Biography Girls

Susan Tate Ankeny was sorting through the belongings of her late father - a World War II bombardier who had bailed from a burning B-17 over Nazi-occupied France in 1944 - when she found two boxes. One contained her dad's Air Force uniform, and the other an unfinished memoir, stacks of envelopes, black-and-white photographs, mission reports, dog tags, and the fake identity cards he used in his escape. Ankeny spent more than a decade from that moment tracking down letter writers, their loved ones, and anyone who had played a role in her father's story.

Women have bravely served in the US Navy for nearly a century, but they have been allowed to serve in combat roles for only the last 25 years. When the combat exclusion law was lifted in 1993, women in the navy soon had a new range of opportunities available to them. The repeal of the law finally gave women the chance to serve on combatant ships for the first time. Among the first women to step onto these warships as a new crewmember was Joanna Sprtel Walters.

Maria Konner takes you on her journey from living a frustrated and bored straight-dude life to becoming a fabulous trans entertainer in San Francisco. She also begins to discover herself sexually after a Halloween costume feels better than she ever imagined. What starts as a lark, quickly becomes a lifestyle. Told in a frank and entertaining manner, Maria details her experiences at Diva's, the legendary trans bar. There, she enters into a world of alternative lifestyles, sexual experimentation, crossdressing, and hardcore kink as she tests the boundaries of her sexuality.

For the first time, music legend Tom Petty’s spouse and muse of 25 years opens up about their intimate, shared lives in this memoir filled with personal anecdotes, and bittersweet reminiscing.

Growing up, Miranda often looked for faces like hers on our screens. There weren't many. And too often there was a negative narrative around Indigenous lives, and Aboriginal women especially. Now an award-winning actor, she decided to change things herself. Combining her love of romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding. But who the hell co-writes, produces and acts in a film about a wedding in the same year they're having their own? Miranda Tapsell does!

A meningitis outbreak in their underprivileged neighborhood left Sylvia Acevedo's family forever altered. As she struggled in the aftermath of loss, young Sylvia's life transformed when she joined the Brownies. The Girl Scouts taught her how to take control of her world and nourished her love of numbers and science.

She was beautiful, talented, irascible, ruthless, vulnerable, and a true Hollywood legend. From abused child to dance-hall entertainer to silent-film actress, she went on to become one of Hollywood's screen goddesses with films such as Possessed opposite Clark Gable, with whom she began a torrid off-screen affair, Grand Hotel, and Mildred Pierce, her Academy Award-winning film.

Danielle has a safe, happy childhood growing up in West London, but her bright future fades as she turns her back on school for gang life and crime. Betrayed by the police after a brutal gang rape, she finds protection under the wing of organised criminals and falls in love with the local ‘top boy’. However, her allegiances bring terror to her doorstep when gun-toting rivals target her flat – and the authorities answer by taking away her baby. Heartbroken, Danielle spirals deeper into gang life and becomes a key player in a sprawling county lines operation.

A raw and bold memoir about abuse and addiction, and the power of expression and community that helped Stephanie Kuehnert, the author of Ballads of Suburbia and regular Rookie contributor, survive and thrive. Told in varied narrative styles, including journal entries and pages torn from her actual diaries and zines, this is the memoir of Stephanie's life as a struggling outsider who survived substance and relationship abuse to become a strong young woman after years and years trapped in a cycle that sometimes seemed to have no escape.

When 16-year-old Mytrae Meliana and her family emigrate from India to the US, she is determined to avoid the arranged marriage her family expects her to have, and to create her own destiny. But when she falls in love with an American man, her family drags the talented graduate student back to India and keeps her hostage.

In late 2019, Sylvia Patterson was a celebrated pop journalist, still merrily writing about the musical greats. But with the diagnosis of a life-threatening disease, a global pandemic and the collapse of her industry, life was about to take a drastic turn. It was a misadventure that would teach her many things. The power of friendship, the shock of mortality and what happens when love is tested. How a walk in the park, a spontaneous dance and a TV hero can save your life. How your perspective can shift on everything, from work, family and music, to what truly makes you happy.

For Leslie Absher, secrecy is just another member of the family. Throughout childhood, her father's shadowy government job was ill-defined, her mother's mental health stayed off limits—even her queer identity remained hidden from her family and unacknowledged by Leslie herself.

Growing up on welfare, food stamps, and Greyhound buses, Holly Thompson Rehder quit school at fifteen to help take care of her mother and younger sister after a devastating car accident. Getting married and pregnant soon thereafter, Holly decided that the life she had been born into was not what she intended to give her child. Two decades later she was a successful businesswoman. And today, she is a rising political star who serves as an inspiration to young women across the state of Missouri—and indeed, the entire nation—all while never forgetting where she came from.

When 16-year-old Jessica Wragg applied for a job at her local farm shop in Derbyshire, England, she never expected to land a position behind the butchery counter. Wragg was younger than many of her colleagues by decades, and she was one of the few women on staff, struggling to earn her keep among colleagues who were reluctant to share the tricks of their trade with a novice. Breaking down carcasses by day, and studying animal anatomy by night, Wragg was soon hooked and determined to establish herself in an industry that is steeped in tradition, and often resistant to change.

When her father, Robert the Bruce, becomes King of Scotland, Marjorie Bruce becomes a princess. But Edward Longshanks, the ruthless King of England, has set his sights on Robert and his family. Marjorie is captured and imprisoned in a wooden cage in the center of a town square, exposed to wind, rain, the taunts of the townspeople, and the scorn of Longshanks himself. Marjorie knows that despite her suffering and pain, she is the daughter of noble Robert the Bruce and she will make her father, and her country, proud. For a true princess is a princess, whether in a castle or in a cage.

Through the Pacific Northwest forests and along the rugged coastal shores of California, Wolf Girl is a young environmentalist's coming-of-age story about learning, discovery, and survival. Wolf Girl takes listeners on Doniga’s journey: from the wilderness immersion school where she was taught by Indigenous elders and wildlife trackers, to hitchhiking across the Pacific Northwest, to Alaska, where she fell in love with tracking wolves. These experiences shaped and inspired Doniga to become the leader in the regenerative agricultural movement that she is today.

The Fleet Street Girls is the inspiring story of the female journalists who broke down barriers in the 1970s as women arrived on Fleet Street for the first time. Julie Welch was the first ever female football reporter. To achieve this role at the Observer, she had to battle the National Union of Journalists nearly calling a strike when she dared to write an article as a mere secretary; an entire room of men falling silent to listen to her give her first football report over the phone, before pronouncing it passable; and many other battles in-between.

Kathi Koll's acclaimed and award-winning memoir is both a love story and a survivor's tale in which Koll courageously unveils an unexpected life of joy, adventure, heartbreak, and even a little laughter as she shares the realities of being a full-time caregiver. When her husband, Don, called on his way to the hospital, Kathi Koll had no idea how dramatically their lives would change or how her loving heart and indomitable spirit would fight it.

A gripping examination of the dark side of an iconic American product and a moving portrait of the women who lived in the shadow of its fractured fortune, JELL-O Girls is a family history, a feminist history, and a story of motherhood, love, and loss. In crystalline prose, Rowbottom considers the roots of trauma not only in her own family, but in the American psyche as well, ultimately weaving a story that is deeply personal, as well as deeply connected to the collective female experience.

Joan's neighborhood is filled with kids of all ages, but even her closest friends don't know how violent Joan's dad is or how difficult it is for her to navigate the troubled waters of her homelife. Joan becomes adept at reading her dad's mood and trying to prevent him from inflicting harm upon her mom. But time and again, her dad succeeds in his mission. As the violence escalates, Joan is plagued with the constant fear that her mother may die.