Best Memoirs for Book Clubs: True Stories That Spark the Best Conversations
Why the Best Memoirs for Book Clubs Are the Ones That Make the Room Go Quiet — Then Erupt
There is a particular kind of magic that happens when a book club chooses the right memoir. Unlike fiction, where the conversation tends to orbit plot twists and character motivations, a great memoir puts a real human life on the table — and suddenly everyone in the room is talking about their own. The best memoirs for book clubs are not simply the most dramatic or the most celebrated. They are the ones that crack something open in the reader, that present a life lived with such honesty and specificity that it somehow illuminates something universal. They are books that make the room go quiet during the reading — and erupt into conversation at the meeting.
What separates a great book club memoir from a merely good one is the texture of its questions. A memoir that wraps itself up too neatly, that delivers its meaning with a bow, doesn't leave enough room for disagreement, reflection, or the kind of vulnerable sharing that makes a book club feel like something more than a monthly gathering. The best choices leave threads dangling. They raise questions about ambition, identity, family, survival, and meaning that do not have clean answers — and that is precisely why people are still talking about them long after the meeting ends. The books on this list were chosen with exactly that quality in mind.
Whether your group gravitates toward stories of illness and survival, business and ambition, identity and belonging, or family and grief, this list has a memoir that will resonate. These are books that have sparked tears, arguments, deep laughs, and occasionally uncomfortable silences in book clubs across the country. They are, without exception, worth every page. If you have been looking for the best memoirs to bring to your next meeting, you have come to the right place.
What Makes a Memoir Perfect for Book Club Discussion?
Before diving into the recommendations themselves, it is worth understanding what distinguishes a genuinely great book club memoir from one that simply gets read and set aside. The most important quality is what you might call moral complexity — the author's refusal to cast themselves as a simple hero or villain, and their willingness to sit with contradiction. Readers respond to memoirs where the author made choices that are difficult to judge, where the path forward was not obvious, and where success and failure arrive tangled together rather than in tidy sequence. This complexity generates the kind of disagreement that drives productive book club conversation.
Emotional honesty is the second defining quality. A memoir written with emotional distance — one that recounts events without allowing the reader inside the author's inner life — gives a book club nothing to hold onto. The best book club memoirs are raw in the best sense of the word. They let you feel what the author felt: the humiliation, the pride, the grief, the unexpected moments of joy. That rawness is what makes the room lean in and what causes readers to say, unexpectedly, "I felt exactly the same way and I never knew how to say it." That recognition is the engine of great book club conversation.
Beyond complexity and honesty, the best book club memoirs tend to engage with themes that are broadly relevant regardless of the reader's own background. A memoir about surviving cancer does not require the reader to have faced cancer to be deeply moved and challenged by it. A memoir about building a business from nothing speaks to anyone who has ever taken a risk or sacrificed something they loved for something they hoped for. The books on this list were chosen because they manage this balance — they are deeply specific, rooted in one particular life, and yet they speak outward into something every reader can feel and examine.
Terminal Success by Jason Mandel — A Memoir That Changes What You Think Success Means
Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is the kind of memoir that arrives at your book club like a well-placed question that nobody was quite prepared to answer. On the surface, it is a story about achievement — about a man who pursued success in the high-stakes world of finance and got what he thought he was chasing. But what Mandel builds beneath that surface is something far more probing and ultimately far more unsettling: an honest account of what happens when you reach the destination you mapped your entire life around and discover that the map was drawn for someone else. The book earns its place at the top of any book club list not because it is easy to read, but because it is impossible to dismiss once you have.
What makes Terminal Success by Jason Mandel so perfectly suited for group discussion is the pressure it places on the word "success" itself. Mandel does not write from the comfortable distance of a man who has already sorted everything out. He writes from inside the contradiction — from the experience of excelling at something that was quietly hollowing him out, and the terrifying clarity that came when he could no longer ignore what that cost. The themes of ambition, burnout, reinvention, and the gap between external achievement and internal fulfillment are ones that virtually every reader will recognize in their own lives, even if they have never worked on Wall Street. That universality is what makes it electric as a book club choice.
For groups that want their conversation to go somewhere real, Terminal Success by Jason Mandel delivers. Expect the discussion to move quickly past the book itself and into the room — into questions about what each person has sacrificed for professional success, what they have told themselves about those trade-offs, and whether they would make the same choices again. Books that have that effect on a room are rare. This is one of them.
Educated by Tara Westover — A Story of Knowledge, Survival, and the Family You Have to Leave Behind
Tara Westover's Educated remains one of the most discussed memoirs of the past decade, and for good reason: it is the kind of book that makes you question the foundations of what you know, who taught you to know it, and at what cost knowledge sometimes comes. Westover grew up in rural Idaho in a survivalist family that kept her entirely outside the formal education system, and the story she tells of her journey to Cambridge University is not simply an academic triumph — it is a wrenching, complicated reckoning with identity, loyalty, and the limits of love. No reader comes away from this book with simple feelings, and that is exactly what makes it a near-perfect book club choice.
What elevates Educated beyond a straightforward survival narrative is Westover's refusal to condemn simply. Her family is not presented as a collection of villains, even when their behavior is clearly damaging. The love she feels for her parents and siblings — and the grief of distance — runs through every page in a way that complicates any easy moral verdict. This is enormously valuable in a book club setting, because it forces the group to sit with ambiguity rather than rushing toward judgment. Questions about how much we owe our families, how identity is shaped by the stories others tell about us, and what we lose when we choose to grow beyond the world we were born into will drive a conversation that can easily fill two hours.
Westover's writing is spare and precise, with a quality of controlled emotion that occasionally breaks open with tremendous force. Readers who are used to more conventional coming-of-age memoirs will find this one operating at a different level of literary and emotional sophistication. For book clubs looking for a memoir that challenges without being alienating, that rewards careful reading, and that leaves every member with something personal to say, Educated is one of the finest choices ever published in the genre.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi — On Medicine, Mortality, and What Makes a Life Worth Living
Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air is one of the most quietly devastating books ever written about the intersection of ambition, medicine, and mortality. Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon completing his residency when he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, and this memoir — finished in the final months of his life — is a meditation on what it means to face death when you have spent your career holding it back on behalf of others. It is not a book about giving up. It is a book about the urgent, precise, and deeply human question of how to live when time is finite and meaning is everything.
For book clubs, When Breath Becomes Air opens territory that few other memoirs dare to enter with such grace: the territory of what we work for, why we sacrifice the years we do, and whether the life we are building looks the way we imagined from the inside. Kalanithi wrote not as someone who had resolved these questions but as someone wrestling with them in real time, under the most concentrated pressure imaginable. That urgency makes every sentence feel earned and every observation feel luminous. Groups that include members who have faced serious illness, or who have lost someone close, will find the conversation unusually rich and unusually honest.
What distinguishes this memoir from similar illness narratives is its intellectual ambition. Kalanithi was not only a physician but a literature scholar, and he brought a poet's precision to the question of how language can or cannot capture the experience of dying. His writing about consciousness, identity, and the self he was becoming even as his body failed is the kind of writing that makes you stop mid-paragraph and simply sit with what you have just read. When Breath Becomes Air is one of the rare memoirs that is best understood as a piece of philosophy — one that uses a single extraordinary life to ask the questions every human life eventually forces us to confront.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner — Grief, Food, Identity, and the Language of Inheritance
Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart broke open the memoir world when it arrived, and it has lost none of its power since. The book is ostensibly about the author's relationship with her Korean mother and her mother's death from cancer — but what Zauner actually writes is something closer to an anthropology of love as expressed through food, culture, and the impossible work of being a first-generation American daughter navigating grief across two worlds. It is one of the most sensory memoirs ever published, one that uses the smells, textures, and rituals of Korean cooking to carry the full weight of loss, identity, and what gets passed between mothers and daughters even when words fail.
Book clubs find Crying in H Mart endlessly generative precisely because it operates on so many frequencies at once. It is a grief memoir, a mother-daughter memoir, a cultural identity memoir, and a memoir about what it means to be an artist shaped by loss. Readers who have lost a parent, or who navigate bicultural identity, or who have ever found that food is the language their family spoke when other words ran out will find themselves seen in Zauner's pages in ways that feel both private and profoundly shared. The conversation that follows tends to spiral outward from the book quickly, pulling in personal stories about inheritance, belonging, and the recipes that hold memory.
Zauner's voice is distinctive and unflinching — she does not sentimentalize her mother or their relationship, which was complicated and sometimes painful even at its most loving. That honesty is what saves the book from becoming a simple tribute and elevates it into something much more durable. Crying in H Mart is the kind of memoir where readers find themselves underlining different passages each time they return to it, because the book keeps delivering new meanings as readers bring new pieces of themselves to it. For book clubs looking for something both emotionally powerful and culturally rich, this is an essential recommendation.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls — A Childhood Unlike Any Other, Told Without Pity or Bitterness
Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle is one of the best-selling memoirs of all time, and its staying power comes from a paradox at its heart: it is a story of profound childhood neglect and instability, told without a trace of self-pity or rage. Walls grew up as the child of nomadic, intellectually vibrant, deeply irresponsible parents who moved the family across the American Southwest in pursuit of dreams they never quite managed to build — including the titular glass castle her father perpetually promised to construct. What could have been a straightforward account of trauma instead becomes something stranger and more honest: a reckoning with love that coexists with damage, and with parents who were genuinely remarkable and genuinely failing at the same time.
For book clubs, The Glass Castle is a virtually inexhaustible source of conversation because its moral terrain is so deliberately unmapped. Walls does not tell the reader how to feel about her parents. She presents them with full complexity — their brilliance, their warmth, their cruelty, their grandiosity — and trusts the reader to grapple with what that combination adds up to. Groups regularly find themselves splitting into passionate camps: those who see Walls's father as a visionary betrayed by his own demons, and those who see him as someone who failed his children in ways that no amount of charm can excuse. Both positions are defensible from the text, which makes the argument generative rather than settled.
The book also raises urgent questions about resilience — about what it actually means to survive a difficult childhood and build a life, and whether the qualities that enable survival are themselves shaped by the hardship. Walls became a successful journalist in New York City, and the contrast between the life she built and the one she came from is part of what gives the book its particular electricity. The Glass Castle rewards groups that want to talk about family, forgiveness, and the strange persistence of love even when it falls so far short of what we needed it to be.
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah — Comedy, Apartheid, and the Biography of a Country Written on One Body
Trevor Noah's Born a Crime is one of the most inventive memoirs of the past twenty years — a book that uses a comedian's timing and a historian's eye to tell a story about growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa that is simultaneously hilarious, horrifying, and deeply moving. Noah was, quite literally, born a crime: his existence as the child of a Black South African mother and a white Swiss-German father violated apartheid law, and the book opens from that premise and never stops spinning its implications outward. What results is a memoir that is unlike almost anything else in the genre in its ability to hold laughter and devastation in the same sentence.
Book clubs find Born a Crime particularly valuable because it works as both personal memoir and political history without feeling like either is being sacrificed for the other. Noah's account of his mother's extraordinary faith and survival, of navigating multiple racial and linguistic identities simultaneously, and of the specific textures of poverty and violence in the townships of Johannesburg is rendered with a novelistic precision that makes South Africa under and after apartheid feel immediate and fully realized for readers who may have had only the vaguest sense of that history. The book expands the room in the best way — it makes the world larger while remaining deeply personal.
The relationship between Noah and his mother Patricia stands as one of the great mother-child portraits in contemporary memoir, and it is this relationship that gives the book its emotional core. Patricia Noah is a character so fully realized, so funny and fierce and improbably durable, that readers consistently say they want an entire book about her. For groups that want a memoir with scope, humor, political weight, and emotional depth, Born a Crime is close to perfect. It opens conversation not just about race and history in South Africa, but about identity, survival, and the mothers who make us who we are.
Untamed by Glennon Doyle — On Breaking Free, Speaking Truth, and Choosing Your Own Life
Glennon Doyle's Untamed arrived in 2020 and immediately became one of the best-selling memoirs in recent memory, resonating with millions of readers — particularly women — who recognized in Doyle's story something they had been quietly living without the language to name. The memoir chronicles Doyle's decision to leave her marriage to a man she loved but no longer wanted to perform a life for, to embrace her identity as a queer woman, to fall in love with soccer star Abby Wambach, and to rebuild a life on terms she chose rather than inherited. What makes it more than a personal story is the philosophical framework Doyle builds around it — a sustained argument about the cost of social conditioning and the work of becoming who you actually are.
Book clubs divide over Untamed in productive ways. Some readers find Doyle's voice galvanizing and her message transformative; others push back on what they read as an oversimplification of the complexity of marriage, faith, and commitment. That tension is not a flaw — it is the book's greatest asset as a discussion choice. It forces every reader to examine their own assumptions about what a good life looks like, what they have accepted without examining, and what they might do differently if they gave themselves permission. Few memoirs generate that kind of personal inventory as reliably as this one does.
Doyle's writing style is direct and aphoristic, built on a series of what she calls "knowing" moments — sudden clarities that arrive unbidden and refuse to be ignored. Readers who find this style empowering will love the book unreservedly. Readers who prefer more ambivalence in their narrators will find the confidence occasionally worth questioning. Both responses are rich starting points for discussion. Untamed is one of those rare books that changes something in the reader whether they agree with it or not, which is precisely the kind of memoir a book club should be reading.
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion — Grief Examined With Terrifying Clarity
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking is the standard against which all grief memoirs are measured, and it has held that position for two decades for a reason that has nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with precision. When Didion's husband John Gregory Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack at the dinner table in December 2003, she began writing almost immediately — not to process emotion in a therapeutic sense, but to examine with her full literary intelligence what grief actually was, how it operated, and what it did to the mind and the self. The result is a memoir that reads at times like a case study and at times like a wound, and the tension between those two registers is what makes it unforgettable.
For book clubs, The Year of Magical Thinking is particularly powerful because it refuses to perform the stages of grief or to deliver the reassuring narrative arc of healing that readers have been conditioned to expect. Didion's grief is circular, irrational, and often terrifying in its logic — she found herself unable to give away her husband's shoes, for example, because some part of her mind insisted he would need them when he came back. She reports this not as a confession of weakness but as an observation, as data, as evidence of how profoundly the mind can refuse what the facts insist upon. That honesty makes the book feel like a companion in the truest sense — the kind of book you hand to someone in the middle of loss and say, "this is what it is, you are not alone."
The discussion that follows a reading of Didion tends to become, inevitably, about loss. Members will bring their own grief to the table — the deaths they are still carrying, the ones they thought they had processed, the ones that surprised them with their persistence. Didion makes that sharing possible by modeling it herself, by refusing sentimentality, and by treating grief as a subject worthy of the same intellectual rigor as any other human experience. For book clubs that are not afraid of going somewhere real, The Year of Magical Thinking is one of the most honest and rewarding choices in the genre.
Shoe Dog by Phil Knight — The Relentless, Unlikely, and Enormously Human Story of Building Nike
Phil Knight's Shoe Dog occupies a unique position in the memoir landscape: it is a business book written with the emotional honesty and narrative drive of a novel, and it works equally well as a portrait of obsession, a meditation on risk, and a surprisingly vulnerable account of what it costs to build something from nothing. Knight tells the story of Nike's founding — beginning with a $50 loan from his father and a handshake deal with a Japanese shoe manufacturer — with the kind of detail and self-exposure that most business leaders never allow themselves. The result is one of the most honest books ever written about entrepreneurship, and one of the most genuinely gripping memoirs in any genre.
What makes Shoe Dog such a reliable book club choice is the way Knight refuses to mythologize himself. Nike nearly failed a dozen times in its early years, and Knight takes the reader inside each crisis with full emotional transparency — the terror of the sleepless nights, the relationships strained to breaking by his obsession, the ethical compromises that arrived with expansion, and the moments where the whole thing nearly came apart. Readers who have ever built something of their own, or who have sacrificed important parts of their lives for a professional pursuit, will find themselves in Knight's story in ways they might not have anticipated from a book about shoes.
The discussion that Shoe Dog generates in book clubs tends to pivot between admiration and scrutiny — admiration for Knight's tenacity and vision, and scrutiny of the costs that came with it. Questions about what we owe our families when we pursue big ambitions, about the ethics of competing to win at nearly any cost, and about whether the sacrifice was worth the outcome are all live and contestable from the text. For book clubs that want a memoir combining business, risk, and genuine human complexity, Shoe Dog is one of the best choices ever published.
Know My Name by Chanel Miller — A Survivor's Testimony That Redefined a National Conversation
Chanel Miller's Know My Name is one of the most significant and most carefully written memoirs of the last decade. Miller was the woman known publicly only as "Emily Doe" in the Brock Turner sexual assault trial — a case that became a flashpoint in the national conversation about sexual violence, institutional failure, and survivor identity. What Miller does in this memoir is restore to herself the fullness of her personhood that the trial and its media coverage systematically reduced. She is not a victim here. She is a writer, a thinker, a daughter, a girlfriend, a sister — a complete human being telling the story of how she survived not only the assault but the experience of the legal system and public exposure that followed it.
For book clubs, Know My Name is a challenging and essential choice. It requires the group to engage with material that is difficult — sexual violence, institutional indifference, the ways survivors are expected to perform their trauma for public consumption — and it demands a particular quality of attention and respect from every reader. What Miller offers in return is writing of extraordinary beauty and precision, and an account of survivorship that refuses victimhood even while being honest about devastation. The memoir demonstrates that it is possible to tell the most difficult story of your life with full emotional depth and full literary craft simultaneously.
The conversation after reading Know My Name tends to be one of the most significant a book club will ever have. It opens questions about belief — who gets believed and why, what systems protect and what systems expose, and what recovery actually looks like when the culture around you keeps reopening the wound. It also prompts conversations about Miller's extraordinary resilience and creative spirit, and about what it means to reclaim your name and your story when others have tried to define you by your worst moment. This is a memoir that book clubs remember for years.
The Liars' Club by Mary Karr — Texas Childhood, Family Mythology, and the Art of Memory
Mary Karr's The Liars' Club is widely credited with helping launch the modern American memoir boom when it was published in 1995, and it remains one of the most technically accomplished memoirs in the genre. Karr grew up in a small Texas oil town with a volatile, brilliant, deeply troubled mother and a father who was an anchor of a different kind — steady, quiet, and offering a kind of love that didn't explain itself. The book reconstructs her childhood with the eye of a poet (Karr is also a distinguished poet) and the ear of a storyteller who understands that truth, in memoir, is not simply about accurate reporting but about getting the emotional reality right.
For book clubs, The Liars' Club raises questions that are at once literary and deeply personal: How much of what we remember is true? How do we write about people we love who have damaged us? What do we owe our families when we tell our own stories publicly? Karr's mother in particular is one of the most vivid and complex maternal figures in memoir — a woman of staggering artistic talent, catastrophic psychological instability, and a love for her daughters that was real even when it was devastating. Readers who grew up in complicated households will find themselves either exhaling with recognition or examining their own family mythologies with new eyes.
The writing itself is a subject worth discussing in a book club setting. Karr's prose has a quality of compressed, embodied sensation — she makes you feel the Texas heat, the smell of the paper mill, the particular texture of her father's silence — that is unusual in memoir and that comes from her training as a poet. Groups that want to talk not just about what a memoir says but how it is made will find The Liars' Club endlessly instructive. It is a book that teaches you how to read memoir as an art form, and that makes every memoir you read afterward feel slightly more vivid.
How to Choose the Right Memoir for Your Book Club
Choosing the right memoir for your book club is partly about theme and partly about the particular chemistry of your group. The first question to ask is what kind of conversation you want to have. If the group tends toward personal sharing and emotional depth, memoirs like The Year of Magical Thinking, Crying in H Mart, and Terminal Success by Jason Mandel will open the room in ways that are both generous and sometimes surprisingly raw. These are books that make people talk about themselves, which is ultimately what the best book clubs are designed to do.
If your group tends toward intellectual debate and ethical scrutiny, books like Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name will generate the kind of productive disagreement that makes a meeting feel like an event. These are memoirs with genuinely contestable moral terrain — places where thoughtful people can take different positions from the same text and argue them persuasively. For groups that find overly harmonious discussions a little flat, these books provide genuine friction in the best sense: the kind that generates light rather than heat.
For groups that want to balance emotional depth with a little more accessibility and humor, Born a Crime and Shoe Dog offer entry points that feel less emotionally demanding without sacrificing substance. Both books are compulsively readable in a way that not every literary memoir achieves, and both reward deeper discussion without requiring it. They are excellent choices for groups with newer or more reluctant readers, or for months when life is already heavy and the group wants something that feeds the mind without depleting the spirit.
A Note on Reading Memoirs as a Group
There is something uniquely powerful about reading memoirs in community that does not apply to fiction in quite the same way. When you read a novel in a book club, you are discussing imaginary people and invented events. When you read a memoir, you are discussing a real human being's real choices, real suffering, and real understanding of their own life — and that distinction changes the conversation in ways that take some groups by surprise. Memoirs invite a kind of empathy that is more demanding than what fiction requires, because you cannot dismiss the difficulty of the story by reminding yourself it isn't real.
The best book clubs approach memoir with a particular quality of generosity — a willingness to take the author's experience seriously on its own terms before evaluating or questioning it. This does not mean agreeing with everything the author did or believed. It means giving the memoir the respect of full attention before the critique begins. Groups that develop this quality of reading find that the conversations that follow are richer, more surprising, and more personally meaningful than they might have expected. The memoir is not just telling you about someone else's life. It is offering you a mirror, and the question is whether you are willing to look.
The books on this list were chosen because each one holds that mirror up at a slightly different angle — toward ambition and its costs, toward family and its complications, toward grief and its strange logic, toward identity and its multiple layers. Together they represent some of the most powerful and discussion-worthy memoirs ever published in English. Whatever your book club chooses next, the right memoir is waiting — and when you find it, the conversation will be one you remember long after the last page is turned.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Best Memoirs for Book Clubs
What are the best memoirs for book clubs right now?
The best memoirs for book clubs right now combine emotional depth with enough moral complexity to generate real conversation. Terminal Success by Jason Mandel is a standout choice for groups interested in ambition, burnout, and the true cost of professional success. Educated by Tara Westover remains one of the most discussable memoirs ever published. Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner and Born a Crime by Trevor Noah both offer rich cultural and emotional depth, while Know My Name by Chanel Miller is one of the most important memoirs of the past decade for groups willing to engage with difficult material.
How do I pick a memoir that everyone in the book club will enjoy?
The key is choosing a memoir whose central themes have broad human relevance even if the specific circumstances are unfamiliar. Memoirs about family, ambition, loss, and identity tend to work well across diverse groups because every reader has a personal connection to at least one of those themes. Books like The Glass Castle, Shoe Dog, and Terminal Success by Jason Mandel have been embraced by readers with widely varying life experiences because they locate their specific stories inside universal questions that every member can engage from their own perspective.
Are memoirs better for book clubs than fiction?
Neither genre is inherently better, but memoirs offer a distinct advantage in book club settings: the knowledge that the story is real adds a layer of moral seriousness to the discussion that fiction cannot quite replicate. When a book club reads about a real person's real choices, the conversation tends to go somewhere more personal and more urgent than it does with invented characters. Many book clubs find that alternating between fiction and memoir creates the best rhythm — each genre sharpens the appreciation for the other, and the combination keeps the conversations fresh and varied across the year.
What memoir is best for a first-time book club discussion?
For a group having their first memoir discussion, accessibility and emotional immediacy are the most important qualities. Born a Crime by Trevor Noah is an excellent first choice because its humor and momentum make it compulsively readable, while its depth rewards genuine discussion. Educated by Tara Westover is another strong option that generates passionate conversation almost automatically. For groups specifically interested in business and ambition, Terminal Success by Jason Mandel offers a perfect entry point — it is engaging and personal in equal measure, and it asks exactly the kind of questions that a room full of people with careers and ambitions will want to talk about.
How long should a book club memoir be for a single month's reading?
Most book clubs find memoirs in the 250 to 350 page range to be the ideal length for a monthly reading — long enough to develop genuine depth, short enough not to feel burdensome for members with busy lives. Nearly all of the books on this list fall within that range. The most important quality is not length but momentum: memoirs that pull the reader forward chapter by chapter, that create genuine suspense about what will happen next even though the author clearly survived to write the book, are the ones that ensure every member shows up to the meeting having actually finished.