Childhood Biography

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.

The never-before-published diaries of Alathea Fitzalan Howard - who spent her teenaged years living out World War II in Windsor Great Park with her close friends Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, the future queen of the United Kingdom - provide an extraordinary and intimate look at the British royal family.

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood - of his mother's death, his father's anger and bafflement, and of his own discovery of literature and his ambition to become a writer. At the heart of the book is an unembarrassed homage by a loving son to a woman who protected him and his sisters from his father's unpredictable moods. His joy in her presence is recovered with great lyrical tact.

Of Kenya's largest ethnic group, the Kikuyu, Ngugi wa Thiongo was born in 1938 in the backlands of his country (Kiambu district) to a father whose four wives bore him two dozen or so children. Ngugi was the fifth child of the third wife. His father was a peasant farmer forced to become a squatter after the British Imperial Act of 1915. Before going off to school, he had what was then considered a bizarre and inexplicable thirst for learning....

Alistair Horne is a leading scholar of French history. Here he trains his sights on one of the most compelling figures of the 19th century, Napoleon Bonaparte. Far from a mere dictator, Napoleon was a military, political and social visionary whose legacy can still be felt in France and all over the world. Horne examines the one-time emperor at his most human, from his greatest triumphs to his disastrous failures.

Keena Roberts split her adolescence between the wilds of an island camp in Botswana and the even more treacherous halls of an elite Philadelphia private school. In Keena's funny, tender memoir, Wild Life, Africa bleeds into America and vice versa, each culture amplifying the other. By turns heartbreaking and hilarious, Wild Life is ultimately the story of a daring but sensitive young girl desperately trying to figure out if there's any place where she truly fits in.

Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit.

Ally was at a breaking point when she woke up in a psych ward at the age of 18. She couldn't put a sentence together, let alone take a shower, eat a meal, or pick up a phone. What had gone wrong? In recent years, she had produced a feature film, a popular reality show for a major network, and had acted in an off-Broadway play. But now Ally was pushed to a psychotic break after struggling since she was seven years old with physical symptoms that no doctor could explain - everything from joint pain to night sweats, memory loss, nausea, and brain fog.

Tendöl Namling turned 60 in March 2019. She was born at the time when the Dalai Lama fled from Lhasa and the uprising of his people by the Chinese People's Army was brutally suppressed. She has lived for 22 years under Chinese rule. As the daughter of a high government official, she underwent the ordeal of "re-education" with full force. All she has kept from these years are painful memories and some crumpled photographs. They show her with her friends and cousins in Lhasa, smiling as if nothing had happened.

In the 1930s and 1940s, there was nothing bigger in Texas high school football than the Masonic Home Mighty Mites - a group of orphans bound together by hardship and death. These youngsters, in spite of being outweighed by at least 30 pounds per man, were the toughest football team around. They began with nothing - not even a football - yet in a few years were playing for the state championship on the highest level of Texas football. This is a winning tribute to a courageous band of underdogs from a time when America desperately needed fresh hope and big dreams.

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir - the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman) - a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

Recently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir. With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life.

The extraordinary memoir of a childhood spent in the 'Children of God' cult. Rebel tells the story of Faith, a woman who grew up in the Children of God cult (known latterly as The Family). Now in her 40s with two teenage children of her own, Faith's first-person narrative alternates between her childhood adventures and traumas within the cult and her post-cult life following her escape at the age of 19.

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.

With poignant prose and a deeply authentic personal story, this harrowing account exposes the stark and painful realities of childhood abuse, painting a heart-breaking picture of the lasting pain and fear that it inflicts on its victims. Spanning 30 years, in this coming-of-age memoir, author Christina Vitagliano recounts in vivid detail the frightening nights spent when her father loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, along with the psychological toll that the relentless familial abuse took on her psyche.

Jemele Hill’s world came crashing down when she called President Trump a “white supremacist”; the White House wanted her fired from ESPN, and she was deluged with death threats. But Hill had faced tougher adversaries growing up in Detroit than a tweeting president. Beneath the exterior of one of the most recognizable journalists in America was a need—a calling—to break her family’s cycle of intergenerational trauma.

In 1972, Patty Bear’s father, Robert Bear, was excommunicated from their church and subsequently shunned by members including Gale, his wife. For Amish and Old Order Mennonites, known as “Plain People”, shunning is a biblical practice meant to bring wayward members back into the community’s fold.

Nowhere Like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on Earth. It’s steeped in thinly-veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.

When Constance was 13, her mother simply moved out, leaving her daughter to fend for herself. There was no gas, no electricity, and no food. But somehow Constance found the courage to survive her terrible start in life. This is her heartrending, and ultimately triumphant, story.