a definition you may begin anyhow. An abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion of the clown’s entry through the chemist’s window. Then whack at your reader at once, hit him over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the poker, bundle him into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before he knows where you are.” For more on Well’s 1898 essay, titled “The Writing of essays,“ go here).

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory (2014)

Doughty is a California mortician, a YouTube celebrity (“Ask a Mortician”), and a passionate advocate for funeral industry reform. In 2006, at age 23, she began working in a San Francisco mortuary, and her description of an experience from her very first day on the job ultimately ended up as a spectacular opening line (in truth, it’s hard to imagine a better way for a female mortician to begin a book about her work). In the book, Doughty continued:

“It is the only event in her life more awkward than her first kiss or the loss of her virginity. The hands of time will never move quite so slowly as when you are standing over the dead body of an elderly man with a pink plastic razor in your hand.”

In a 2015 PsychologyToday.com article (“The Truth About Cremation”), psychologist Susan K. Perry wrote, “If you delight in a one-of-a-kind writer’s voice…I doubt that you have ever read a first sentence like this one.”

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death (2019)

Doughty’s entire book consists of her answers to questions about death and dying posed by children. It opens with this creepy-but-adorable answer to a question that also served as the title to Chapter One: “When I Die, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs.” About the book, reviewer Terri Schlichenmeyer (“The Bookworm Sez”) wrote: “There’s serious science here, but also cultural lessons in death and dying, a little history, and a touch of gruesomeness wrapped in that shroud of sharp, witty humor.“

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845)

This is a soft beginning, but it’s about to take a dramatic turn. Douglas continued: “By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday.”

As I began to think about the immense psychological significance of not knowing one’s own birth date, I was eager to learn more, and Douglass didn’t disappoint. He continued: “They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit.”

In mid-February of 1817, Frederick Douglass was born into slavery in Tuckahoe (near Easton) Maryland. As indicated in the dramatic opening line above, the exact date of his birth was not known, and he later chose February 14th as the day to celebrate his birthday. He escaped from his servitude in 1838, quickly changing his name to avoid capture as a “fugitive slave,“ and ultimately settled in Massachusetts. He went on to become a popular spokesman for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, traveling throughout the U. S. and the British Isles. He also became a successful businessman (the first Black man to own a publishing house), a diplomat (ambassador to Haiti), and the author of three autobiographies (considered among the best “slave narratives” ever written).

You might also find it interesting that Booker T. Washington was almost certainly inspired by Douglass’s opening words when he wrote Up From Slavery (1901).

Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide (2005)

Dowd, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, is best known for her political commentary, but she also wrote extensively about gender dynamics. She previewed her views on the subject when she continued: “I had a moment of dazzling clarity when I was twenty-seven, a rush of confidence that I had cracked the code. But it was, alas, an illusion. I think I overcomplicated their simplicity. Or oversimplified their simplicity. Are they as complicated as a pile of wood? Or as simple as a squid?”

“We Are Trapped in the Madness of Powerful Individuals,” in The New York Times (Feb. 27, 2022)

In the article, published just after Vladimir’s Putin’s infamous invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022, Dowd was reminded of a number of previous “demented, destructive rides” she’d been forced to take in her lifetime. She continued: “And it always feels as though we are powerless to stop the madness of these individuals, that we are trapped in their ego or libido or id or delusion.”

“Hence, Mike Pence,” in The New York Times (June 18, 2022)

This is one of the best opening lines of 2022, in my opinion, and a perfect way to describe the fate of Mike Pence, who, after years of loyally standing by Donald J. Trump, defied Trump’s wishes by helping to certify Joseph Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. The opening line was followed by three brief paragraphs that matched it in quality:

“At first, you think that fawning over the boss is a good way to move forward. But when you are dealing with a narcissist—and narcissists are the ones who like to be surrounded by sycophants—you can never be unctuous enough.

“Narcissists are Grand Canyons of need. The more they are flattered, the more their appetite for flattery grows.

“That is the hard, almost fatal, lesson Pence learned on Jan. 6, when he finally stood up to Donald Trump after Trump asked for one teensy favor: Help destroy American democracy and all we stand for.”

Adventures of a Bystander (1978)

Drucker continued: “But standing in the wings—much like the fireman in the theater—the bystander sees things neither actor nor audience notices. Above all, he sees differently from the way actors or audience see.”

“Managing Oneself,“ in Harvard Business Review (January 2005)

When most people use the term manage, they think of it as directing the activities of others—mainly subordinates—but Drucker, often described as “The Father of Modern Management,“ helpfully reminds us here that great achievers are great in large part because they are skilled at managing themselves.

The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

Du Bois offered these words in the book’s “Forethought,“ and the final portion (“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”) went on to become one of the most important quotations of the twentieth century. He continued: “I pray you, then, receive my little book in all charity, studying my words with me, forgiving mistake and foible for sake of the faith and passion that is in me, and seeking the grain of truth hidden there.“

Du Bois was one of the most influential figures in black history. A co-founder of the NAACP in 1909, he was the first African-American person to be awarded a Ph.D. (from Harvard, in 1895). In Living Black History (2011), historian Manning Marable wrote: “Few books make history and fewer still become foundational texts for the movements and struggles of an entire people. The Souls of Black Folk occupies this rare position.“

Myself When Young: The Shaping of a Writer (1977)

“The Losses We Share,” in The New York Times (Nov. 25, 2020)

This is a deeply personal—and a remarkably effective—way to begin an Op-Ed column. The opening was so impressive, in fact, that I selected it as one of “Twenty of the Best Opening Lines of 2020” in a Smerconish.com post.

Justice: Crimes, Trials, and Punishments (2001)

Dunne’s opening sentence emphasizes something that is often unappreciated—one of the most important of all writing skills has nothing to do with writing per se, but with clearly and accurately observing what is going on around us. In the opening paragraph, he continued:

“My career in television and movies in Hollywood had come to a permanent halt, and I had nowhere else to turn. The thought of writing had been lurking within me for some time, but I didn’t actually begin until I finally removed myself from the glamorous world in which I no longer belonged to a one-room cabin in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon. There I began my second career as a writer and a recorder of the social history of our time.”

The Story of Civilization: The Reformation (Vol. VI; 1957)

A grand declaration right out of the gate is designed to get the attention of thoughtful readers, and this one succeeds admirably. In the book, Durant continued:

“In our youth, we may have resented, with proud superiority, its cherished incredibilities; in our less confident years we marvel at its prosperous survival in a secular and scientific age, its patient resurrection after whatever deadly blows by Epicurus, or Lucretius, or Lucan, or Machiavelli, or Hume, or Voltaire. What are the secrets of this resilience?”

Surviving the Toxic Workplace (2010)

Beginning a book with a series of pointed questions is a classic way to begin a self-help book—and that approach is enhanced when a little wordplay is added, as we see with the clever tweak of the medical term staph infections in the very next sentence: “These are all signs of Staff Infections—the difficulties you experience in dealing with toxic people and workplace conditions.

Your Erroneous Zones (1976)

In the early 1970s, while a professor at St. John’s University (New York), Dyer’s lectures were so popular with students that a Manhattan literary agent convinced him to put his ideas together in a book. The result was the cleverly-titled and eminently readable self-help book Your Erroneous Zones.

After the book was published, initial sales were so sluggish that Dyer decided to take matters into his own hands. He quit his job, loaded the back of his station wagon with books, and embarked on a national promotional tour in which he tenaciously pursued radio stations for interviews and bookstores for book signings. His efforts paid off—handsomely. The book gradually became a word-of-mouth bestseller. It ultimately sold over 30 million copies, and built a foundation upon which Dyer forged one of the most successful writing careers in history, with well over forty books published before his death at age 75 in 2015.

“Tutti Frutti. Little Richard,” in The Philosophy of Modern Song (2022)

These are the opening words of one of the sixty-plus essays in a book described by The New Yorker’s David Remnick as “Dylan wandering through the enormous record bin of his mind.” Based in part on Dylan’s popular “Theme Time Radio Hour,” a weekly program on XM Satellite Radio from 2006-2009, The Philosophy of Modern Song is a collection of intellectually and emotionally evocative essays on the modern era’s most popular songs. In his tribute to Little Richard and his 1955 “Tutti Frutti” classic, Dylan continued:

“He took speaking in tongues right out of the sweaty canvas tent and put it on the mainstream radio, even screamed like a holy preacher—which is what he was.”

The book is filled with similar delights. For one other example, here are the two opening paragraphs of his essay on the 1963 song “Detroit City,” by Bobby Bare:

“In this song you’re the prodigal son. You went to sleep last night in Detroit City. This morning you overslept, dreamt about white snow cotton fields, and had delusions about imaginary farmsteads. You’ve been speculating about your mother, having visions about your old pappy, making up stories about your brother, and idealizing your sister, and now you want to go home. Back to where things are more neighborly.

“From the postcards and junk mail that you dashed off, everybody assumes you’re a bigwig, that things are cool and beautiful, but they’re not, and the disgrace of failure is overwhelming. Your life is unraveling. You came to the big city, and you found out things about yourself you didn’t want to know, you’ve been on the dark side too long.”

Life Itself: A Memoir (2011)

This is an intriguing opening line—and perfectly suited for one of history’s most celebrated film critics. In the opening paragraph, Ebert continued: “The visuals were before me, the audio surrounded me, the plot unfolded inevitably but not necessarily. I don’t remember how I got into the movie, but it continues to entertain me.”

Adrenaline Junkie: A Memoir (2018)

Few memoirs begin with the admission of an act of thievery, and it immediately makes us wonder what other fascinating disclosure will be coming in future pages. In the opening paragraph, Edgerton—a former convict who went on to become a popular writer and writing teacher—further deepened our interest by continuing:

“Most of them were foreign ones he’d picked up overseas during World War II. I had no idea how I planned to spend English half-pence or German Reichspfennig coins or if I ever planned to spend them at all. I just wanted them because I thought I could take them without getting caught. After he put his belt away, and I pulled my pants back up, my father made me take four of the smallest coins and swallow them.”

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot To Take Over America and the Woman Who Stopped Them (2023)

This dramatic first sentence from the book’s Introduction reads like the opener of an “alternate history” novel, but it is in fact a true-life examination of (1) the central role a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan played in Indiana history, and (2) the role that a deathbed confession from a virtually unknown Jewish woman played in bringing him down.

In the opening words of Chapter One (“The Birth and Death of the Klan”), Egan—a Pulitzer Prize as well as a National Book Award winner—provided further evidence of his writing chops:

“When white-sheeted nightriders first appeared in the dark Southern night, many people thought they were ghosts. That was the idea: the souls of those who’d died for a republic of slaveholders had returned from their graves. They were out for vengeance, and they were invisible.”

I was delighted to honor Egan’s opening words in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the list here).

King: A Life (2023)

If you’re going to write a major, new biography of the most influential black man in American history, why not start with an inspired first sentence that places him in the pantheon of white men who nearly two centuries earlier founded the country? In the first paragraph of the book’s Prologue, Eig continued:

“He was twenty-six years old and knew the role he was taking carried a potential death penalty. The place was Montgomery, Alabama, former capital of Alabama’s slave trade.”

I was delighted to feature Eig’s fantastic first sentence in my annual Smerconish.com list of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

“Notes for an Autobiography,” in Saturday Review of Literature (Nov. 26, 1949)

Shortly after the end of WWII, Einstein was invited by the Library of Living Philosophers to write an autobiographical essay about the development of his ideas. The result was short on personal revelations, and a bit technical for the average reader, but it was the closest to an autobiography Einstein ever wrote. A slightly revised version of the “Notes” essay went on to appear in a Library of Living Philosophers volume titled Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949).

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (2014)

Ellenberg, the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin and a worthy heir to Martin Gardner as a distinguished writer about math & science, finds a perfect way to introduce his book on the importance of math literacy—fully realizing that the seeds of math illiteracy are sown early in life, and mainly in the classroom. He continued in the first paragraph: “The teacher has just asked her to spend a substantial portion of her weekend computing a list of thirty definite integrals.”

In the book’s second paragraph, Ellenberg continued: “There are other things the student would rather do. There is, in fact, hardly anything she would rather not do. She knows this quite clearly…. [ellipsis mine] She doesn’t see the point, and she tells her teacher so. And at some point in this conversation, the student is going to ask the question the teacher fears most: “When am I going to use this?”

“And So It Goes”: Adventures in Television (1986)

Ellerbee continued: “Anyway, the only people in my business worth a damn are those who haven’t written a book about television news. I would prefer to be counted with that group, so let me say right now that this isn’t a book about television news.“

Move On: Adventures in the Real World (1991)

Ellerbee continued: “Next I tore down the wall. After that, I ripped up the floor, raised high the roof beam, put up a skylight big enough to bring the moon home, put down a Jacuzzi big enough to do the backstroke across, planted flowers so fragile they faint if you frown twice, painted everything else a lovely shade of Childless White and watched my son go nuts.“

Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table (2005)

Any opening paragraph that contains the words “pig museum” is certainly tantalizing, but when it goes on to describe the museum as “a national treasure,” it becomes a bona fide hook.

“On Never Having Been a Prom Queen,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

“Reunion,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

Ephron continued: “How to explain the significance of it? It is a Friday night in June, the first night of the tenth reunion of the Class of 1962 of Wellesley College, and a member of my class has just returned from the bathroom with the news. A boy and girl are taking a shower together. No one can believe it.”

“Vaginal Politics,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

“Crazy Ladies,” in Crazy Salad (1975)

“Moving On,” in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006)

“Who Are You?” in I Remember Nothing (2010)

Ephron continued: “We’re at a big party. We’ve kissed hello. We’ve had a delightful conversation about how we are the last two people on the face of the earth who don’t kiss on both cheeks. Now we’re having a conversation about how phony all the people are who do kiss on both cheeks. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. You’re so charming. If only I could remember your name.”

“The D Word,” in I Remember Nothing (2010)

Ephron continued: “I have now been married to my third husband for more than twenty years. But when you’ve had children with someone you’re divorced from, divorce defines everything; it’s the lurking fact, a slice of anger in the pie of your brain.”

“The O Word,” in I Remember Nothing (2010)

Good without God (2009)

Ambition: The Secret Passion (1980)

“Funny, But I Do Look Jewish,” in The Weekly Standard (Dec. 15, 2003)

Epstein continued: “I’m fairly sure I didn’t always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent.”

“Duh, Bor-ing,” in Commentary magazine (June 2011)

George Burns: An American Life (2011)

Epstein continued: “He liked, for instance, to tell the story of the stage manager who heard him singing and fired him on the spot. But Burns could never tell it the way it really happened. He retold it with comic exaggeration to hide the pain.”

Shame (1997)

I was completely unfamiliar with Ernaux’s work when it was announced in 2022 that, at age 82, she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. You can imagine my pleasant surprise, then, when the first of her books that I read contained this powerful opening line.

Arnaux was twelve when she witnessed the event in question, and the memoir was her attempt to chronicle and examine the circumstances of her life at the time. In a New Yorker profile on the author, staff writer Alexandra Schwartz described the first words as “unforgettable.” And in an Amazon.com review, writer Wendy Smith wrote:

“You’d expect a book that begins with these words to be a raw, anguished account of childhood trauma, but prize-winning French author Ernaux disdains such American-style obviousness.” She later added: “This is a memoir in the classic Gallic tradition: lucid, spare, impeccably reasoned and written, completely devoid of self-pity. There’s not an excess word or a facile emotion anywhere in her elegant text, which compels readers’ sympathy all the more forcefully by never asking for it.”

Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)

This is the entire first paragraph of a book that is now regarded as a classic in feminist thought. The book, written by a Jungian psychoanalyst, drew heavily from folk tales, fairy tales, and worldwide mythology. It remained on The New York Times bestseller list for nearly three years—145 weeks in all (Estés was the first Latina to make the coveted list).

In the second paragraph, Estés continued: “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinctive nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt. For long periods it has been mismanaged like the wildlife and the wildlands. For several thousand years, as soon and as often as we turn our backs, it is relegated to the poorest land in the psyche. The spiritual lands of Wild Woman have, throughout history, been plundered or burnt, dens bulldozed, and natural cycles forced into unnatural rhythms to please others.”

Then There Was Larry: A Memoir (2021)

Estorge’s memoir had me in the first four words. I immediately thought, “Who doesn’t?” And then I put down the book for a moment, reflected on a few of my secrets, and wondered how many other readers might do the same thing.

In her first paragraph, Estorge continued: “Some secrets are as endearing as a caterpillar tickling its way across your toes. Like telling your friend that her baby is adorable despite the newborn’s resemblance to E.T. Some secrets are as harmless as a personal pet peeve. Like when your coworker says, ‘I seen that movie,’ and you want to grip her by the shoulders and say, ‘It’s I have seen that movie.’ Some secrets, however, are as poisonous as the Cone Snail with their harpoon-like teeth and paralysis-causing venom—a creature you don’t want to brush up against accidentally.”

Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty (1999)

It’s hard to imagine a better way to open a book on the nature and importance of beauty in human life, and Etcoff—a professor at Harvard Medical School and psychologist at Massachusetts General Hospital—finished off her first paragraph in an equally impressive way:

“Asked why people desire physical beauty, Aristotle said, ‘No one that is not blind could ask that question.’ Beauty ensnares hearts, captures minds, and stirs up emotional wildfires. From Plato to pinups, images of human beauty have catered to a limitless desire to see and imagine an ideal human form.”

“Why We Build,” in Virginia Writers Club Journal (2023)

This is a sensational in media res (“in the middle of things”) opener, dramatically capturing the danger inherent in using power tools. In the opening paragraph, Evans continued:

“Grabbing the rescued tip in his good hand just before it tumbled onto the sawdust-strewn floor below, he saw the gushing blood. The rush of pain was about to catch up.”

The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir (2017)

This is the delightful opening line of one of the best father-daughter memoirs ever written. About the book, writer and fellow wine lover Christopher Buckley wrote:

“If Anne Fadiman’s book about her father were a wine, it would merit a ‘100’ rating, along with all the oeno-superlatives: ‘smooth,’ ‘elegant,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘rounded,’ ‘with a dazzling, heart-warming finish.’ But as it is a book and not a wine, let’s call it what it is: a stunning, original, beautifully written, clear-eyed yet tear-inducing account of a daughter’s love for her famous father; and into the bargain, the best family memoir yet to come out of the Baby Boom generation.”

In her opening paragraph, Fadiman—a truly gifted writer—continued: “Nearly every evening of my childhood, I watched him cut the capsule—the foil sleeve that sheathes the bottleneck—with a sharp knife. Then he plunged the bore of a butterfly corkscrew into the exact center of the cork, twirled the handle, and, after the brass levers rose like two supplicant arms, pushed them down and gently twisted out the cork. Its pop was satisfying but restrained, not the fustian whoop of a champagne cork, but a well-bred thwick.”

In the Darkroom (2016)

This is the haunting first sentence of one of the most interesting father-daughter stories I’ve ever read (it went on to win the 2016 Kirkus Prize for nonfiction and was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography). In the opening paragraph, Faludi—an influential American feminist—continued:

“The project began with a grievance, the grievance of a daughter whose parent had absconded from her life. I was in pursuit of a scofflaw, an artful dodger who had skipped out on so many things—obligation, affection, culpability, contrition. I was preparing an indictment, amassing discovery for a trial. But somewhere along the line, the prosecutor became a witness.”

“Civilization: Evolution of a Word and a Group of Ideas” (1930); reprinted in A New Kind of History (1973; P. Burke, ed.)

A Peculiar Treasure (1938)

Ferber’s opening paragraph is only sixty-eight words in length, but it contains a wealth of information not merely about her own childhood, but also about life in the American Midwest in the final decades of the nineteenth century. She continued: “I didn’t much relish the errand because the creamery had a curdled smell like that of a baby who has just had a digestive surprise.”

A Kind of Magic (1963)

A Kind of Magic was Ferber’s second memoir (the first was A Peculiar Treasure, seen above), and she found a beautiful way to open it. In the work, she continued:

“It is a unique thing. It happens only once in a lifetime. To be alive, to know consciously that you are alive, and to relish that knowledge—this is a kind of magic. Or it may be a kind of madness, exhilarating but harmless.”

Bossypants (2011)

In a review in London’s Sunday Telegraph, Viv Groskop hailed Bossypants as “A masterpiece in comedy writing,” adding “I was hooked from the first word.”

“How I Wound Up with a Wound from Heteronyms,” in The Washington Post (May 20, 2021)

Consider the Oyster (1941)

Fisher was one of history’s most popular and influential food writers, but she had great fans in the writing world as well, with W. H. Auden once saying of her: “I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.“ While I can’t be sure, I’ve got to believe Auden was thinking about these opening words when he made his remark.

In a 1941 New York Times review, Edward Larocque Tinker described Consider the Oyster as a “A gay, pleasant, and instructive book.” Tinker went on to add: “This contribution to gastronomic lore completes the picture of a new type of cookery book that has captured popular favor.”

Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (2022)

This is the spectacular first sentence of one of the most intriguing memoirs of the year. I was delighted to honor it in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

In a starred BookPage review, Isaac Fitzgerald wrote: “Isaac Fitzgerald grabs readers’ attention with the title of his memoir…and never lets go. He’s a mesmerizing storyteller who deploys unexpected delights from his very first line.” In the book’s second paragraph, Fitzgerald continued:

“That’s the way I open every story when I’m asked about my childhood. I was a child of passion! A happy little accident. Or, put another way, I was born of sin: a mistake in human form, a bomb aimed perfectly to blow up both my parents’ lives.”

The Invention of Murder (2011)

It’s relatively uncommon for writers to use a quotation as an opening line, but Flanders chose a perfect one for her delightful book on a grim subject. Subtitled How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime, Flanders continued in the opening paragraph: “But even more pleasant, he thought, was to read about someone else’s sweetheart bubbling in the tea-urn, and that, too, is hard to argue with, for crime, especially murder, is very pleasant to think about in the abstract: it is like hearing blustery rain on the windowpane when sitting indoors. It reinforces a sense of safety, even of pleasure....“

Go Back and Get It: A Memoir of Race, Inheritance, and Intergenerational Healing (2023)

This powerful first sentence from the memoir’s Prologue is an immediate—and deeply poignant—reminder about a unique experience facing black Americans attempting to trace their roots: they must often look for white people to find their own ancestors. In the opening paragraph, Ford continued with a stark assessment of the situation:

“Any African American can expect that 19 percent of their ancestors were White men. So, the enslavers might also be your relatives.”

Ford’s decision to rigorously research her family history went into high gear on her thirty-eighth birthday, when an internet search led her to a family photograph that included her great-great grandmother, Tempy Burton, and her great-grandmother, Josephine Stuart. Here’s how she described it:

“In 1858, when Colonel W. R. Stuart, a wealthy Louisiana cotton broker, married Elizabeth McCauley, a girl from a long line of North Carolina plantation owners, her family gave the couple a slave named Tempy Burton as a wedding gift. Elizabeth was sickly and couldn’t have children, but Tempy could and did have six of them with her new master, the Colonel. My great-grandmother, Josephine, born a decade after slavery ended, was their youngest child.”

About the book, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “A fascinating American odyssey quite unlike any other you are likely to encounter, beautifully written, heartfelt, at times painfully candid, and deeply moving.” And I liked Ford’s first sentence so much that I included it in my annual Smerconish.com list of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the complete list here).

The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue (2015)

This is a tantalizing opening sentence with a delightful dash of understatement. Forsyth straight-off confesses to making a blunder that might have started a world conflagration, and then adds: “To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault. But I’m getting ahead of myself.” It’s hard to imagine a reader not wanting to read on.

Forsyth is best known as a bestselling action writer, but he also lived an action-filled life. He was once described in the Washington Post as “A writer of thrillers whose life is one, too.”

Kirkus Reviews wrote about the memoir: “Acclaimed thriller writer Forsyth delivers a charming autobiography about his real-life adventures around the globe. His tales of derring-do are a pleasure to read, especially when coupled with his self-deprecating humor, but his most endearing quality is his ravenous curiosity, which pulled him from one exotic location to another. Forsyth has seen it all. After living such an exciting life, he has earned his bragging rights.”

The Elements of Eloquence (2013)

From the outset, we clearly recognize the central thesis of Forsyth’s book: eloquence is not a gift possessed only by the lucky few, but a skill—and one capable of being taught and learned by many.

Skyline: A Reporter’s Reminiscence of the 1960s (1961)

Given the voluminous output of most newspaper reporters, it’s hard to imagine a better opening line for a journalist’s autobiography. Fowler wrote thousands of newspaper articles and columns in his career, nearly twenty books (including his biographies of John Barrymore, Jimmy Durante, and New York City mayor Jimmy Walker) and screenplays for more than twenty films (including Call of the Wild, A Message to Garcia, and White Fang).

In the opening paragraph of Skyline, Fowler continued: “It would seem harder now to shape the towers of reverie than in the gone time when a man dared send the children of his mind outdoors, and expect them to come home unmarked by the blows of cynics and immune to the contagions of despair.”

The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler (1977), a biography by H. Allen Smith, also begins with some memorable opening words. See the Smith entry in the BIOGRAPHIES page.

Lucky Man: A Memoir (2003)

In the opening words of his memoir, Fox finds a creative as well as a memorable way to describe the appearance of his very first Parkinson’s Disease symptom—a twitching of the pinkie finger on his left hand. It occurred just after waking up that morning, and his first thought was that he had slept on it wrong. After trying to shake it out, however, he couldn’t make it stop, and the twitching intensified as the day progressed.

It would be almost another year before Fox was formally diagnosed, but he found what he described as a “serviceable metaphor” to describe that day: “That morning—November 13, 1990—my brain was serving notice; it had initiated a divorce from my mind. Efforts to contest or reconcile would be futile; eighty percent of the process, I would later learn, was already complete.”

The Diary of Anne Frank (1947; originally titled The Annex)

This was the very first entry written by Anne Frank in a diary she’d been given on her 13th birthday. Bound with red-and-white checkered cloth, the book had a small lock on the front, giving the newly minted teenager a secure feeling that no one but her would be able to read the contents. An exceptional student in a local Montessori school, Anne was already dreaming of a literary career—and the diary’s opening words reveal a sophistication beyond her years.

In February of 1934, Frank was four-and-a-half-years-old and living temporarily with her grandmother when she joined her parents and older sister Margot in Amsterdam, Netherlands. A year earlier, after the Nazi Party won the federal elections and Hitler became Chancellor, thousands of Jewish families began fleeing their native Germany and settling in neighboring European countries. The Franks lived a comfortable (if slightly uneasy) life until May of 1940, when Germany formally occupied the Netherlands and began to identify and deport the country’s Jews.

In the summer of 1942, just after Margot received a letter ordering her to report to a work camp, the family began hiding in a secret room in a building where her father worked. The “secret annex,” as they sometimes called it, was hidden behind a bookcase, and it kept them and a number of other Amsterdam Jews safe until they were arrested by the Gestapo in 1944. Anne and Margot were first sent to Auschwitz, and then the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died—most likely of typhus—several months later.

After the war, Anne’s father Otto—the only surviving member of the Frank family—returned to Amsterdam to discover that his secretary had saved Anne’s diary. To honor his daughter’s dream of becoming a writer, he published a Dutch version in 1947.

First published in English as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952, the book failed to find an audience and was out of print the following year. In 1955, “The Diary of Anne Frank”, a play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, debuted on Broadway. A critical success, the play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1956 and greatly fueled interest in Anne’s story. In 1959, the play was adapted into the “The Diary of Anne Frank,” a film starring Millie Perkins (it was nominated for seven Oscars, winning three.) Now regarded as a cinematic classic, the film re-ignited interest in Anne’s diary, which went on to become one of the world’s most popular books, translated into more than 70 languages and selling more than 35 million copies.

Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot: And Other Observations (1996)

Franken continued in the book’s next two paragraphs:

“Confident that I was now on my way to a bestseller, I took some time off and went to Florida with my wife and kids. But when I returned and sat down to work, it became immediately apparent that the “title tail” was going to wag the “content dog.” That is to say, I’d actually have to write about Rush Limbaugh.

Which, of course, meant I’d have to listen to him on radio, read his books, and watch him on TV. ’How much am I getting paid for this?’ I asked myself.“

Man’s Search for Meaning (1946)

These are the opening lines of one of the most influential books of the 20th century. In 1942, Frankl was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist when he, his wife, and his parents were transported to a Czechoslovakian concentration camp. Two years later, they were all sent to Auschwitz, where his wife and parents perished.

In 1945, after Allied forces liberated many of the Nazi concentration camps, Frankl put the finishing touches on a memoir he began while reflecting on his experiences as a prisoner. The original title of his book, first published in 1946, was Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. After the book was published in English in 1956 (under the title Man’s Search for Meaning), it became an international best-seller and Frankl was hailed as one of modern psychology’s most influential figures.

This is How Your Marriage Ends (2022)

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (2022)

The opening paragraph reads like the first words of a suspense thriller, but they are, in fact, based on the true story of Rudolf Vrba, the first Jew to successfully escape from Auschwitz (one of only four in history). In the book’s second paragraph, Freedland continued:

“The two other prisoners were already there, at the designated spot. Wordlessly, they gave the nod: do it now. Walter and Fred did not hesitate. They climbed on top of the timbers, found the opening and, one after the other, they dropped inside. A second later, their comrades moved the planks into place above their heads. One of them whispered, ‘Bon voyage.’ And then all was dark and silent.”

Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius (2021)

In the bio’s opening paragraph, Freedman continued: “In his youth the idea of setting his words to music rarely crossed his mind. And even when it did, and he started writing songs for others, the thought of performing them himself positively terrified him. So much so that the first time he was asked to perform his music in public he got stage fright and darted off midway through his act.” This was one of my choices for a Smerconish.com post on “Twenty-One of the Best Opening Lines of 2021.“

The Escape Artist: A Memoir (2020)

This is not only a spectacular opening line, it’s one of the most quotable observations I’ve seen on the subject (I’ve also happily added it to the sisters section of “Dr. Mardy’s Dictionary of Metaphorical Quotations”).

I only recently happened upon Fremont’s book (her second memoir, following up the bestselling After Long Silence in 2011). If I’d come across it when it was published, her first sentence would have made my end-of-year list of “The Twenty Best Opening Lines of 2020” (to be seen here).

The Feminine Mystique (1963)

This is the opening paragraph of the first chapter (titled “The Problem That Has No Name“ ) of one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. In 1957, as her 15th Smith College reunion approached, Friedan—a married woman with three growing children—was asked to do a survey of her classmates, almost all of whom were leading what looked like idyllic lives as suburban mothers and homemakers. Just below the comfortable-looking surface, though, Friedan discovered a deep strain of frustration, discontent, and lack of fulfillment. Nobody had written about this phenomenon, and she began to think about it as a problem without a name. A few years later, she gave it an unforgettable name—The Feminine Mystique—and explored it in detail in a book that launched the modern women’s movement.

In a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2013, writer Gail Collins described the three-word concluding question (Is this all?) as “an earthshaking query.“ Three years after publication of the book, in 1966, the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, and Friedan was one of the cofounders.

“A Salty Piece of Land: Wise Old Jimmy Buffett,” in The New York Times (Nov. 28, 2004)

It’s uncommon to find a killer opening line in a book review, but Friedman is not exactly your typical book reviewer. He continued: “The two of us are among the few musicians in the Western world who make a regular habit of writing prose, which may also explain why this newspaper decided upon me to review this book rather than, say, Philip Roth.”

In an Oct. 21, 2007 New York Times article, Dwight Garner wrote about the opening words of Friedman’s review: “The Book Review editors, like editors everywhere, value a memorable first sentence.”

Garner went on to write: “Reviewing Robbins’s novel ’The Carpetbaggers’ in 1961, Murray Schumach, writing in The Book Review, began his assessment with these two sentences: ’It was not quite proper to have printed ‘The Carpetbaggers’ between covers of a book. It should have been inscribed on the walls of a public lavatory.’ Not quite as fun as Kinky’s opener, but it does get its point across.”

“Outlaws,” in ’Scuse Me While I Whip This Out (2004)

“Ode to Billy Joe,” in ’Scuse Me While I Whip This Out (2004)

What Would Kinky Do?: How to Unscrew a Screwed-Up World (2008)

Friedman continued: “Millions upon millions of people, however, have gladly and gratefully taken bad advice, foolish advice, pop advice, and glib advice. Why is this? No doubt it’s partly because of the perversity of human nature. This notwithstanding, the other part, I believe, is because of the sanctimonious, constipated, pompous, smug, and self-righteous way that good advice is usually given.”

“Foreword” to Willie Nelson’s Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die (2012)

“The Big Liar and His Losing Little Liars,” in The New York Times (Nov. 15, 2022)

Friedman’s simple-but-powerful lede about the 2022 mid-term elections perfectly summed up my own feelings about voting this year—and probably yours as well. I was delighted to honor it in my compilation of “The Best Opening Lines of 2022” on Smerconish.com (see the full list here).

The Art of Loving (1956)

Opening a book with a rhetorical question is a time-honored way to immediately engage the reader, and Fromm—one of the great popularizers of psychological concepts to a lay audience—does that very nicely here.

In the opening paragraph, he continued: “Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something one ‘falls into’ if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.”

“I Threw Jerry Rubin off My Show,” in A Thousand Friends (1974)

This is the wry and highly quotable first sentence of an article describing one of the most fascinating interviews in Fuldheim’s long and fascinating career. While doing an on-air interview with hippie Jerry Rubin in the early 1960s, Fuldheim grew so frustrated with the political activist’s smug and smart-alecky remarks that, after about ten minutes, she abruptly ended the interview by standing up and shouting, “Out! Stop the interview!“ The opening line of the article went on to become Fuldheim’s most popular observation, subsequently appearing in numerous quotation anthologies.

Often described as “The First Lady of Television News,“ Fuldheim was the first woman in history to anchor a television news broadcast (in 1947, at WEWS-TV in Cleveland). Barbara Walters frequently credited Fuldheim for her trailblazing role, once observing that she was “the first woman to be taken seriously doing the news.”

“Mrs. O’Grady,” in A Thousand Friends (1974)

A well-crafted rhetorical question can occasionally be a perfect way to open an article or essay, as Fuldheim demonstrates here. She continued:

“How many women stay married though they experience a dull nagging unhappiness; stay because after years of marriage they have developed no skill to qualify for a job and if they are over forty, their age is an additional hindrance. If ever there are lives led in “quiet desperation,” they are marriages without friendship, dignity, love, and passion.“

Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (1989)

Fussell continued: “Going very fast and looking as cute as Bambi, it flies into the air, and behind, the little gun bounces high off the ground on its springy tires. This graceful duo conveyed the firm impression of purposeful, resourceful intelligence going somewhere significant, and going there with speed, agility, and delicacy—almost wit.”

Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic (1996)

Fussell offered these masterfully understated opening words in an advance note “To The Reader” at the very beginning of the book.

The Last Traverse: Tragedy and Resilience in the Winter Whites (2020)

GUEST COMMENTARY from David J. Hartson, Ph.D. a retired North Dakota psychologist who lived and practiced for many years in Littleton, New Hampshire. Dr. Hartson writes:

“These dramatic first lines capture a medical team’s tense struggle to save the life of James Osborne, an outdoorsman who hours earlier was rescued half-alive and more than half-frozen while on a winter hike in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. One of the world’s most beautiful places in the summer, it is one of the most treacherous in the winter, with routine low temperatures of -20 F, wind velocity of 75-95 mph, wind chill at -53 F, and visibility of zero. Gagne’s book is a moving tribute to the medical team’s efforts to save Osborne’s life, and to the First Responders who brought him out alive.”

The exceptionally high quality of Gagne’s writing continued in the remainder of the first paragraph: “As the life struggle rages on, he swings helplessly back and forth through a spectrum of amorphous dreams and disruptive stimuli. His primitive brain is on alert, working behind the scenes in support of the intervention it senses being undertaken by forces unknown. This is because his analytic brain, the cortex, did an emergency bailout over a day ago and hasn’t been heard from since.”

The Affluent Society (1958)

Galbraith continued: “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding. The poor man has always a precise view of his problem and its remedy: he hasn’t enough and he needs more. The rich man can assume or imagine a much greater variety of ills and he will be correspondingly less certain of their remedy. Also, until he learns to live with his wealth, he will have a well-observed tendency to put it to the wrong purposes or otherwise to make himself foolish.“

“Promises to Keep,” in The New York Times (April 25, 1971)

A man must be in possession of quite an ego to begin a review of someone else’s memoir with a grandiose statement about himself, but nobody ever accused Galbraith of being a Shrinking Violet. In point of fact, though, Galbraith began his review of Chester Bowles’s 1971 memoir (My Years in Public Life, 1941-1969) by simply suggesting that the careers of the two men paralleled each other in so many ways that he was the perfect person to review his memoir. Galbraith went on to write: “He is a friend, which is a disadvantage only if the book in question is bad. Only then do you have to consider whether the author should get the truth from you or someone else. This, fortunately, is an extremely good book.”

An Autobiography: Or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927)

Gandhi explained at the outset that autobiographies were a Western tradition, not an Eastern one, and he was deeply uncomfortable about writing something that focused on himself as an individual. He explained: “It is not my purpose to attempt a real autobiography. I simply want to tell the story of my numerous experiments with truth, and as my life consists of nothing but those experiments, it is true that the story will take the shape of an autobiography.”

Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961)

Gardner continued: “Most human societies have been beautifully organized to keep good men down. Of course there are irrepressible spirits who burst all barriers; but on the whole, human societies have severely and successfully limited the realization of human promise. They did not set out consciously to achieve that goal. It is just that full realization of individual promise is not possible on a wide scale in societies of hereditary privilege—and most human societies have had precisely that characteristic.”

In his 1984 revised edition of the book, Gardner retained the exact wording of the first sentence, but changed the second paragraph in this way: “Most human societies of which we have any historical record have been beautifully organized to keep good men and women down. The reasons are many, but the most obvious is that throughout most of recorded history societies of hereditary privilege have predominated.”

“Adventures Of a Mathematician: The Man Who Invented the H-Bomb,” in The New York Times (May 9, 1976)

This is the opening paragraph of Gardner’s review of S. M. Ulam’s 1976 book, Adventures of a Mathematician. In the review, he described Ulam, a Polish mathematician, as the man who, modifying a previously failed plan of Edward Teller’s, deserves credit for inventing the H-Bomb.

In the review’s second paragraph, Gardner wrote: “Imagine Aristotle revivified and visiting Manhattan. Nothing in our social, political, economic, artistic, sexual or religious life would mystify him, but he would be staggered by our technology. Its products—skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, television, pocket calculators—would have been impossible without calculus. Who invented calculus?”

Parasites: The Inside Story (2022)

When serious scientific books begin with a touch of whimsy, they send a clear message to readers: “Yes, this may be a work of serious scholarship, but that doesn’t mean it has to be boring.” In a 2022 review in The New Yorker (“In Praise of Parasites?“), Jerome Groopman described the book as “an approachable and often fascinating primer on the subject.“

“In ‘Yours in Haste and Adoration,’ Terry Southern’s Thoughts Spill Out,” in The New York Times (Dec. 15, 2015)

In the article’s second paragraph, Garner continued: “It must further have been a groove, to use another of his favorite terms, to get a letter from Southern (1924-95) because he seemed to know everyone, from George Plimpton and Lenny Bruce to Ringo Starr and Dennis Hopper and had stories to tell.”

“Metaphysics Laced with Magic,” in The New York Times (February 8, 2022)

GUEST COMMENTARY from veteran poet, playwright, and author Louis Phillips, who writes:

“Although I may not fully agree with Dwight Garner’s assessment of Heti’s new novel, I’m impressed with how he’s able to deliver his entire review in three simple, eye-opening sentences. Each one elicits a specific reaction. The first startles with a great improbability. The second is a clever allusion about the novel. And the third delivers the witty knock-out punch.”

See some of Phillips’ great opening lines on the Short Stories page, beginning here).

Mozart: A Life (1999)

A perfectly crafted opening sentence can compress a wealth of information into a handful of words, as Gay so ably demonstrates here. His writing continued to impress as he continued:

“A few five- or six-year-olds of his time could produce pretty variations on a theme or lure coherent tunes from a harpsichord with its keyboard covered so that they could not see their hands. But unlike other mid-eighteenth-century Wunderkinder, Mozart refined his inventions and his performances into breathtaking beauty and never showed the slightest sign of fading into ordinary adolescence, a fate that has always bedeviled prodigies.”

The World in a Phrase: A Brief History of the Aphorism (2005)

From the very first sentence, we become aware of the important role that short, pithy sayings—better known as aphorisms—have played in Geary’s life.

Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists (2007)

Why is this an effective opening line? When most people lose their jobs, an aphorism is likely one of the last things to pop into their minds.

I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor (2011)

This may seem like an unusual way to begin a book on metaphor—and the role metaphorical language plays in our lives—but it certainly piques the reader’s interest, thereby achieving the objective of all opening lines.

Black Wave (2020)

Ghattas, a Lebanese scholar and journalist, provides a glimpse of his thesis in the book’s subtitle: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East.

In the first paragraph of the book, Ghattas continued: “You will hear it from Iran to Syria, from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and in my own country of Lebanon. For us, the past is a different country, one that is not mired in the horrors of sectarian killings; a more vibrant place, without the crushing intolerance of religious zealots and seemingly endless, amorphous wars. Though the past had coups and wars too, they were contained in time and space, and the future still held much promise.“

In writing “the past is a different country” above, Ghattas was almost certainly inspired by one of the most famous opening lines in literary history, from L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. See the Hartley entry here.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776)

When we read an opening line like this, we can understand why historian J. B. Bury would write, “Edward Gibbon is one of those few who hold as high a place in the history of literature as in the roll of great historians.“

In the first paragraph of his classic work, Gibbon continued: “The frontiers of that extensive monarchy were guarded by ancient renown and disciplined valor. The gentle, but powerful influence of laws and manners had gradually cemented the union of the provinces. The peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury.“

“The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon,” in Esquire magazine (March 1997)

These are the opening words of the original Esquire article that turned an East Village bar into a New York City cultural landmark. Early in Gilbert’s career, while attempting to make a living as a working journalist, she supplemented her income with waitressing and bartending jobs, including a stint at the Coyote Ugly Saloon. Her article inspired the 2000 film “Coyote Ugly.“

By the way, if you don’t know the meaning of the slang term “coyote ugly,“ a Wikipedia entry says it “refers to the feeling of waking up after a one-night stand, and discovering that one’s arm is underneath someone who is so physically repulsive that one would gladly chew it off without waking the person just so one can get away without being discovered. Coyotes are known to gnaw off limbs if they are stuck in a trap, to facilitate escape.”

Eat, Pray, Love (2006)

Gilbert continued: “Oh, but there are so many reasons why this would be a terrible idea. To begin with, Giovanni is ten years younger than I am, and—like most Italian guys in their twenties—he still lives with his mother. These facts alone make him an unlikely romantic partner for me, given that I am a professional American woman in my mid-thirties, who has just come through a failed marriage and a devastating, interminable divorce, followed immediately by a passionate love affair that ended in sickening heartbreak. This loss upon loss has left me feeling sad and brittle and about seven thousand years old. Purely as a matter of principle I wouldn’t inflict my sorry, busted-up old self on the lovely, unsullied Giovanni.”

First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (and Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents (2021)

The opening words come from the book’s Preface, and, after reading them, it is virtually impossible not to read on. Ginsberg continued: “It was during the sixth-grade play at Windermere Elementary School, outside of Buffalo, New York, and I was jarred and transfixed. Until then I didn’t know anything about politics let alone Lincoln, but from that moment on I was obsessed with the American presidency.”

The opening paragraph has nothing to do with the precise subject of the book—the best friends of American presidents, and their almost-always-overlooked impact on American history—but they send an important subliminal message to readers: the author has been fixated on the U.S. presidency since childhood, and anything he chooses to write about it should be seen from that perspective.

The Tipping Point: How Little things Can Make a Big Difference (2006)

In a 2008 article in The Guardian (“A Thriller in Ten Chapters”), Robert McCrum wrote: “The Tipping Point was almost a flop. It was published to mixed reviews in the US, did no serious business in the UK and was saved by—yes—word of mouth. After a dismal launch, and as a desperate last resort, Gladwell persuaded his American publisher to sponsor a US-wide lecture tour. Only then did the book ‘tip.’ Eventually, it would become a literary success of its time, turn its author into a pop cultural guru and spend seven years on The New York Times bestseller list.”

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021)

To open a book with a little known historical fact is a time-honored tradition among non-fiction authors, and for reasons I’m not sure I can easily articulate, I found something especially appealing about this opening sentence. Gladwell continued: “The Marianas are the southern end of a largely submerged mountain range—the tips of volcanoes poking up through the deep ocean waters. For most of their history, the Marianas were too small to be of much interest or use to anyone in the wider world. Until the age of airpower, when all of a sudden they took on enormous importance.”

During WWII, the Japanese controlled the entire area until the summer of 1944, when a brutal and costly series of victories by American forces brought them under Allied control. Almost immediately, U.S. Navy Seabees commenced one of the most ambitious construction projects in military history. Within a few months, American commanders had at their disposal four of the largest airports the world had ever seen, all equipped with the 8,500-foot runways that were needed to accommodate massive B-29 “Superfortress” bombers—and ultimately bring the war to an end.

Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Skin Trade (2000)

“From Its Myriad Tips,” in London Review of Books (May 20, 2021)

This was the opening line of Gooding’s review of Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 book, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape our Futures. The idea is not as far-fetched as it might originally seem, for that is exactly what Sheldrake—a respected English biologist—attempted to do when he sought the assistance of LSD and psilocybin in an attempt to expand his thinking about how fungi reproduce and spread.

French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France (1991; rev. ed. 2002)

These beautiful opening words come from the book’s Prologue, and one would have to be insensate not to want to read on about how gardening may be likened to a great love story. Shortly after Goodman’s book was published, a review in The Midwest Book magazine paid the author—a writer and university professor, not a professional gardener—the supreme compliment, writing: “Goodman is to gardening what M. F. K. Fisher is to food.”

If that amazing analogical tribute didn’t make Goodman’s day, imagine how he felt when the legendary M. F. K. Fisher herself wrote to him about the book: “I possess a deep prejudice against anything written by Anglo-Saxons about their lives in or near French villages. So, Richard, I thank you for breaking the spell. I like very much what you wrote.”

“In the Beginning: Creating Dynamic, Meaningful & Compelling Openings,“ in The Writer’s Chronicle (October 2012)

Goodman, a professor of English at the University of New Orleans, continued: “The reason for its prominence is similar to seeing anything for the first time. Your senses are attuned. Your expectations are high. You’re looking intently at what’s there. It’s analogous to seeing a person for the first time.”

About a first sentence (or first paragraph), Goodman also wrote: “There is one thing it must do: compel the reader to continue reading. Or, to put it another way, to make the reader unable not to read on. If the reader stops cold after the first line, it doesn’t matter what else that line does, or what follows.”

And a little later in the article, Goodman offered this information-packed paragraph on the subject: “What can, and should, an opening do, besides being irresistible? It can provide information. Not necessarily by providing facts—although it can do that—because information can be emotional or tonal. It can, speaking of tone, set the tone. It can create a sense of drama, mystery or tension. It can introduce a character. It can hint at a problem. It can engage the reader by the voice of the narrator. It can foretell the ending. (“In my beginning is my end,” T. S. Eliot wrote.) It can do all of these things, or some of them, at the same time. It’s a unique opportunity. You’ll have only one first opened door with your story. Only one, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?’”

States of Matter (1975)

It’s exceedingly rare for textbooks in any field to have a spectacular opening line—and especially one with such understated wit—but professor Goodstein manages to achieve it in a graduate-level physics text! For another opening gem from a physics text, see the Paesler and Moyer entry.

Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018)

Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009)

After opening with an impressive metaphorical flourish, Gopnik nicely sets up the thesis of the book—that a spectacular coincidence can change the course of world history. He continued: “On February 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic. One entered life in a comfortable family home, nicely called the Mount, that still stands in the leafy English countryside of Shrewsbury, Shropshire; the other opened his eyes for the first time in a nameless long-lost cabin in the Kentucky woods.” Those two baby boys, of course, were Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.

“Why Don’t the French Celebrate Lafayette?” in The New Yorker (Aug. 16, 2021)

Gopnik continued: “He is, in the collective imagination, little more than a wooden soldier with a white plume on his cocked hat. In the original production of ‘Hamilton,’ Daveed Diggs portrayed him affectionately, with a comically heavy French accent and an amorous manner—a hero, yes, but of the cartoon kind, a near relation of Pepé le Pew.”

Rubber Balls and Liquor (2011)

“The Flamingo’s Smile,” title essay from The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985)

Gould continued: “In 1867, under a contract to provide food for railroad crews, he and his men killed 4,280 animals in just eight months.”

A respected paleontologist and Harvard University professor for thirty-five years, Gould is widely regarded as one of history’s best science writers. He also became something of a celebrity in the broader culture as a result of 300-plus essays he wrote for Natural History magazine. The essays were compiled into many bestselling books with great titles: The Panda’s Thumb (1980), Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (1983), The Flamingo’s Smile (1985), Bully for Brontosaurus (1991), and Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995).

“A Most Ingenious Paradox,” in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985)

“The Rule of Five,” in The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History (1985)

Thinking in Pictures: And Other Reports from My Life with Autism (1995)

Grandin is one of the truly great heroes in the autism community (her life and work was memorably portrayed by Clair Danes in the 2010 HBO movie “Temple Grandin”). In the book’s opening paragraph, Dr. Grandin continued:

“Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures.”

Gretzky: An Autobiography (1990; with Rick Reilly)

This is the full opening paragraph, and it quickly seems like a huge understatement as Gretzky continued: “I could skate at two. I was nationally known at six. I was signing autographs at ten. I had a national magazine article written about me at eleven and a thirty-minute national television show done on me at fifteen. I turned pro and kept going to high school!”

As Gretzky goes on like this for a few more moments, many readers might be thinking, “What a great beginning to a great life! No wonder they called him The Great Gretzky.” Others, however, might be thinking, “I hope this self-puffery doesn’t continue for the rest of the book.” And then Gretzky drops the hammer by writing in the next paragraph: “I just felt like I was the happiest kid in Canada. Until I was about twelve. That’s when I realized I was the unhappiest.”

How unexpected! And how cool to see such disarming honesty. How could a reader not continue reading?

The Storyteller: Tales of Live and Music (2021)

Grohl, the original drummer for the rock band Nirvana and founder of Foo Fighters, continued: “Though it only takes one quick look in the mirror to remind me that I am no longer that little boy with a cheap guitar and a stack of records, practicing alone for hours on end in hopes of someday breaking out of the confines and expectations of my suburban Virginia, Wonder Bread existence.”

“Half the World Has a Clitoris. Why Don’t Doctors Study It?” in The New York Times (October 17, 2022)

In the world of journalism, a great opening line is commonly called a lede, and they don’t get much better than this first sentence of Gross’s story about a registered nurse’s medical misadventures after her gynecologist recommended a vulval biopsy.

Havelock Ellis: A Biography (1980)

I Killed Scheherazade: Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman (2010)

From the outset, it’s clear who the author is addressing—and the confident, modern, “voice” she will be using to communicate her message. Haddad, an influential Lebanese writer, reporter, and human rights activist, continued: “For in this book, I will try to do everything that I can to ‘disappoint’ you. I will attempt to disenchant you, and deprive you of your chimera and ready-to-wear opinions.”

The Last Black Unicorn (2017)

In a blog post, writer and Scribe Media co-founder Tucker Max wrote: “From the first line of her book, Tiffany reveals that you’re going to learn things about her that you don’t know—personal things. I mean, really personal. The book’s opening story concludes with her trying to cut a wart off her face because she was teased so much about it (that’s where the “unicorn” nickname came from).“

Elvis Forever: Looking Back on the Legacy of the King (2021)

A popular technique among biographers when introducing the people they’re writing about is to open by revealing important—and sometimes little-known—early details that later evolved into major life themes . Hadleigh does that very nicely here, and he continues to do so in the book’s first paragraph:

“Mother Gladys, fearful of losing her only child, kept him close. The mother-son bond intensified when father Vernon was away working, seeking work or in jail. Growing up and in school, Elvis was a loner, often shunned by classmates due to poverty, the way he dressed and his longer hair. As his parents’ marriage deteriorated, Gladys’s sole focus became her son, whose fondness for singing she encouraged. She steered him away from his interest in guns, which would later prevail, and helped Elvis pay for his first guitar.”

By the end of the first paragraph, the reader has been given a capsule summary that beautifully captures the essence of Elvis’s early years. This is no small feat. You should know, however, that Hadleigh’s book is not a true biography, but rather an extensive collection of quotations about Presley. Hadleigh is a talented quotation anthologist, but the first paragraph of this book suggests he might also want to try his hand at formal biographies.

Reasons to Stay Alive (2015)

With these opening words of Chapter One, Haig begins his memoir—and the story of his longtime struggle with depression and anxiety disorder. They are not the first words the reader sees, however. In a note to the reader at the very beginning of the memoir (titled “This Book is Impossible”), Haig wrote:

“Thirteen years ago I knew this couldn’t happen.

“I was going to die, you see. Or go mad.

“There was no way I would still be here. Sometimes I doubted I would even make the next ten minutes. And the idea that I would be well enough and confident enough to write about it in this way would have been just far too much to believe.

“One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future.”

The Drinking Life: A Memoir (1995)

John Irving is widely quoted as saying, “Whenever possible tell the whole story of the novel in the first sentence,“ and Hamill proves in the opening words of his book that the advice applies equally well to memoirs and autobiographies.“

When I first read Hamill’s memoir, I had two major reactions to the opening paragraph. The first was to view it as an absolutely remarkable way for a recovering alcoholic to begin a memoir about his time in the drinking life. The second was to think to myself, “The tale may not have had any heroes, but I’m sure there were plenty of victims.“

The Greek Way (1930)

Hamilton continued: “Something had awakened in the minds and spirits of the men there which was so to influence the world that the slow passage of long time, of century upon century and the shattering of changes they brought, would be powerless to wear away that deep impress.”

A Victorian in Orbit: The Irreverent Memoirs of Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Told to James Brough (1961)

This striking opener is so wonderfully phrased it has become the personal motto of countless actors and aspiring actors. And, as good as the first sentence is, the first paragraph only gets better as Hardwicke—one of the great English actors in the first half of the twentieth century—continued with a witty and wonderful metaphorical observation:

“In my childhood, when people on the whole showed better sense on the subject, the sun was regarded as something to be avoided under parasol or Panama hat. It was understood then that the human brain, like other cuts of meat, requires refrigeration for its well-being.”

Mike Nichols: A Life (2021)

Harris continued: “The first image of himself he chose to conjure for people was that of a boy on a boat, holding his younger brother’s hand, traveling from Germany to America. They were unaccompanied on that six-day crossing in 1939, their ailing mother still bed bound in Berlin. Their father was already in New York. His two small sons had not seen him for almost a year.”

Harris’s opening paragraph raises an interesting question we all might give some thought to. When we tell our own origin stories, where exactly do we begin, and what is the psychological significance of that precise moment we’ve selected as our starting point?

The Fear of Crime (1969; an expanded version of a 1968 New Yorker magazine article)

Harris opens with an eminently quotable observation, which is always a great way to begin a book on any topic.

Lying (2013)

In crafting the first sentence of a non-fiction work, it’s hard to beat an emphatic assertion that is single-mindedly designed to get the reader’s attention. When I read this opener for the first time, it stopped me in my tracks—and I felt compelled to set the book down for a moment to reflect on the significance of Harris’s grand declaration.

In the remainder of his opening paragraph, Harris elaborated on his thesis by identifying one culprit in particular: “Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, guilt, and disappointment. And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.”

Rex: An Autobiography (1975)

This is a very interesting way to begin any book, but especially an autobiography. In the work, Harrison continued: “We were living then in the village of Huyton, near Liverpool; the nursery in our house was on the top floor, and from the window I could see the far larger house of a family called Brunner, in grounds which amounted to a small estate. Sheila Brunner was a year or two older than I, with lovely long hair which, to my mind, compensated for an undeniably skinny figure—I decided philosophically that one couldn’t have everything.“

In his lifetime, Harrison was married six times, so it’s not surprising to see the topic of romance show up early in his life story. As for a romance at age six, I also recall being smitten at that age, but I don’t recall being so philosophical at the time.

Cruel and Unusual Puns (1991)

In the opening words to his book on transpositional humor, Hauptman wisely provided a sampling of what was in store for readers. His book was aimed at punsters and fans of wordplay, including one of the great masters, Richard Lederer, whose blurb for the book couldn't have been more apt: "This definitive treasury of transposition puns is truly a re-wording experience."

On Reflection: An Autobiography (1968; with Sandford Dody)

My Life in Three Acts (1991; with Katherine Hatch)

Hayes continued: “The first act covers the time when I was guided and strongly influenced first by my mother and then by my husband, the playwright Charles MacArthur. The second opens after Charlie’s death, when I realized that I was now on my own and solely responsible for what became of me. Act three concerns the years after I left the stage in a not-too-successful attempt to stay out of the limelight and live quietly at my homes in Nyack, New York, and in Mexico.“

“Zounds! What the Fork Are Minced Oaths?” in TheConversation.com (July 16, 2020)

So begins a fascinating article on the subject of “minced oaths,” which Hazen, a professor of linguistics at West Virginia University, described this way: “They are a kind of euphemism: an indirect expression substituted to soften the harsher blow of the profane.”

In the article’s second paragraph, Hazen continued: “I’ll get to the crickets later. But what unites all these expressions is a desire to find acceptable versions of profane or blasphemous words. ‘God’ becomes ‘gosh,’ ‘hell’ becomes ‘heck,’ and ‘damnation’ becomes ‘tarnation.’ In a similar vein, the rather antiquated phrase ‘God’s wounds’ turns into ‘zounds.’”

The Time of My Life (1989)

Healey was a longstanding British politician who was best known for his bushy eyebrows and ability to turn a phrase. He was born on August 30, 1917, three years into what was commonly called "The Great War" or "the war to end all wars." He continued by quoting one of England's most famous writers: "Virginia Woolf records in her diary that it was 'not actually raining, though dark. Trees turned brown, shriveled on their exposed sides, as if dried up by a hot sun.'"

A Child of the Century (1954)

In his opening words, Hecht beautifully captured the dilemma of almost all autobiographers. He continued to do so—both cleverly and eloquently—in the next two paragraphs:

“This vanity of expecting too much of myself has often thrown me into long silences as a writer. I was, in my dreams of self, never quite finished with becoming what I hoped to be and, thus, inclined to hold my tongue as unworthy of my future wonders.

“I have decided to put away such convenient humility and accept myself as completed—wonders and all. Perhaps I am even a trifle overdone, for I have less anger in me and less love than I had a few years ago, and my sentences have grown a little longer. Obviously, if I keep postponing the task, no book at all will come to pass and the empire I call myself will vanish without its ideal historian to chronicle it. So I set myself to work.“

“Girl Scout Cookie Deodorant? Enough Already with the Food Collabs,” in The Washington Post (Jan. 6, 2024)

If you can stop reading after a bizarre-but-brilliant opening line like this, you’re made of different stuff than I am. Heil continued in her opening paragraph:

“Me neither. Nevertheless, the chance to slather yourself with the scent of Thin Mints and their sister confections has arrived: The Girl Scouts of the USA is partnering with the personal-care brand Native for a newly launched line of shampoos, conditioners, body washes and—yep—deodorants inspired by some of the Scouts’ most famous cookies.”

In her article on the questionable practice of food collaboration, Heil also introduced other products created by “demented minds,” including Oscar Mayer face masks, Kraft Mac & Cheese ice cream, and Velveeta-scented nail polish.

“Who Are We?” in Sex Tips for Girls (1983)

Playing off the famous Thomas Paine observation, this is the opening line of Heimel’s first published collection of articles that she had written for New York Magazine and The Village Voice. You can see Paine’s historic first sentence here.

“How to Find Someone to Fall in Love With,” in Sex Tips for Girls (1983)

When I first read these wry and witty opening words many decades ago, it forever changed the way I looked at so-called women’s magazines.

To drive her point home, Heimel continued: “How to make him happy in bed, how to choose his socks, how to tell if he’s screwing his secretary, and how to prepare his income tax returns are, according to these magazines, topics deemed monumental in importance.”

“Big Brother is Us,” in Get Your Tongue Out of My Mouth, I’m Kissing You Good-Bye! (1993)

“Hiroshima,“ in The New Yorker (Aug. 31, 1946)

In a 2020 NPR interview, Lesley Blume, author of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-Up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World (2020), described this as “one of the most famous introductions in journalistic history.”

After the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings brought WWII to an end, the U.S. government released plenty of pictures of mushroom clouds and landscape devastation, but nothing about the horrifying human toll. The government’s reluctance to be transparent was captured in a remark by Henry Stimson, then U. S. Secretary of War: “I did not want to have the United States get the reputation for outdoing Hitler in atrocities”

Hersey, a respected war correspondent at the time, chose to tell his story through the experiences of six Japanese survivors of the atomic blast. His 30,000-word article took up nearly the entire August 31, 1946 issue of The New Yorker magazine. For the first time, the American public was learning about such ghastly details as melting eyeballs and people being vaporized.

The issue sold out within hours of publication, and the article was soon reprinted in newspapers around the country, unheard of at the time for a piece of such enormous length. Two months later, the article was published as a full-length book. A main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it was sent free to members (the first and only time this has happened). The book is now regarded as a classic in journalism history.

“Home: Survival and the Land,” in Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home (2011)

These words open the first chapter of the closest thing to an autobiography that Hill has written. She continued: “Situated in Stillwater, Oklahoma State University was only three hours by car from the farming community of Lone Tree, where I’d grown up, but it was a world away from what I was leaving.”

Think and Grow Rich (1937)

These are the opening words of the book’s Introduction, but in an earlier “Author’s Preface,” Hill already tantalized readers with these two paragraphs:

“In every chapter of this book, mention has been made of the money-making secret which has made fortunes for more than five hundred exceedingly wealthy men whom I have carefully analyzed over a long period of years.

“The secret was brought to my attention by Andrew Carnegie more than a quarter of a century ago. The canny, lovable old Scotsman carelessly tossed it into my mind when I was a young boy. Then he sat back in his chair, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, and watched carefully to see if I had brains enough to understand the full significance of what he had said to me.”

Seabiscuit: An American Legend (2001)

I love great opening lines, true, and that love also occasionally extends to the things written about them. If I spent a month crafting my own thoughts about Hillenbrand’s remarkable opening paragraph, it wouldn’t hold a candle to an amazing assessment made by professor Richard Goodman of the University of New Orleans. In an October 2012 article in The Writer’s Chronicle (titled “In the Beginning: Creating Dynamic, Meaningful & Compelling Openings”), he offered a Masterclass in literary criticism in these three paragraphs:

“How do writers take advantage of the opening of their story and use it skillfully to accomplish what they need to do? We can begin with the simple act of dispensing of information. There’s no better example of how that’s done well than the Preface of Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction book Seabiscuit: An American Legend. Remember that when this book was published in 2001, very few people had ever heard of Seabiscuit, much less had known anything about the horse’s remarkable, unlikely drama. That seems incredible now, after the hugely successful book and the equally successful movie, but it’s true. Not only that, Hillenbrand knew very well that no book about a horse had ever done remotely well in the history of American literature. (I’m excluding books for children and young adults, because this book is not in that category.) She had her work cut out for her….

“What she does here, foremost, in this brief paragraph, is to get the reader to understand how big, culturally speaking, Seabiscuit was. First, we notice the famous—and infamous—company she puts Seabiscuit in: Roosevelt, Pope Pius XI, Clark Gable. Mussolini and Hitler. But it’s how she puts Seabiscuit in that company that makes this so convincing. The names are intricately balanced. If you were to diagram them, poetically speaking, it would be AAA—all the political figures—; B—the Pope—; and CCC—all the well-known cultural icons. Look closely, and you’ll see this paragraph is even more fully balanced. The year 1938 is at the start of the paragraph, and it’s also near the end. The word ‘newspaper’ is placed before the litany of names, as well as after. Hillenbrand further provides a sense of balance with the litany itself: ‘was not’; ‘wasn’t’; ‘nor was’; ‘wasn’t even’, setting up the dramatic ‘It was.’ Having been set to expect a person, we are, instead, given the name of a horse. That horse—the one who was more famous that Roosevelt, Clark Gable or the Pope—was named Seabiscuit.

“No good artist ever does anything without a reason. So you can be certain that every single thing in this paragraph was done deliberately. The effect is to get you to look at this horse in a way you’ve never looked at another horse and to believe this is going to be a story worth reading. Of course we know the denouement to this paragraph is going to be Seabiscuit. That’s the name on the cover of the book. So how can we still be surprised? We’re surprised by the facts that we didn’t know, and by how they’re presented to us. This writing is the result of patient crafting, but it’s also the result of research and of marshaling facts. These facts didn’t just fall from the sky, though; Hillenbrand rooted them out—obsessively, as she herself describes it. To find those facts she began, ‘prowling Internet search engines, memorabilia auctions, and obscure bookstores, writing letters and placing information wanted ads, and making hundreds of calls to strangers.’ She didn’t stop until she found what she was looking for. This, with her craft, produced a gem of an opening paragraph.”

Very well said, professor Goodman, very well said, indeed. Thank you for granting me permission to quote you.

Mortality (2012)

So begins a book of deeply personal essays—all originally written for Vanity Fair—that chronicled Hitchens’s battle with a fast-growing esophageal cancer that ultimately took his life at age 62 on December 15, 2011. In his opening paragraph, Hitchens continued:

“The whole cave of my chest and thorax seemed to have been hollowed out and then refilled with slow-drying cement. I could faintly hear myself breathe but could not manage to inflate my lungs. My heart was beating either much too much or much too little. Any movement, however slight, required forethought and planning. It took strenuous effort for me to cross the room of my New York hotel and summon the emergency services.”

The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study on Female Sexuality (1976)

This is the frank and unequivocal first sentence of a book that exploded on the national scene in 1976. Building on the work of Kinsey and, after him, Masters & Johnson, Hite was a previously unknown sex researcher who brought a feminist perspective to human sexuality—and who famously concluded that women didn’t need sexual intercourse, or even men, to experience sexual gratification. A 2020 New York Times obituary wrote about her: “However obvious her conclusions might seem today, they were seismic at the time.” An international bestseller, her book went on to sell nearly 50 million copies. In her opening paragraph, she continued:

“Researchers, looking for statistical ‘norms,’ have asked all the wrong questions for all the wrong reasons—and all too often wound up telling women how they should feel rather than asking them how they do feel.”

As the years passed and more controversial books followed, questions about the quality of Hite’s research—and her life—fueled a conservative backlash that made her life in America so miserable that she ultimately renounced her U.S. citizenship in 1995 to formally became a German citizen.

Bettyville: A Memoir (2015)

The opening paragraph has little to do with the central thrust of the book—a gay, New York man returning to his childhood home to take care of his ailing mother—but they set an inviting tone for a book that writer Jeannette Walls (of The Glass Castle and other works) described as “An exquisitely written memoir.“ The book went on to with the 2015 Nautilus Book Gold Award.

Hodgman continued in the same vein in the book’s second paragraph, this time adding an urban-rural tease he’s clearly used before with cosmopolitan friends: “Then there are the funny-named places. Licking is a favorite, along with Fair Play, Strain, Elmo, Peculiar, Shook, Lone Jack, Butts, Lupus, Moody, Clover, Polo, Shake Rag, and the T towns that always end my list—Turtle, Tightwad, Tulip, and Tea.“

The Paranoid Style in American Politics: and Other Essays (1964)

This opening line from the book’s Introduction is not only beautifully written, it perfectly captures the challenge awaiting all essayists who attempt to put together compilations of previously-published essays.

Originally a 1959 BBC radio lecture titled “The American Right Wing and the Paranoid Style,“ Hofstadter’s in-depth examination of political extremism in America first appeared in essay form in a November 1964 issue of Harper’s magazine. More than four decades later, staff writer Scott Horton wrote in 2007 that Hofstadter’s essay was “one of the most important and most influential articles published in the 155-year history of the magazine.“

When I recently re-read the essay, it presciently shed light on the motivation of modern-day conspiracy theorists and right-wing nationalists. And in a 2018 New York Times op-ed article on the growing signs of authoritarianism in the Republican Party, Paul Krugman tipped his hat to Hofstadter by titling his piece, “The Paranoid Style in G.O.P. Politics.”

Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain (2011)

Holbrook was a toddler when his parents abandoned him and his two older sisters, leaving them in the care of paternal grandparents. He continued about his mother: “I’m told she was just a young girl and that she left when I was two. I have a picture of her, a little brown-tinted photograph in a gold frame, and she is, indeed, a young girl with a shy smile. But there is some other message in her eyes. Something tired, the eyes of a girl who has had enough and wants it to be over.“

Lady Sings the Blues (1956)

This is one of the truly classic opening lines in publishing history. Not long after the book came out, the editors of London’s New Statesman magazine were so taken with the intriguing first sentence that they announced a competition in which readers were invited to submit “similarly explosive first or last sentences from a real or imagined biography.“ None of the hundred-plus entries came close to the quality of Holiday’s original words, though, and they were all awarded only consolation prizes—along with an admission on the part of the editors that they had greatly underestimated the difficulty of the challenge.

The editors of the magazine went on to provide Holiday with a most memorable compliment: “In 23 superbly chosen words, she has established her background, recorded at least five relevant facts, illustrated (by her method of doing so) one facet of her own character and made firm friends with the reader by a breathtaking and naughty dénouement.“ And about the submissions they received from contestants, they wrote: “Too many of her imitators felt that vulgarity or sheer improbability were satisfactory substitutes for the artfully conjured impudence and shock which characterized the original.“

Despite the legendary status of the book’s opening words, they are not factually true. In Billie Holiday: The Musician and the Myth (2015), biographer John Szwed described the book as “a form of autobiographical fiction.“ He went on to write: “When Billie was born, her mother was nineteen, her father seventeen. They never married and had never lived together in a little house with a picket fence on Durham Street in Baltimore. She was not born in Baltimore but in Philadelphia.“

From Under My Hat (1952)

Hopper continued: “When I first saw him, I knew I was in show business. Kids in the neighborhood couldn’t afford pennies, but I made them pay five pins every time they got a look at him.“

Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (1992)

Being an Englishman, the football Hornby is describing is what Americans call soccer.

Adolph Sutro: King of the Comstock Lode and Mayor of San Francisco (2020)

When reading biographies, it’s rare to find an opening line that might work perfectly in a standup-comedy routine, but that’s what happened when I opened the pages of Huber’s book about one of the most fascinating personalities in San Francisco’s colorful history. This great line came at the beginning of Chapter One. A page earlier, in the book’s Introduction, Huber also began memorably, writing: “A biography of one born in 1830 is sure to end with the death of the subject, and the opening chapter describes that inevitable outcome.”

“From Harlem to Paris,” in The New York Times (Feb. 26, 1956)

This is the first sentence of Hughes’s review of James Baldwin’s book of essays—Notes of a Native Son—published several months earlier. Hughes continued: “There is something in Cervantes or Shakespeare, Beethoven or Rembrandt, or Louis Armstrong that millions can understand.”

While acknowledging that the 31-year-old Baldwin was not yet “a great artist,” Hughes certainly recognized his great potential, writing: “Few American writers handle words more effectively in the essay form than James Baldwin. To my way of thinking, he is much better at provoking thought in the essay than he is in arousing emotion in fiction…. In his essays, words and material suit each other. The thought becomes poetry, and the poetry illuminates the thought.”

“Of the First Principles of Government,“ in Essays: Moral, Political, & Literary (1741-42)

“Of the Independency of Parliament,“ in Essays: Moral, Political, & Literary (1741-42)

"The Platonist", in Essays: Moral, Political, & Literary (1741-42)

An Enquiry Concerning The Principles of Morals (1751)

The language may be a little dated and high-flown, but few philosophical works have opened with a better combination of elegant phrasing and forceful expression. As Hume brought the first paragraph to a close, he offered an important generalization about the human experience: “And as reasoning is not the source, whence either disputant derives his tenets; it is in vain to expect, that any logic, which speaks not to the affections, will ever engage him to embrace sounder principles.”

This is one of intellectual history’s best opening paragraphs—and as relevant today as when it was written 270 years ago. In The Great Guide: What David Hume Can Teach Us About Being Human and Living Well (2021), Julian Baggini summarized the essence of the paragraph this way: “When reason has nothing to do with why people hold their beliefs, reason is powerless to change them.”

Society’s Child: My Autobiography (2008)

This was the book’s entire first paragraph. In the second, Ian continued: “On one side of the chasm was the America my parents lived in. There, the country was still congratulating itself on winning the war after the War to End All Wars. Men wore suits and ties to work, or laborer’s uniforms. Women wore stiletto heels, and kept themselves pure for marriage. Females did the housework, males did the heavy lifting. Blacks knew their place, whites knew theirs, and there wasn’t much room between.“

In the third paragraph, Ian, who was born in 1951, continued: “On the other side of the crack was the America I grew up in, bounded by anarchy and a passion for truth. In that America, all wars were meaningless, born out of governmental greed and disregard. Vietnam was just the latest in a series of events to help the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. People on my side of the crack wore colorful clothing and water buffalo sandals, made love not war, and believed in the family of man, unbounded by race, religion, or nationality. We lived through an adolescence tinged by the assassinations of those we held dear. We didn’t know our place.“

Island of the Aunts (originally published in England under the title Monster Mission) (1999)

This is yet another example of a novel for children treating a serious crime in a sensible or almost commendable way. In the novel, the narrator continued: “Aunt Etta and Aunt Coral and Aunt Myrtle were not natural kidnappers. For one thing, they were getting old, and kidnapping is hard work; for another, though they looked a little odd, they were very caring people.” The novel was named a School Library Journal Best Book of 2000.

Kissinger: A Biography (1992)

Isaacson continued: “He was a bookish and reflective child, with that odd mixture of ego and insecurity that can come from growing up smart yet persecuted. ’I’ll be back someday,’ he said to the customs inspector who was surveying the boxes.“

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003)

Isaacson begins his biography with a reference to the beginning of Franklin’s Autobiography, where Franklin had talked about arriving in Philadelphia after hastily leaving Boston. The “something more” is what Franklin’s original description had revealed about him. “Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us,“ Isaacson concluded. And a moment later, he described Franklin this way:

“Ben Franklin, that ambitious urban entrepreneur, seems made of flesh rather than marble, addressable by nickname, and he turns to us from history’s stage with eyes that twinkle from behind those newfangled spectacles. He speaks to us, through his letters and hoaxes and autobiography, not with orotund rhetoric but with a chattiness and clever irony that is very contemporary, sometimes unnervingly so.“

American Sketches (2009)

Isaacson continued: “A little secret of many nonfiction writers like myself—especially those of us who spring from journalism—is that we don’t quite think of ourselves as true writers, at least not of the sort who get called to reflect upon “the writing life.“

“Franklin and the Art of Leadership,” in American Sketches (2009)

Steve Jobs (2011)

Isaacson began his acclaimed biography with a tantalizing tidbit about his subject’s adoptive father; and—while I won’t go into the details here—it all makes eminent sense in the grand scheme of Jobs’s remarkable life.

Leonardo da Vinci (2017)

This is a superb opening line—a classic example of oxymoronic phrasing—and easily the best of any of Isaacson’s fine biographies. I also regard it as one of the all-time best first sentences in the biography genre that Isaacson has come to dominate.

In his first paragraph, the affable Tulane University professor continued: “Otherwise, he would have been expected to become a notary, like the firstborn legitimate sons in his family stretching back at least five generations.”

“Soap Opera,” in The Progressive (October 1967)

“Magnolias and Moonshine,” in Mother Jones (June 1988)

In a column on the ingratiating quality of presidential candidates early in the election season, Ivins continued: “Bob Dole claimed to be a Southerner-in-law. Paul Simon noted he is from southern Illinois. Albert Gore, Jr., fondly reminisced about shoveling pig manure, and Pat Robertson ate grits in public. George Bush, who only the week before had been in New Hampshire claiming to be the full-blooded Yankee—Drink Syrup or Die—turned up in Houston wearing boots, cowboy hat, and neckerchief.”

“Good Morning, Fort Worth! Glad to Be Here,“ in Fort Worth Star-Telegram (1992)

“Texas Woman: True Grit and All the Rest,” in Cosmopolitan magazine (Vol. 212, 1992)

“My, Oh, My, It’s the Ninth Wonder of the World,” in Fort-Worth Star-Telegram (May 15, 1994)

“Say So,” in Rosie magazine (2001, Vol. 128)

“Who Needs Breasts, Anyway,“ in Time magazine (Feb. 18, 2002)

Ivins retained her irreverent sense of humor even while struggling with the cancer that would take her life—at age 62—in 2007. She continued: “One of the first things you notice is that people treat you differently when they know you have it. The hushed tone in which they inquire, ‘How are you?’ is unnerving. If I had answered honestly during 90% of the nine months I spent in treatment, I would have said, ’If it weren’t for being constipated, I’d be fine.’ In fact, even chemotherapy is not nearly as hard as it once was, although it still made all my hair fall out.”

“Love Match,” in Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)

Iyer continued: “In China, a million people raced to see First Blood within ten days of its Beijing opening, and black marketeers were hawking tickets at seven times the official price. In India, five separate remakes of the American hit went instantly into production, one of them recasting the macho superman as a sari-clad woman.”

“The Quest Becomes a Trek,” in Video Night in Kathmandu (1988)

This is the piece’s entire first paragraph. In the second, Iyer continued: “The Hotel Eden, that is, not to be confused with the Paradise Restaurant around the corner or the Hotel Shangri-La. The Eden was on the intersection of Freak Street and the Dharmapath, which was, I thought, the perfect location: at the intersection of hippiedom and Hinduism, where Haight-Ashbury meets the Himalayas.”

“Why We Travel,” in Salon.com (March 18, 2000)

On its own, this is a spectacular aphorism, well deserving of inclusion in any of the major anthologies of great quotations. in the article, Iyer continued:

“We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

“Making Kindness Stand to Reason,” in Sun After Dark (2004)

Iyer is best known for his travel writings, but his profiles about people are also beautifully written—and this particular opener is outstanding. He continued: “And though he is most celebrated around the world these days for his ability to talk to halls large enough to stage a Bon Jovi concert, his special strength is to address twenty thousand people—Buddhists and grandmothers and kids alike—as if he were talking to each one alone, in the language she can best understand.”

“Welcome to the Much-Maligned World of the Conservative,” in The Boston Globe (Feb. 24, 1994)

In his very first column for the liberal-leaning Boston Globe, the conservative Jacoby couldn’t have written a better opening line.

“See How They Lie,” in The Boston Globe (Nov. 13, 1997)

The opening words nicely tweak the old saying about honesty being the best policy. In the article’s opening paragraph, Jacoby continued: “My father often warned my siblings and me that if we got caught doing something wrong, we would be punished, but if we got caught lying, the punishment would be doubled. Naturally, we lied, hoping not to get caught at all. Sometimes it even worked.”

“My Father’s Shoes,” in The Boston Globe (April 15, 1999)

The best way to describe this dramatic opener is “arresting.” As soon as its read, it not only gets the reader’s attention, it holds it for some time after.

Jacoby went on to write: “It was in September 1997, during a trip he’d always insisted he wouldn’t take. He never wanted to go back to his native Czechoslovakia, he’d said; never wanted to revisit Auschwitz, where his parents, his brothers, and his two younger sisters were murdered by the Germans in 1944.”

“Romney’s Secret ‘R,’” in The Boston Globe (Oct. 6, 2002)

Jacoby was referring to Romney’s presidential campaign in the traditionally liberal state of Massachusetts. He continued: “Shh—keep it to yourself. Nobody’s supposed to know. That’s why on the campaign trail, Romney never mentions his party affiliation. That’s why the word ‘Republican’ can barely be found on his lavish web site, Romney2002.com. That’s why it doesn’t cross his lips during debates, and why his press releases routinely avoid it. (They identify him not as the GOP gubernatorial nominee but as “Former Winter Olympic Chief Mitt Romney.“)

“Arafat the Monster,” in The Boston Globe (Nov. 11, 2004)

Jacoby went on to add: “In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, well-wishers would not be flocking to the hospital grounds to create a makeshift shrine of flowers, candles, and admiring messages. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, ‘God bless his soul.’”

“The House of Tudor Didn’t Get the Last Word,” in The Boston Globe (March 26, 2015)

This clear and confident assertion formed the article’s entire first paragraph. In the second, Jacoby continued: “When Richard III, the last Plantaganet king of England, was killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, his corpse was stripped and hauled in disgrace through the streets of Leicester… stuffed into a crude grave, naked and coffinless….”

In 2012, after King Richard’s bones were found under a London parking lot (yes, a parking lot!), the discovery prompted an historic reappraisal of an English monarch who’d been denigrated by Shakespeare as “That bottled spider, that foul hunch-back’d toad.” In 2015, three years after his body was discovered, the remains were reburied—with full honors—in Leicester Cathedral. Jacoby believed there was much to learn from this unusual turn of events, writing: “It may have taken 530 years, but history’s verdict on Richard III turned out to be very different from the malignant reputation ascribed to him by the Tudor loyalists of his era. There is a lesson in that, and not only for medievalists.”

Unreliable Memoirs (1980)

These are the wry opening words to Chapter One of James’s memoir, but he also began the Preface to the book in an engaging way:

“Most first novels are disguised autobiographies. This autobiography is a disguised novel. On the periphery, names and attributes of real people have been changed and shuffled so as to render identification impossible. Nearer the center, important characters have been run through the scrambler or else left out completely. So really the whole affair is a figment got up to sound like truth.”

Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of an Autobiography (1999)

James’s book—part diary, part memoir—focused on the twelve months of her life from her 77th to her 78th birthday. The title was inspired by a Samuel Johnson observation: “At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.”

“Who Poisoned Joe Gilliam…Twice?” in Willamette Week (Nov. 3, 2021)

It’s rare for a newspaper article—especially one from a small community newspaper—to begin like a first-rate crime thriller, but Jaquiss accomplishes that feat here.

Negroland: A Memoir (2015)

Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots (2020)

Jerkins continued: “He pulled me to his side and said he had something to show me. I assumed that is was a gift. He would regularly visit me at my mother’s home, bringing niceties along with his charisma and swagger. Instead, he pulled out his wallet and showed me photos of three girls before saying, ‘These are your sisters.’”

Me (2019)

Opening lines in every literary genre have long fascinated me, but I’ve been especially intrigued by the choices people make when they write the first sentence of their memoirs. John went on to explain his choice by writing:

“Every Friday, after work, she would pick up her wages, stop off on the way home at Siever’s, an electrical store that also sold records, and buy a new 78. It was my favorite time of the week, waiting at home to see what she would bring back. She loved going out dancing, so she liked big band music—Billy May and His Orchestra, Ted Heath—and she loved American vocalists: Johnnie Ray, Frankie Laine, Nat King Cole, Guy Mitchell singing “She wears red feathers and a huly-huly skirt.” But one Friday she came home with something else. She told me she’d never heard anything like it before, but it was so fantastic she had to buy it.”

The song she played for her son that day was Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel,“ and his life would never be the same. About the recording, he wrote: “You could barely understand a word he was saying [but] you could literally feel this strange energy he was giving off, like it was contagious, like it was coming out of the radiogram speaker straight into your body.“

The Lives of Brian: A Memoir (2022)

It’s a treat to read a celebrity memoir that is actually well written, and Johnson, the lead singer of the legendary rock band AC/DC, begins the first chapter of his memoir with a touching memory of his mother.

Even before readers get to the first chapter of Johnson’s memoir, however, they are treated to two other memorable openers. The first appeared in an “Author’s Note,” which began: “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” The other came from the Prologue: “I’d taken some hard blows before. But this time felt different.”

A Very Punchable Face: A Memoir (2020)

Opening a memoir with the transparent admission of a personal weakness is always a good idea, but this one is particularly special, for it ultimately helps readers see something familiar in a new way. As Jost continued, he offered the fascinating hypothesis that a weakness that might have derailed a career as a stand-up comic or improvisational comedian worked very nicely for someone who decided to become a comedy writer. He explained it this way:

“For someone whose job is essentially speaking, this creates a deep anxiety and sometimes a paralysis that keeps me from expressing what I’m really thinking. Whereas the act of writing allows my brain to function in a different way. I can write and not be afraid of what I’m going to say.”

Jost was a Saturday Night Live comedy writer for nine years before becoming the show’s “Weekend Update” co-anchor (with Michael Che) in 2014.

Ford Madox Ford (1990)

Judd continued: “In the 1930s, when Ford was hard up in Paris, a Georgian prince—every Georgian in Paris was a prince in those days—came to him and asked for some. Ford had never met the man before but let him have a check. The prince was outraged by the smallness of the sum and never visited Ford again, though he kept the check. It was for one half of the money Ford owned.”

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961)

This opening sentence is from the book’s Prologue, and it captures in a nutshell Jung’s view of the powerful role the unconscious plays in human affairs. He continued:

“Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole. I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem.”

“An Answer to the Question: ’What is Enlightenment?’“ in Berlin Monthly (Dec. 1784)

Kant continued: “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding.”

Sapere aude! is a Latin proverb generally translated as “Dare to know!” or “Dare to be wise!” In modern usage, it has also come to mean something close to: “Dare to think for yourself!”

The Liar’s Club: A Memoir (1995)

These three paragraphs open the Introduction to Karr’s memoir, and they should be required reading for anyone who believes a short, pithy hook is the best way to begin a book. Karr went on to add in the next paragraph: “Which tells you first off why I chose to write The Liar’s Club as memoir instead of fiction: when fortune hands you such characters, why bother to make stuff up?“

In some cases, it’s difficult to determine what actually constitutes a book’s “opening words.“ After the several-page Introduction, the actual first sentence of Chapter One (“My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark”) is followed by a memory from age seven when Karr was being examined by a doctor who “had a long needle hidden behind his back.“ It’s an interesting and well-written beginning, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the opening paragraphs of the Introduction.

Cherry: A Memoir (2000)

Lit: A Memoir (2009)

Karr begins Book Three of her memoirs with a Prologue titled “Open Letter to My Son.“ She continued: “It’s true that—at fifty to your twenty—my brain is dimmer. Your engine of recall is way superior, as you’ve often pointed out.

Love, etc. (1979)

After this nifty oxymoronic opening—with the captivating idea of a happily miserable couple whose marriage is not unlike a Chinese finger puzzle—only the nearly comatose would fail to read on.

Girl, Interrupted (1993)

In her best-selling memoir, Kaysen chronicled her eighteen-month experience as a patient at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts (the book was adapted into an award-winning 1999 film, starring Angelina Jolie in an Oscar-winning performance and Winona Ryder in the role of the author).

Kaysen continued in the next paragraph: “And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. There are so many of them: worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it.“

My Wonderful World of Slapstick (1960; with Charles Samuels)

Keaton continued in the opening paragraph, "I can't imagine what the great rail splitter's reaction would have been to this, though I sure was pleased."

You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1970)

Keats continued: “She was an elfin woman who had two kinds of magic about her. Her first magical quality was that no one could consider her even dispassionately, and the other was that no one could precisely define her.“

The Story of My Life (1902)

Keller opens her autobiography with a somewhat unusual admission—but one that piques our interest. From the outset, it is clear that one of her biggest concerns was separating what actually happened from one’s fallible and faulty memory of what happened. She continued:

“The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The woman paints the child’s experiences in her own fantasy.“

Profiles in Courage (1956)

Kennedy’s book went on to win the 1957 Pulitzer Prize in Biography and nicely positioned him for a presidential run a few years later. At the time, many believed Theodore Sorenson, a noted historian and close friend of the Kennedy family, had actually ghostwritten the work.

JFK didn’t say much about the matter, but in 1957 his father famously threatened to sue political commentator Drew Pearson for asserting that Sorenson was the real author. The controversy even resulted in a popular apocryphal story that one of Kennedy’s colleagues in the Senate had said to him, “Jack, I wish you had a little less profile and a lot more courage.” The whole matter remained murky until 2008, when Sorenson revealed in his memoir (Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History) that he had, in fact, written “a first draft of most of the chapters” and “helped choose the words of many sentences.”

In the opening words to the book, Kennedy continued: “And these are the stories of the pressures experienced by eight United States Senators and the grace with which they endured them—the risks to their careers, the unpopularity of their courses, the defamation of their characters, and sometimes, but sadly only sometimes, the vindication of their reputations and their principles.”

Orange is the New Black: My Year In a Federal Prison (2010)

From the outset, it’s clear that this is not going to be your typical prison memoir.

She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman (2004)

It’s hard to imagine a better—or more clever—way to begin a sex manual. This opening sentence may shock the sensibilities of some, but those who are offended are almost certainly not members of the target audience.

In the book, Kerner continued in the first paragraph: “As bestselling author Lou Paget has written, ‘Ask most women, and if they’re being honest, they will admit that what makes them hottest and come hardest is when a man can use his tongue well.’”

I also admired the lovely metaphorical way Kerner began the book’s second paragraph: “But as with any language, in order to express yourself fluently, in order to make your subject sing and soar, you must be thoroughly acquainted with the rules of grammar and style.”

Please Don't Eat the Daisies (1957)

The Snake Has All the Lines (1960)

A Most Dangerous Method (1993)

Kerr continued: “The last time the two men were together in the same room was at the Fourth International Psychoanalytic Congress, held in Munich on 7-8 September 1913. On that occasion, so far as is known, they said not a single word to each other. So it was in silence that one of the most vexed partnerships in the history of ideas ended.”

More Myself: A Journey (2020; with Michelle Burford)

This is a lovely, but soft beginning to a high-impact introduction. As the cab drives mother and daughter through the then-seedy 42nd Street neighborhood, seven-year-old Alicia is confused by the sight of scantily-clad women in tight dresses and fishnet stockings standing in the cold, rubbing their hands together to stay warm.

When Alicia asks why these women are standing out in the cold, her mother replies, “When people go through hard times, they often have to do things they don’t want to. Those women are just trying to survive.“ If her mother’s answer had involved information about sex, or pimps, or drugs, it would’ve been too much for a young girl’s mind to grasp—and, it turns out, such words were not necessary.

Keyes concluded her introductory words by writing: “What she does somehow convey is a truth I still carry with me: the women I’ve spotted aren’t on that corner by choice, but by circumstance. Without another word, I slide down into the cracked leather seat and make a silent agreement with myself. I will never be in a situation like that. Vulnerable. Powerless. Exposed.“

Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003)

So begins Kidder’s biography of Paul Farmer, a renowned physician and infectious-disease specialist whose motto was “the only real nation is humanity.” Nine years earlier, in 1994, Kidder was on assignment in Haiti, reporting on the 20,000 American troops who had been sent to restore the nation’s democratically-elected government after it had been toppled by a military junta three years prior.

Anne Dillard had the opening line—and more—in mind when she said the book “unfolds with the force of a gathering revelation.“

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000)

“Great Hookers I Have Known,“ in Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction on the Craft of Writing (2000)

Writers have been referring to Great Opening Lines as hooks for many generations, but I’d never heard them described as hookers until I read this essay by King. He went on to explain: “He’d asked about opening lines, and pulp-magazine editors used the slang term “hookers” to describe such lines. The editors knew pretty well who the audience was. Truckers. Short-order cooks. Steelworkers. Farmhands. Working guys, in other words, who wanted to get away from the gray lives they lived and experience more exciting ones—lives that were bright with color and adventure. If you were good enough to cut it, that readership would support you and the magazines would continue to publish you. But if what you wrote started off flat, the readers would quickly flip past you to the next story.“

Strength to Love (1963)

These are the opening words of the book’s first chapter, titled “A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart.” The French philosopher in question is Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and the observation comes from his 1669 defense of Christian thought, Pensées (literally, “Thoughts”).

In the book, Dr. King continued: “Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.”

Men: Notes From an Ongoing Investigation (2014)

Kipnis continued: “A daddy’s girl who grew into a wayward woman, I wasn’t that surprised to find, when I started rummaging around in the essays and criticism I’d written over the last fifteen or so years, that it wasn’t the random, unsystematic tangle I’d recalled; instead a lot of it seemed to cluster around the subject of…men.” [ellipsis in original]

Drinking: A Love Story (1996)

This is a powerful introduction to a powerful and, if you will excuse the word, sobering memoir. Three months after the incident with her friend’s daughters, Knapp quit drinking—for good.

The two sentences above come from the Prologue to the book, and they are so captivating that I’m featuring them instead of the opening words of Chapter One, which begins simply: “I drank.“

In the second paragraph of Chapter One, Knapp continued: “I drank Fumé Blanc at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and I drank double-shots of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks at a dingy Chinese restaurant across the street from my office, and I drank at home. For a long time I drank expensive red wine, and I learned to appreciate the subtle differences between a silky Merlot and a tart Cabernet Sauvignon and a soft, earthy Beaucastel from the south of France, but I never really cared about those nuances because, honestly, they were beside the point.“

“The Collateral Damage of Queen Elizabeth’s Glorious Reign,” in The New Yorker (April 29, 2022)

It’s hard to imagine a better description of the modern English monarchy, and it was a pleasant surprise to find it in Knight’s review of Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers (2022). In his first paragraph, he continued:

“Naturally, the rest of the Royal Family—the heirs; the spares; Princess Michael of Kent, whose father was in the S.S. and whom Diana nicknamed the Führer; Princess Anne, Charles’s younger sister, who’s known to feed the chickens in a ballgown and Wellington boots after a night at the palace—are all busy. They have numberless engagements and causes, which fill their identical, repeating years, but they exist only as heralds for the magical authority of the Crown, which resides in the Queen and nobody else.”

By the way, in Brown’s in-depth examination of the House of Windsor, the long-time royal observer referred to the entirety of Queen Elizabeth’s relatives in a memorable metaphorical way: “They are high-born scaffolding.”

“A. K. Phone Home,” in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, 2007 (2007; Lucy McCauley, ed.)

After these engaging opening words about herself, Kozolchyk continued:

“Still, I’ve never met another thirty-six-year-old whose parents expect daily communiques from wherever she happens to be. And where I happen to be, quite often, is the boonies—if not the official, geographic Middle of Nowhere, then damned close.”

Road Song (1990)

About this opening, Thomas Larson wrote in The Memoir and the Memoirist (2007): “Who among us doesn’t want to be confided to by this writer’s voice? That the bad stuff is coming doesn’t seem to matter as much once we know the family is self-reliant, perhaps as ours once was.“

The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship (2021)

Kwak was a passenger on the Viking Sky when, in 2019, it suffered a complete engine failure, had difficulty remaining upright, and began to drift dangerously close to a jagged shoreline. Kwak continued: “For now the ship has yet to fully flop, though it feels like we’re getting pretty close. Lucky us, the modern ocean liner is an engineering marvel equipped with technologies ensuring that it always stays upright. We’ve been rolling dangerously during a nasty storm but recover and list upright after each pounding wave threatens to capsize us.”

An American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (2012; with Scott McEwen & Jim DeFelice)

In the third paragraph of the book, Kyle continued: “I’m proud to say that I still try to live my life according to those values. I have a strong sense of justice. It’s pretty much black-and-white. I don’t see too much gray. I think it’s important to protect others. I don’t mind hard work. At the same time, I like to have fun; life’s too short not to.“

Almost immediately after it was published, the book broke into The New York Times Best-Seller list, where it remained for 37 weeks (it was later adapted into an acclaimed 2014 film, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper).

An Extraordinary Theory of Objects: A Memoir of an Outsider in Paris (2012)

Of all the ways a writer could choose to describe herself at the beginning of a memoir, this is an unusual, but extremely effective choice—and it only gets better as the opening paragraph unfolds:

“Born with red hair to parents without it, I always thought I was a changeling—swapped at birth because some perfect couple knew they didn’t want me, even before I could talk, before I could tell them they were right.”

Immediately, we form the impression of someone who, from her earliest days, felt like an outsider looking at an alien and unwelcoming world. In a 2013 review in Black Warrior Review, Ethel Rohan singled out LaCava’s first sentence for comment, and wrote: “What follows in this brief but gripping memoir is the chronicling of her desire, separateness, depression, loneliness, and her inability to feel settled in the world and within herself.”

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts of Faith (1999)

Lamott continued: “Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land. And in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.”

“It’s Good to Remember: We Are All on Borrowed Time,” in The New York Times (October 30, 2023)

In the opening paragraph, Lamott—writing at age sixty-nine—continued:

“At the Safeway sushi bar during lunchtime, I look at the teenage girls in their crop tops with their stupid flat tummies and I feel bad about what lies beneath my big, forgiving shirts but—and this is one of the blessings of aging—not for long.”

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003)

In this compelling work—named “Best Book of the Year” by the San Francisco Chronicle—Larson brought a novelist’s sensibility to a history book. Larson continued: “One was an architect, the builder of many of America’s most important structures, among them the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C.; the other was a murderer, one of the most prolific in history and harbinger of an American archetype, the urban serial killer. Although the two never met, at least not formally, their fates were linked by a single, magical event.”

That single, magical event was, of course, Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair (officially named “The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition”). Larson’s book reintroduced modern readers to the legendary American architect Daniel Burnham and interwove his story with that of H. H. Holmes, a Chicago man who is often described as America’s first serial killer.

The Memoir and the Memoirist (2007)

Larson continued: “It mirrors the open-faced trait of Americans and their speech. It remains open to the nostalgic and the sentimental. It personalizes horror. It belongs equally to a professional writer and a dockworker, a home health-care nurse and your Uncle Donny.”

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) (2012)

These are the opening words of the Introduction to the book. In the first chapter, titled “I Was a Three-Year-Old Arsonist,” Lawson also began memorably:

“Call me Ishmael. I won’t answer to it, because it’s not my name, but it’s much more agreeable than most of the things I’ve been called. Call me ‘that-weird-chick-who-says-fuck-a lot’ is probably more accurate. But ‘Ishmael’ seems classier, and it makes a way more respectable beginning than the sentence I’d originally written, which was about how I’d just run into my gynecologist at Starbucks and she totally looked right past me like she didn’t even know me. And so I stood there wondering whether that’s something she does on purpose to make her clients feel less uncomfortable, or whether she just genuinely didn’t recognize me without my vagina.”

Day-by-Day and Heart-to-Heart (2021)

By beginning her book with a delightful bit of ironic phrasing, Lazar immediately communicates an important message: this memoir will be far more than a simple recounting of events and experiences.

“My Day: An Introduction of Sorts,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

Writer and critic Edmund White once called Fran Lebowitz “The funniest woman in America,“ and these opening words are a perfect example of her wry wit. What makes the opener so witty, of course, is that the phone call awakening Lebowitz has come just after noontime.

In the opening essay of her now-classic 1978 collection of essays, Lebowitz continued: “My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish.”

“Modern Sports,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

Lebowitz continued: “It is not that I am totally indifferent to the joys of athletic effort—it is simply that my idea of what constitutes sport does not coincide with popularly held notions on the subject.”

“Sleep,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

“Writing: A Life Sentence,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

“Taking a Letter,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

“A Few Words on a Few Words,“ in Metropolitan Life (1978)

Lebowitz continued: “This is not to say that it is without its drawbacks—chief among them being its regrettable tendency to encourage people in the belief that all men are created equal.”

“People,” in Social Studies (1981)

In the opening paragraph, Lebowitz continued: “People, even at the current rate of inflation—in fact, people especially at the current rate of inflation—are quite simply a dime a dozen. And, I hasten to add, their only similarity to snowflakes resides in their invariable and lamentable tendency to turn, after a few warm days, to slush.”

Anguished English (1989)

Tweaking a famous quotation is a time-honored way of beginning a book—especially a non-fiction work—and Lederer does that very nicely here and in his The Miracle of Language entry.

For more than a quarter of a century, Lederer taught English at St. Paul’s School, a prestigious prep school in Concord, New Hampshire. From early in his teaching career, Lederer began recording “bloopers” and “blunders” from his students (like “Noah’s wife was Joan of Ark” and “A man with more than one wife is a pigamist”). Over time, he began soliciting additional examples from teachers around the world, and the result was Anguished English, which he delightfully subtitled: “An Anthology of Accidental Assaults Upon Our Language.“

The book was hugely successful, allowing Lederer to quit his New Hampshire teaching job, move to San Diego, and pursue his passion for words on a full-time basis. In a full and vibrant career, Lederer has written more than fifty books that sold well over a million copies. Count me among the many verbivores—a word coined by Lederer, by the way—who regard him as a national treasure.

The Miracle of Language (1991)

The Cunning Linguist: Ribald Riddles, Lascivious Limericks, Carnal Corn, and Other Good, Clean Dirty Fun (2003)

Lederer continued by having the teacher say: “Correct. Now Mary, I want to tell you three things. First, you didn’t do your homework last night. Second, you have a dirty mind. And third, when you grow up, you’re going to be dreadfully disappointed.”

If we were to apply the Motion Picture Association of America’s film ratings system to Lederer’s more than fifty books, all but this one would probably be G-Rated. The Cunning Linguist probably deserves a PG Rating—not just for the occasionally raunchy content, but also for the punning title (if you can’t figure it out on your own, ask a more worldly friend).

Amazing Words: An Alphabetical Anthology of Alluring, Astonishing, Beguiling, Bewitching, Enchanting, Enthralling, Mesmerizing, Miraculous, Tantalizing, Tempting, and Transfixing Words. (2012)

An opening paragraph with an endearing personal touch is almost always warmly welcomed by readers—and that is especially true in this case, where the self-disclosure is combined with a thoughtful observation about blurring the distinction between who people are and what they do. Lederer continued: “When you love what you do, you never work a day in your life, and writing forty books has never felt like work. Especially this one.”

When I was asked by Lederer’s publisher to write a blurb for the book, I happily agreed to do so, and offered this assessment: “This is not simply a book about Amazing Words, it is also an amazing book about words—and one that could have only been written by the inimitable Richard Lederer. Enjoy, word lovers, enjoy!”

Richard Lederer’s Ultimate Book of Literary Trivia (2021)

Reading these opening words, our minds are almost immediately filled with thoughts of people who’ve never actually existed but who seem very real indeed—Sherlock Holmes, Little Nell, Mickey Spillane, Holden Caulfield, Jane Eyre, Atticus Finch, Walter Mitty, Scarlett O’Hara, Harry Potter, Hannibal Lector, Don Quixote, and on and on.

Lederer continued: “Figments though they may be, literary characters can assume a vitality and longevity that pulse more powerfully than flesh and blood.”

“Sweet Smell of Success” (1950), title story of Sweet Smell of Success: And Other Stories (1957)

The narrator, a sleazy Manhattan press agent named Sidney Falco, continued in the first paragraph: “I sat there at my desk with the phone propped between my head and shoulder and allowed the insistent monotone of her voice to jab at my brain, while I mopped my forehead with my left hand and tapped a cigarette with my right.”

Lehman’s story originally appeared under the title “Tell Me About It Tomorrow” in an April, 1950 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine (the publication’s editors insisted on a title change because they didn’t want the word “smell” to appear in the pages of the magazine).

Lehman’s novelette was adapted into a first-rate 1957 film starring Tony Curtis as Falco and Burt Lancaster as the powerful and unprincipled newspaper columnist J. J. Hunseker (Lehman co-wrote the screenplay with Clifford Odets). The film got off to a disappointing start, in large part because Tony Curtis fans had trouble accepting him in a role that clashed with his “nice-guy” image. By the end of the year, however, the film was on numerous “Ten-Best” lists, and is now regarded as a film noir classic.

This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral—Plus Plenty of Valet Parking!—in America’s Gilded Capital (2013)

Leibovich’s provocative opening words perfectly encapsulate the nature of life in Washington, DC—even at a memorial service for a recently departed news legend, politics permeates the room. Leibovich continued by describing the challenge facing a political reporter at such an event:

“You can’t work it too hard at a memorial service, obviously. It’s the kind of thing people notice. But the big-ticket Washington departure rite can be such a great networking opportunity. You can almost feel the ardor behind the solemn faces: lucky stampedes of power mourners, about two thousand of them, wearing out the red-carpeted aisles of the Kennedy Center.”

One of the most anticipated books of the year, This Year debuted at Number One on The New York Times Best Seller List, and remained on the list for twelve weeks. In a New York Times review of the book (cleverly titled “A Confederacy of Lunches”), novelist Christopher Buckley began his review by writing:

“Not to ruin it for you, but: if you already hate Washington, you’re going to hate it a whole lot more after reading Mark Leibovich’s takedown of the creatures who infest our nation’s capital and rule our destinies. And in case you are deluded enough as to think they care, you’ll learn that they already hate you.”

“How John McCain Turned His Cliches into Meaning,” in The New York Times (Dec. 18, 2013)

This oxymoronic opening serves as an example about why Leibovich was hailed by The Washingtonian’s Garrett M. Graff as “Washington’s reigning master of the political profile.” In the piece’s second paragraph, Leibovich continued:

“He is sampling none of the usual flavors of upset we tend to associate with the Arizona senator: not the ‘McCain is bitter’ or ‘get off my yard’ varieties, not even the ‘deeply troubled’ umbrage that politicians of all stripes love to assume. Here is a man, instead, who is gleefully seizing an opportunity for outrage.”

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir of the End of Sight (2023)

These are the stark—and startling—opening words of a memoir that seemed to come out of nowhere in the middle of the year and ended up on numerous “best books of the year” lists. Leland continued in the opening paragraph:

“It feels less dramatic than it sounds. The words aren’t disappearing as I type. I’m sitting comfortably in the sunroom. The sun is rising like it’s supposed to. I can plainly see Lily sitting next to me, reading in her striped pajamas. The visible world is disappearing, but it’s not in a hurry.”

Leland—a Massachusetts writer, teacher, editor, and audio producer—has retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a progressive eye disease that slowly but inexorably leads to blindness. When the book was published, he could see only about six percent of what a person with normal vision sees.

I was so impressed with Leland’s opening sentence that I included it in my annual Smerconish.com post on “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

This is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism (2021)

These are the opening words to the book’s Prologue, titled “A Letter to My Nephew.” After the unmistakable allusion to the George Floyd killing, Lemon offered a bleak-but-beautifully-phrased assessment of the likely aftermath.

Astute readers will quickly surmise that, in approaching his book, Lemon was inspired by James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963). Both books have fire in the title, and Baldwin also began his classic work with a letter to his nephew. Both books also contain a similar tone of deep frustration and controlled rage at America’s failure to learn from its own painful history.

Education and Ecstasy (1968)

It is generally inadvisable to begin a book with a sarcasm-laced observation, but Leonard—a leader of the human potential movement and critic of the educational establishment—was clearly trying to get people’s attention. In the first paragraph, he continued:

“What energy it takes to make a torrent into a trickle, to train that trickle along narrow, well-marked channels!“

The Ultimate Athlete (1974)

Leonard continued: “Every body that moves about on this planet, if you look at it that way, may well be inhabited by a strong and graceful athlete, capable of Olympian feats.“

These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)

It takes a touch of audacity to attempt a one-volume history of the United States, and Lepore—a Harvard University history professor as well as a New Yorker staff writer—opens with a bang. Bruce Watson, a noted writer/historian in his own right, alerted me to Lepore’s opening words, writing: “It’s not easy to sum up history in a sentence, nor is it easy to do a full U.S. history in a single book, but Lepore rises to both tasks. Introducing her monumental single-volume history, she makes many profound statements about history as an inexact science and America as a work in progress. She had me from the start.”

Lepore’s book was widely hailed, but my favorite critical comment came from Casey Cep, also a New Yorker staff writer, in a Harvard Magazine review. After describing the work as “Astounding,” Cep went on to write that Lepore “has assembled evidence of an America that was better than some thought, worse than almost anyone imagined, and weirder than most serious history books ever convey.”

The title of Lepore’s book, of course, comes from the second line of the Declaration of Independence, which begins, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….“

The Dance of Anger (1985)

This is a brilliant opening line, succinctly capturing in nine simple words the essence of an entire book. They also begin a full paragraph that is one of psychology history’s clearest and most lucid descriptions of a complex emotion:

“Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to. Our anger may be a message that we are being hurt, that our rights are being violated, that our needs or wants are not being adequately met, or simply that something is not right. Our anger may tell us that we are not addressing an important emotional issue in our lives, or that too much of our self—our beliefs, values, desires, or ambitions—is being compromised in a relationship. Our anger may be a signal that we are doing more and giving more than we can comfortably do or give. Or our anger may warn us that others are doing too much for us, at the expense of our own competence and growth. Just as physical pain tells us to take our hand off the hot stove, the pain of our anger preserves the very integrity of our self. Our anger can motivate us to say ‘no’ to the ways in which we are defined by others and ‘yes’ to the dictates of our inner self.”

In One Era and Out the Other (1973)

Levenson, one of his era’s most admired humorous writers, continued: “So I took my arm by the hand and off we went to seek my fortune. Show business was the last place in the world I expected to find it.”

The essence of the “if you ever need a helping hand” saying went on to become very popular, with many celebrities (including Audrey Hepburn) adopting it as a kind of motto. In Diana Maychick’s biography Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (1993), she quoted Hepburn as saying: “If you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm. As you get older, you must remember you have a second hand. The first one is to help yourself, the second one is to help others.”

Levenson’s memoir was also graced with one of my all-time favorite book titles.

If This Is a Man (1947)

These are the first ten words of the “Author’s Preface.“ Levi quickly provides a fuller explanation of what he means, but it’s hard to imagine a more arresting opening. It also seems clear that he wanted to begin in the most dramatic way possible.

Here’s the complete first paragraph: “It was my good fortune to be deported to Auschwitz only in 1944, that is, after the German government had decided, owing to the growing scarcity of labor, to lengthen the average life-span of the prisoners destined for elimination; it conceded noticeable improvements in the camp routine and temporarily suspended killings at the whim of individuals.“

Successful Aging (2020)

Levitin, a neuroscientist who authored four previous New York Times bestsellers, turned his attention to aging in this latest book, also a bestseller. He continued: “I saw my grandfather suffer aches and pains. Once agile and proudly self-sufficient, by his sixties he struggled to swing a hammer and was unable to read the label on a box of Triscuit crackers without his glasses. I listened as my grandmother forgot words, and I cried when eventually she forgot what year it was.”

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003)

In this landmark sports book, Lewis began by introducing the idea of experts focusing on the wrong things. He continued: “When big league scouts road-tested a group of elite amateur prospects, foot speed was the first item they checked off their lists. The scouts actually carried around checklists. ‘Tools’ is what they called the talents they were checking for in a kid. There were five tools: the abilities to run, throw, field, hit, and hit with power. A guy who could run had ‘wheels’; a guy with a strong arm had a ‘hose.’ Scouts spoke the language of auto mechanics. You could be forgiven, if you listened to them, for thinking they were discussing sports cars and not young men.”

“Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group,” in The Paris Review (Jan. 9, 2024)

A creative writing group at the CIA? And one called “Invisible Ink”? I don’t know about you, but I’m compelled to read on.

The Telephone Booth Indian (1942)

These are the first words of the Preface to the book. Liebling continued: “The details are not too clear in my mind, as I read the story in a hygiene reader which formed part of the curriculum of my fourth year in elementary school, but I have no doubt it is essentially correct.”

The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, and the Unlikely Ascent of Hallelujah (2012)

For a writer, it’s got to be a major challenge to craft an exemplary opening for a biography about the legendary Leonard Cohen and his equally legendary song, “Hallelujah.” But Light finds a way to do it with style—bringing together three iconic historical figures in one intriguing observation about two of them.

“Game of Crones,” in Longreads.com (May 2019)

Lippmann, fifty years old when she and her husband adopted a baby girl, found an intriguing way to introduce her essay on the topic of older mothers. She was invited to write the piece for the Longreads.com “Fine Lines” series.

A Preface to Morals (1929)

Lippmann continued: “It is not intended to disturb the serenity of those who are unshaken in the faith they hold, and it is not concerned with those who are still exhilarated by their escape from some stale orthodoxy. It is concerned with those who are perplexed by the consequences of their own irreligion.”

Priestdaddy: A Memoir (2017)

Priestdaddy was one of the most acclaimed memoirs of 2017, an extraordinary recounting of Lockwood’s experiences as the daughter of a Lutheran minister who became a highly unconventional Catholic priest. It also had what I regard as the best opening line of the year in the world of non-fiction—a perfect signal to readers that this would be a memoir with both wit and edge.

In a New York Times review, Dwight Garner was clearly thinking about Lockwood’s opening salvo when he wrote that the book “roars from the start.” Priestdaddy went on to win the 2018 Thurber Prize for American Humor. And in 2019, The New York Times included it on its list of “The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years.“

“My Early Years at School,” in Getting Personal: Selected Essays (2003)

The opening line above comes from the very first chapter, and Lopate followed it by writing: “All I remember is running outside at three o’clock with the others to fill the safety zone in front of the school building, where we whirled around with our book bags, hitting as many proximate bodies as possible. The whirling dervishes of Kabul could not have been more ecstatic than we with our thwacking book satchels.”

In the Introduction to the book, Lopate—who is seventy-seven as I write this in 2021, and still very much alive—plays around with readers by suggesting that this book of heavily autobiographical essays is being published posthumously. The Introduction even includes a note from Lopate’s friend and running partner, Dr. Horst Shovel (yes, that’s his real name), who writes that this collection of essays will have to serve as “the informal version of the autobiography he never got around to writing” during his lifetime. I’m not sure why Lopate decided to employ this deceased author conceit, but I’m hoping to one day find out the answer. I’ll let you know when I do.

“Willy,” in Getting Personal: Selected Essays (2003)

We’re used to seeing the phrase, “My wife was seeing another man,” but to see it applied to mothers is fresh and unexpected. It’s also a helpful reminder than an affair does not merely involve a husband and a wife, but sometimes an entire family.

In the opening paragraph, Lopate continued: “It may have been childish confusion—I was eight years old at the time—or a trick memory plays on us, but I seem to remember the Jeep he drove was also a Willys. This car has disappeared from modern life. I am unable even to picture it. But at the time it colored all my thinking about the affair.”

“Samson and Delilah and the Kids,” in Getting Personal: Selected Essays (2003)

If you’re anything like me, your first reaction to this opening line is probably something along the lines of: “The era of the great Jewish lovers? When was that?”

Lopate clearly anticipated that reaction, and continued: “Samson and Delilah, David and Bathsheba, Solomon and Sheba were burning up screens across the land. I never managed to see David and Bathsheba (though I know the coming attractions by heart), because the movie industry in its wisdom decreed that I was too young for this adulterous tale. Inconsistently, they let me into Samson and Delilah when I was seven.”

To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction (2013)

More than any other contemporary writer, Phillip Lopate’s name is virtually synonymous with the form of writing known as the personal essay. In the book’s opening paragraph, he continued: “Many of my fellow writers treat teaching as a lower calling; they only do it to pay the rent, or until such time as they can support themselves entirely from royalties and advances. For my part, I think I would continue to teach even if I were to win the lottery.”

The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice (2012)

Few people would regard Elizabeth Taylor as an influential figure in the early history of feminism, but Lord’s mission is to set the record straight. In the second paragraph, she continued: “Feminism may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Elizabeth Taylor. But it might if you share your definition with writer Rebecca West: ‘I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist when I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”

Managing Thought: Think Differently. Think Powerful. Achieve New Levels of Success (2008)

A bold declaration is always a good way to begin any book, especially a non-fiction work, and Lore’s impressive explication of her thesis had the added benefit of helping readers reframe their thinking about the future.

In a later paragraph, Lore, a popular platform speaker as well as an award-winning author, went on to add: “We achieve results by focusing on the moment. And the results we achieve—bad, good, or significant—depend on what we focus on in the moment.”

“‘They’re All High’: Louisiana Police Say Rats Eating Marijuana in Evidence Room,” in The Guardian (March 12, 2024)

This opening sentence has it all: rats…getting high…off marijuana…stolen from an evidence room…at police headquarters…and, of course, in New Orleans. You can’t make this stuff up, but you can write an unforgettable first sentence about it—as Luscombe does here. His article continued in the second paragraph:

“The rats are eating our marijuana. They’re all high,” Anne Kirkpatrick, superintendent of the city’s police department, told a council committee meeting on Monday.

While a final decision remains to be made, Luscombe’s inspired opener has an excellent chance of being included in my end-of-year list of the best opening lines of the year.

“‘Max’ in Danger” (1922), in Essays on Life and Literature (1951)

Since canonization is typically regarded as a good thing, Lynd immediately gets our attention by suggesting that, at least in this case, the very opposite is true. At the time the article was written, all literate readers would have known that the “Max” in question was Max Beerbohm, one of the truly great wits in the early decades of the twentieth century. In his opening paragraph, Lynd continued: “Critics may quarrel about him, but it is only because the wreaths get in the way of one another, and every critic thinks that his should be on top.”

After this engaging introduction to the subject of the essay, Lynd continued to write with great flair as he went on to say: “In order to avert this unseemly canonization—or, at least, to keep it within the bounds of reason—one would like to adopt the ungracious part of advocatus diaboli and state the case against ‘Max’ in the strongest possible terms. But, alas! one finds that there is nothing to say against him, except that he is not Shakespeare or Dr. Johnson.”

A Casual Commentary (1925)

I’m not sure if Macaulay was the first person to use the phrase another spin of the wheel to describe the ending of one year and the beginning of another, but it’s now become a common expression. And it’s a lovely metaphor to be employed in the opening sentence of a work of nonfiction. In the work, Macaulay continued:

“Another January; another new year; presently another quickening of the sap in the trees, of green in the undergrowth, of the blood in man’s veins, of activity among publishers and birds; in brief, another year.”

Adventures in Staying Young (1955)

I still recall the moment when I first came across this opening line more than a half-century ago. It perfectly phrased something I’d personally experienced but had never consciously thought about—or seen put into words.

The Magic Power of Self-Image Psychology (1964)

Maltz continued: “All these feelings will pulse through you—and more. For the picture you will see is about the most fascinating person in the world—yourself. In this theatre, which is in the mind and heart of each of us, you are the producer, director, writer, actor or actress, hero and the villain. You are the film technician up in the booth—and the audience which reacts to this thrilling drama.”

Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela (1994)

Mandela, whose full name was Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, deftly opened his autobiography with a preview of events to come. He continued: “I do not believe that names are destiny or that my father somehow divined my future, but in later years, friends and relatives would ascribe to my birth name the many storms I have both caused and weathered.”

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)

How Not to Kill Yourself: A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind (2023) A Portrait of the Suicidal Mind (2023)

It’s a grisly first sentence, true, but it’s hard to imagine a better opening line for a nonfiction book addressed to people who are attempting to cope with suicidal thoughts. After his “hook” has been implanted in readers, Martin—a philosophy professor with a long history of failed suicide attempts—reels them in with the following explanation:

“As usual, I didn’t write a note. I carried down a green leather and wood chair from my office while my dog watched from the stairs. She’s afraid of the basement. I took the heavy blue canvas leash, looped it over a beam, made a noose by snaking the leash through the handle, latched it, and checked it for strength. Then I kicked the chair away like the gentle old institutionalized suicide Brooks Hatlen does toward the end of The Shawshank Redemption.”

I was delighted to include Martin’s first sentence in my end-of-year Smerconish.com post of “23 of the Best Opening Lines of 2023” (see the full list here).

Groucho and Me (1959)

Marx continued in the book’s second paragraph: “Although it is generally known, I think it’s about time to announce that I was born at a very early age. Before I had time to regret it, I was four and a half years old. Now that we are on the subject of age, let’s skip it. It isn’t important how old I am. What is important, however, is whether enough people will buy this book to justify my spending the remnants of my rapidly waning vitality in writing it.”

The Communist Manifesto (1848)

This is the first sentence of the Preamble to the book—originally written more than a decade before the American Civil War!—and it went on to become one of the most famous opening lines in history.

The first line of the book’s first chapter went on to rival the Preamble opener in fame: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

The Communist Manifesto is a political treatise—and one of the most influential in world history—but these two opening lines reveal one other thing: the book was written by two men who also had some serious writing skills.

Toward a Psychology of Being (1962)

These are the hopeful opening words of a book that helped launch the humanistic psychology movement in America. The introductory chapter was based on a 1954 lecture Maslow originally delivered at the Cooper Union in New York City.

The Summing Up (1938)

In this book, often described as a “literary memoir,” Maugham continued: “Sometimes an experience I have had has served as a theme and I have invented a series of incidents to illustrate it; more often I have taken persons with whom I have been slightly or intimately acquainted and used them as the foundation for characters of my invention. Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now, looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other.”

One of my favorite passages in the book could easily be applied to me, a seventy-nine-year-old lifelong learner when I launched this website. Maughan wrote: “When I was young I was amazed at Plutarch’s statement that the elder Cato began at the age of eighty to learn Greek. I am amazed no longer. Old age is ready to undertake tasks that youth shirked because they would take too long.“

Strictly Personal (1941)

Maugham continued: “For more than two years now the great powers of Europe have been engaged in a fearful struggle, a dozen small nations have been invaded, and France has been vanquished: these are matters that the newspapers have reported and that history will deal with.”

The Summing Up and Strictly Personal are Maugham’s only semi-autobiographical works, published when he was sixty-four and sixty-seven years of age; he would live to be ninety-one.

Man’s Search for Himself (1953)

These are the opening words of the Preface to the book. May continued: “When our society, in its time of upheaval in standards and values, can give us no clear picture of ‘what we are and what we ought to be,’ as Matthew Arnold puts it, we are thrown back on the search for ourselves. The painful insecurity on all sides gives us new incentive to ask, Is there perhaps some important source of guidance and strength we have overlooked?”

Love and Will (1989)

“The Vassar Girl,” in Holiday magazine (May, 1951)

“My Confession,” in Partisan Review (Fall, 1953)

“The Vita Activa,” in The New Yorker (October 18, 1958)

“Artists in Uniform,” in Harper’s Magazine (March, 1953); reprinted in On the Contrary (1961)

We typically expect luxuriant character descriptions in works of fiction, but McCarthy demonstrates here that they can work equally well in non-fiction articles. She continued: “He appeared to be under some intense nervous strain and had sat the night before in the club car drinking bourbon with beer chaser and leafing through magazines which he frowningly tossed aside, like cards into a discard heap.”

A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean (2009)

When a memoir—especially one centered around a personal or athletic achievement—begins with an opening line that rivals those of the great novelists, it’s yet another accomplishment, and I’m delighted to be honoring it here.

In 1999, McClure became the first woman in history to row across the Atlantic ocean, and the first person to do it solo. She had attempted the crossing a year earlier, but was thwarted by a hurricane. In Book Lust to Go (2010), American librarian Nancy Pearl wrote “I love the first line,” and offered the fascinating tidbit that Muhammad Ali was instrumental in getting McClure to make a second attempt. According to Pearl, Ali told her that she probably didn’t want to go down in history as the first woman who “almost rowed across the Atlantic.”

For her incredible feat, McClure received numerous awards, including the Ocean Rowing Society International’s Peter Bird Trophy for Tenacity and Perseverance, and the Victor Award, given annually by the National Academy of Sports Editors to outstanding athletes. The Atlantic crossing, as it turns out, was only one of McClure’s outstanding personal efforts. She is also the first woman to ski to the South Pole and the first woman to climb the Lewis Nunatak in the Thiel Mountains of Antarctica. As I write this in early 2022, she has graduated to new feats of daring, serving as president of Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky.

Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (1996)

In his memoir, McCourt continued: “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

McCourt’s memoir was one of the most acclaimed books of the year, winning the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography.

Teacher Man: A Memoir (2005)

McCourt continued: “On the first day of my teaching career, I was almost fired for eating the sandwich of a high school boy. On the second day I was almost fired for mentioning the possibility of friendship with a sheep. Otherwise, there was nothing remarkable about my thirty years in the high school classrooms of New York City. I often doubted if I should be there at all. At the end I wondered how I lasted that long.”

Every Third Thought: On Life, Death and the End Game (2017)

This is a dramatic opening, and that haunting phrase about being most greedy for blood kept returning to my mind. McCrum continued: “Eventually, perhaps some hours later, like a breaking dam, the clot burst into the right side of my brain, causing an uncontrolled ‘bleed’ that would achieve irreversible destruction of cerebral tissue deep inside my head, in the part of the cortex known as the basal ganglia.”

You might also be interested in knowing that McCrum borrowed the title of his memoir from a Prospero line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Every third thought shall be my grave.”

“Twilight on the Buffalo Paddock,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

McGuane continued: “They are massing peacefully, feeding and nuzzling and ignoring the traffic. They are fat, happy, numerous beasts; and all around them are the gentle, primordial hills of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, U.S.A. It is dawn on the buffalo paddock; the frontier is nowhere in sight.”

“Me and My Bike and Why,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

“A World-Record Dinner,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

The title of the essay is nothing to write home about, but the opening paragraph is exceptional, and the writing only gets better as McGuane moves into the second paragraph:

“And it is true that the fish, as you may have suspected, is not at all handsome, with its large and vacant-looking head, crazy red eye, and haphazard black spot just shy of its tail. Yet its brick-orange flanks and red tail are rather tropical and fine, and for a number of reasons it deserves consideration as major light-tackle game. When you have been incessantly outwitted by the mutton snapper, you cease to emphasize his vaguely doltish exterior.”

“Molly,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

“Wading the Hazards,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

McGuane continued: “Traced upon the minds of many of our countrymen are the perimeters of a golf course, a last frontier, a wonderful great lawn whose spacious nocturnal gloom always served the fantasies of young trespassers when nothing else in the republic did.”

“Motocross,” in An Outside Chance: Essays of Sport (1980)

McGuane continued: “The right bike in the right hands can travel full tilt in bumps, slides, and vaults over ground that would gunnysack Land Rovers and Power Wagons. In the hands of the cyclists who dominate motocross racing, the progress is made with a power and alacrity that makes your hair stand on end.”

Out of Their League (1970)

This is a wonderful beginning to one of the most interesting and influential sports memoirs ever written (in 2002, Sports Illustrated ranked it Number 63 on its list of The Top 100 Sports Books of All Time). Meggyesy was only 29 when the book was published, and at the top of his game, but he believed the sport he had loved his entire life was in desperate need of reform. Look magazine’s Leonard Schecter called it “the roughest sport book ever written.” And seventeen years after it was published, David Remnick wrote in a 1987 Sports Illustrated article that it had “changed the way we think about the most popular sport in the country.”

In his article, Remnick also memorably described the book: “A polemical book that made Jim Bouton’s Ball Four seem as tame as The Red Grange Story. Meggyesy wrote about alumni boosters contributing money under the table to college athletes, team doctors shooting up players with painkillers, coaches pushing athletes to play despite serious injuries, players cheating on their wives and organizing orgies, sadistic coaches treating players like dray horses, teams divided along racial lines.”

Dead Man in the Silver Market: An Autobiographical Essay on National Prides (1954)

Menen has been largely forgotten by modern readers, but he was popular enough to be remembered in a warm New York Times obituary after his death in 1989. A prolific writer of two-dozen novels, travel books, and non-fiction works, Menen was born in London in 1912 to an Irish mother and Indian father. He was also known as a gifted satirist, as he proves in this magnificent opening line. Menen’s book is often described as an autobiography, but it is in reality a series of essays, many of a semi-autobiographical nature.

No Man is an Island (1955)

These are the opening words of Chapter I, which is memorably titled “Love Can Be Kept Only By Being Given Away.“ This single observation went on to become one of Merton’s most popular quotations.

In the second paragraph, Merton continued: “There is a false and momentary happiness in self-satisfaction, but it always leads to sorrow because it narrows and deadens our spirit. True happiness is found in unselfish love, a love which increases in proportion as it is shared,”

Of Merton’s many spiritual and philosophical works, No Man is an Island is my favorite, and one I have returned to again and again over the years (technically, it is a collection of essays rather than a single non-fiction work). The title, of course, comes from a famous line in John Donne’s classic prose work, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

The World Is My Home: A Memoir (1992)

Michener continued: “I segregate the material in this way for two reasons: I want the reader to see in careful detail the kind of ordinary human being who becomes a writer and then to see the complex and contradictory motivations that enable him to remain one.”

A View from A Broad (1980)

In her cleverly titled memoir, Midler demonstrates that one of the best ways to begin a book is with an unexpected twist—the sight of a nearby freeway is not generally regarded as an exceptional view. She continued: “I was truly at peace. And I was truly a mess, having just forged my way through the potentially crippling round of severe calisthenics I dutifully perform every evening of the year.”

“How to Build a Pedestal,” in The Spokesman-Review [Spokane, Washington] (Feb. 22, 2024)

When writers ask me, “What’s the best way to begin my book (or article, or essay), I have a stock answer: “Write something brilliant, if you can. That’s the only sure-fire way to ensure that readers will continue reading.” Happily, I did not have to give that advice to Midstokke, for she apparently already knew the answer. I will almost certainly be featuring the opening words of her column in my end-of-year compilation of the best opening lines of 2024.

In the article, Midstokke was talking about the critical importance of compliments, praise, acknowledgments, and other affirmations of our personal worth. She went on to write later in the column:

“Which brings me to the importance of the pedestal. I am told they are topple-tippy things, a precarious risk to be stood upon. Once placed up there, the only place we can go is down. I disagree. We should be put on pedestals all the time, preferably for the most mundane things. I know this because my husband has healed a thousands wounds of my inner child by doing just that. He literally told me he was proud of me for taking a nap the other day. This is brilliant because I’m really good at taking naps. What I’m learning is that it is often these nearly microscopic acknowledgments, the tiny affirmations of our choices, the nods of empathy when we wrestle with our mistakes, that give us our sense of place, belonging, worth.”

Sacred Journey of the Peaceful Warrior (1991)

This is a powerful opening line, and it is all the more impressive because compelling “hooks” like this generally come from novels, and not personal growth/self-discovery books. The first sentence is also the complete first paragraph, thereby ensuring maximum impact. In the book’s second paragraph, Millman continued with a poignant description of the inner turmoil and psychic pain that can result from losing our way in life:

“Linda and I were married on a Sunday in the spring of 1967, during my senior year at U.C. Berkeley. After a special dinner, we spent our brief honeymoon in a Berkeley hotel. I remember waking before dawn, unaccountably depressed. With the world still cloaked in darkness, I slipped out from under the rumpled covers and stepped softly out onto the balcony so as not to disturb Linda. As soon as I closed the sliding glass door, my chest began to heave and the tears came. I could not understand why I felt so sad, except for a troubling intuition that I had forgotten something important, and that my life had somehow gone awry.”

Everyday Enlightenment: The Twelve Gateways to Personal Growth (1998)

Beginning a non-fiction work with an important self-revelation is almost always a good idea, but it works especially well in a book inviting readers on a journey of personal discovery. The impact of Millman’s first sentence was further enhanced by the exceptional candor—and, in my view, the emotional courage—he showed as he continued in the opening paragraph:

“We had been married for six years and were living in a cottage at Stanford University where we served as dormitory directors. My wife had become enamored of a handsome tennis player. When he entered our cottage to speak with her, as students did on occasion, her eyes sparkled as they no longer sparkled for me. They spoke and laughed into the night, lost in conversation.”

On Trails: An Exploration (2016)

Moor also began the book’s Prologue with a memorable line: “Once, years ago, I left home looking for a grand adventure and spent five months staring at mud.”

“On Laziness,” in Pipefuls (1920)

Morley was one of literary history’s great essayists, and the self-referential words of his famous laziness essay immediately capture the reader’s attention. By acknowledging that his own laziness kept him from the actual writing of an essay on laziness, Morley sets up what literary people call a meta-narrative. In the essay’s second paragraph, Morley continued:

“The sort of thing we had in mind to write would have been exceedingly persuasive. We intended to discourse a little in favor of a greater appreciation of Indolence as a benign factor in human affairs.”

The Naked Ape: A Zoologist’s Study of the Human Animal (1967)

Morris, a zoologist and former curator of mammals at the London Zoo, said his purpose in writing the book was to examine human beings in the same way that members of his profession had previously studied animals. In his opening words, he continued: “This unusual and highly successful species spends a great deal of time examining his higher motives and an equal amount of time studiously ignoring his fundamental ones.”

Shortly after publication, the book became an international bestseller, translated into more than two dozen languages. Part of the book’s popularity came from Morris’s clear and often captivating prose—as seen in his opening words. But it is also clear that many readers were attracted by the book’s titillating details, including Morris’s assertion that, compared to other mammals, male human beings had the highest ratio of penis size to body mass (it was for this and a few other reasons that Morris described human beings as “the sexiest primate alive”).

Catwatching (1986)

Morris continued: “The dog may be man’s best friend, but it is rarely allowed out on its own to wander from garden to garden or street to street. The obedient dog has to be taken for a walk. The headstrong cat walks alone.”

Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005)

Even though Morris quickly explained that Bagnold was “not quite right in her facts” about the situation Beethoven’s mother was facing, his decision to open the book with the well-known anecdote was clearly a decision on his part to immediately “hook? the reader.

“Introduction” to Richard Harding Davis’s “The Red Cross Girl” (1912), in The Novels and Stories of Richard Harding Davis, Vol. 11 (1916)

One of the most delightful surprises in my research into great opening lines was discovering remarkable specimens in the most unexpected places. This spectacular tribute came at the beginning of the “Introduction” to Richard Harding Davis’s 1912 short story “The Red Cross Girl.” The writer was Davis’s good friend and fellow pulp fiction writer Gouverneur Morris IV (1876-1953), the great-great-grandson of one of America’s Founding Fathers. In the opening words, the tribute continued at an exceptionally high level:

“Some people think that a man of fifty-two is middle-aged. But if R. H. D. had lived to be a hundred, he would never have grown old. It is not generally known that the name of his other brother was Peter Pan.”

Richard Harding Davis has been almost entirely forgotten by modern readers, but he was a major American celebrity in the early 1900s. A pioneering war correspondent and bestselling writer of adventure stories, he was also Theodore Roosevelt’s good friend. There is no question that Davis’s writing about the exploits of Roosevelt and his Rough Riders was instrumental in creating the legend that continues to surround the 26th President. A handsome, dashing figure, Davis also served as the model for Charles Dana Gibson’s “Gibson Man,” created to match his famous “Gibson Girl.” Davis died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 51 in 1916.

“The Woke Target Metaphors, Leaving No Scone Unturned,” in The Wall Street Journal (Dec. 27, 2021)

Thus begins Morrow’s review of a newly published Inclusive IT Language Guide by the folks at the University of California, Irvine. The Guide contained much questionable advice, according to Morrow, himself a recognized language expert, including the suggestion that the saying “Killing two birds with one stone” be replaced by “Feeding birds with two scones.”

In the second paragraph of his essay, Morrow wrote: “My friend would sit down at his typewriter—this was a long time ago—and set out to tell a seemingly straightforward news story. But in the first or second sentence, his mind would be seized by an image (jaunty, visual, arresting), and pretty soon the seductive analogy would take over the story altogether, hijacking the news report that it was intended merely to embellish.”

Loneliness (1961)

Moustakas continued: “In the past I tried to overcome my sense of isolation by plunging into work projects and entering into social activities. By keeping busy and by committing myself to interesting and challenging work, I never had to face, in any direct or open way, the nature of my own existence as an isolated and solitary individual.”

Loneliness and Love (1972)

Moustakas continued: “This awareness is usually thrust upon me when the spirit of my life is broken, when the person who I am is clearly not being received, when I am being judged, examined, questioned.”

“I Want U.S. History to Make My Kids Uncomfortable,” in The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC; Nov. 17, 2021)

Op-Ed articles aren’t usually admired for their impressive openings, but this one by the pastor of The Grove Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, NC, is an exception to the rule. In her opening paragraph, Murphy gives the impression of going in a certain direction—and then dramatically heads in the opposite way, writing: “It’s critical to me that the things my children read about American history make them uncomfortable. I want them to be troubled, deeply troubled.”

After arguing that it is our patriotic duty to recognize and confront the darker aspects of American history, Rev. Murphy concluded: “I want my girls to struggle with American history. But it’s not because I want them to hate America or themselves. I want them to struggle with the past so that they can fall in love with all that America could be. I want them to be uncomfortable with the past so they can join us to change the future.”

Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard (2010)

Wiving: A Memoir of Loving Then Leaving the Patriarchy (2020)

This was one of my choices for The 20 Best Opening Lines of 2020 (to see the full list, go here). I had expected Myers’s memoir to be a relatively straightforward tale of self-discovery, but her opening words quickly set me straight. In addition to being a moving tale about her personal journey from young, devout Mormon girl to strong, independent woman, it is also a stirring polemic about life for women in a male-dominated world.

Myer continued: “In the story, a woman who is—according to an occult and capricious geometry of features and culture and a man’s particular taste—’beautiful’ must be attached to a man. To be unattached at my age is a violation of the story. This man wants an explanation. If my answer isn’t plausible, if there is no man waiting around the corner or recently dead or banging a college student, I should be grateful he is offering me a happy ending.

“His desire lands on my shoulders like a bird of prey.

“What he means is, I need you to fill the gap in me.“

Speak, Memory: A Memoir (1951)

This beautifully-phrased opening line went on to become one of Nabokov’s most popular quotations. In composing his thought, it’s possible Nabokov was inspired by a similar thought from Thomas Carlyle, first offered in his 1840 classic Heroes and Hero-Worship: “One life; a little gleam of Time between two Eternities; no second chance to us for evermore!”

All the Way: My Life in Four Quarters (2019)

These opening words immediately raise the question: what is causing a man known for his brashness and confidence to feel distracted and out of his element? Turns out, it’s the challenge of sitting down to write his own autobiography. Yes, Namath had published a first memoir in 1969 (I Can’t Wait for Tomorrow…’Cause I Get Better Looking Every Day), but that book was essentially written by Dick Schaap, who posed a multitude of questions to the New York Jets’ quarterback, recorded his answers, and then reconstructed his words into a celebrity autobiography.

In All the Way, clearly written by himself this time, the seventy-something Namath continued his opening paragraph by writing: “I decide to pull up the definition of ‘memoir’ on my iPad: ‘A record of events written by a person having intimate knowledge of them and based on personal observation.’ Boy, that just isn’t me. I don’t have a lot of practice talking about myself unless I’m answering questions. Growing up with three older brothers, somebody else was always talking, louder than I ever could. It just feels negative, man. Negative.”

Jawaharlal Nehru: An Autobiography (1936)

This is the first sentence of the Preface to the book, and it gets things off to a dramatic start. A few pages later, Chapter One begins with an intriguing and unexpected revelation from a child of privilege: “An only son of prosperous parents is apt to be spoilt, especially so in India. And when that son happens to have been an only child for the first eleven years of his existence there is little hope for him to escape this spoiling.”

It’s a Long Story: My Life (2015; with David Ritz)

Beginning a book with a pithy, quotable line is always a good idea, as Nelson demonstrates here. In the second sentence, he continued by attempting to clarify the authorship of a legendary country music observation that is usually attributed to Author Unknown: “It might have been my buddy Harlan Howard, a writer I met in Nashville in the sixties, who first said a song ain’t nothing but three chords and the truth.”

Nelson continued in the book’s second paragraph: “Well, songs come easy to me. I’ve written hundreds of them. I see them as little stories that fall out of our lives and imaginations. If I have to struggle to write a song, I stop before I start. I figure if it don’t flow easy, it’s not meant to be.”

Balls (1984)

The Moon’s a Balloon (1971)

When the English publisher Hamish Hamilton published Niven’s memoir in Great Britain in 1971, this was the spectacular opening. However, if you went on to read Dell Publishing’s American version of the book, published a year later, you saw a different opening. Clearly, American publishers felt great discomfort about broaching the idea of sex with a minor girl, so they persuaded Niven to modify his opening paragraph. He made a few other tweaks as well, as you will see below:

“Nessie, when I first saw her, was nineteen, honey-blond, pretty rather than beautiful, a figure like a two-armed Venus de Milo who had been on a sensible diet, had a pair of legs that went on forever, and a glorious sense of the ridiculous. She was a Picadilly whore. I was a fourteen-year-old heterosexual schoolboy, and I met her thanks to my stepfather. (If you would like to skip on and meet Nessie more fully, she reappears on page 42.)”

Bring on the Empty Horses (1975)

Quotation lovers now know that Stein was referring to Oakland, not Hollywood, but Niven took a few liberties with her observation in order to craft a nifty opening to his book about life in Hollywood in the years between 1935 and 1960.

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (1978)