Motherhood Memoir

Everybody knows that Patricia Heaton plays the hilarious, wise, and tempestuous married-with-kids everywoman on Everybody Loves Raymond. What they might not know is that in real life, she is married, has four boys under eight years old, and is just as funny offscreen as on. Motherhood and Hollywood is Patricia Heaton’s humorous and poignant collection of essays on life, love, marriage, child-rearing, show business, having parents, being a parent, spousal rage, surviving fame, success, and the shame of underarm flab. She is warm, witty, and refreshingly irreverent.

Like many women her age, 34-year-old Rebecca Walker was brought up to be skeptical of motherhood. As an adult she longed for a baby but feared losing her independence. In this very smart memoir, Walker explores some of the larger sociological trends of her generation while delivering her own story about the emotional and intellectual transformation that led her to motherhood.

After her six-year-old daughter puts a hammer through a wall, Megan Williams decides to abandon a career as an academic and become a police officer. It's not lost on her that she may have applied to the Police Academy to escape the realities of mothering twins born via IVF at twenty-nine weeks. As the twins grow and test her endlessly, she feels she is failing. She needs a win. During a grueling application process, Megan measures herself against the other candidates and confronts the normative notions of what it is to be a good mother.

On the surface, Victoria Jackson is the American Dream personified: from a troubled childhood and unfinished high school education, she overcame immeasurable odds to create a cosmetics empire valued at more than half a billion dollars. Married to Bill Guthy - self-made principal of infomercial marketing giant Guthy-Renker - Victoria’s most treasured role is mother to three beautiful, beloved children, Evan, Ali, and Jackson. Suddenly, Victoria’s dream life is broken....

A heartfelt and funny collection of journals illuminating the joy, uncertainty, and complexity of modern motherhood. Journey with Anony Mom through her social awkwardness, failed romances, and cycle breaking, as she attempts to embrace her imperfections and murder her inner people-pleaser who just won't die.

Anerkennung, Freiheit, Karriere: Dafür kämpfte Clara Schumann ihr Leben lang – und stand vor den gleichen Herausforderungen wie Frauen im 21. Jahrhundert. Sie haderte mit ihrer Rolle als Mutter von sieben Kindern und mit der nahezu unmöglichen Aufgabe, Beruf und Familie zu vereinbaren. Gestützt auf bisher unbeachtete Quellen, erzählt Bestsellerautorin Christine Eichel das Leben der gefeierten Pianistin und Komponistin radikal neu und räumt dabei mit einigen Klischees auf. Clara Schumann war keine sanfte Muse im Schatten ihres genialischen Mannes Robert.

Part memoir and part self-help guide, Chemical Khichdi provides a pathway for anyone with a mental health condition and the family, friends, colleagues, and medical professionals that love and care for them. Empathetic, candid and accessible, it outlines ‘seven therapies’ that have enabled Aparna to ‘hack’ her mental health and find equilibrium over the years, and shows how you or someone you know can also do the same.

Born and raised in Utah, Jenny Lowe got married at the age of 19. The marriage ended in divorce, and at 30 years old, she married again. Emotionally and financially ready to start a family and with her biological clock ticking, the couple decides to have a child. After months of trying without success, they seek the help of fertility specialists. What follows is a series of unsuccessful attempts to conceive and the discovery that she has ovarian cancer. This book lets the listener accompany her on her emotional journey.

From the author of the viral New York Times op-ed column "To Siri with Love" comes a collection of touching, hilarious, and illuminating stories about life with a 13-year-old boy with autism that hold insights and revelations for us all.

I could do it all. I could be everything to everybody. I put every ounce of my being into mothering two beautiful boys, one of whom has a debilitating life-limiting condition. I was fine just the way I was. Just fine - until I wasn't. One day, the wheels fell off. This is the story of my journey and transformation.

When Holly learned she was having a girl, and long before she heard the words Asperger's syndrome or chronic disease, she was already committed to raising Britney to love God and seek His will in her life with integrity. Determined to follow her lead, support her decisions, provide her with unconditional love, and do whatever she could to help her succeed, Holly had no idea of the journey she and Britney were about to take together.

This gripping memoir details a California woman's quest to adopt a baby girl from Guatemala in the face of overwhelming adversity. At only 32 years old, Jessica O'Dwyer experiences early menopause, seemingly ending her chances of becoming a mother. Years later, married but childless, she comes across a photo of a two-month-old girl on a Guatemalan adoption website and feels an instant connection. When the process drags on for more than a year, Jessica quits her job at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and moves to Antigua, Guatemala, to finish the adoption herself.

In the late 1960s, at the age of eighteen and living far from home amidst the thriving counterculture of Ottawa, Marilyn Churley got pregnant. Like thousands of other women of the time she kept the event a secret. Faced with few options, she gave the baby up for adoption. Over twenty years later, as the Ontario NDP government’s minister responsible for all birth, death, and adoption records, including those of her own child, Churley found herself in a surprising and powerful position–fully engaged in the long and difficult battle to reform adoption disclosure laws and find her son.

Women today feel pressure to be the best wife, mom, and professional possible - often at the expense of their own identity. But what if you could experience deep peace - knowing you are loved right now, just as you are? In Brave Love, the founder of the multi-million-dollar company Lisa Leonard Designs inspires women to find themselves again amidst the noise and competing demands of real life.

Since bursting into the spotlight aged nine, Coleen Nolan has experienced more highs and lows than most people have had hot dinners. Now she's ready to share the lessons she's learned along the way. From the good, the bad and the ugly (otherwise known as love and marriage) to career tips, lifestyle hacks and motherhood, Coleen covers everything you need to know. With her trademark down-to-earth wisdom, Coleen shares her best advice for navigating divorce and embracing single life, including her top Tinder tips.

Jane is to the world a charismatic personality—opinionated, an inner-city teacher and public activist, a lover of Italy, proud and successful—who thrives on a carefully crafted life narrative. Susannah, her beautiful only daughter and her intended protege, senses the stricter, darker truth, and fights to resist the control imposed on her by her mother's narcissistic tale, especially as Susannah becomes a mother herself. But then Jane at seventy-five, healthy and fit, chooses suicide, leaving her daughter with grief and the unwelcome gift of forty-five years of hidden diaries

Claudia Garcia crossed the border because her toddler, Natalia, could not hear. Leaving behind everything she knew in Mexico, Claudia recounts the terror of migrating alone with her toddler and the incredible challenges she faced advocating for her daughter’s health in the United States. When she arrived in Texas, Claudia discovered that being undocumented would mean more than just an immigration status—it would be a way of living, of mothering, and of being discarded by even those institutions we count on to care.

Through her signature candid, humorous and yet often biting takes, Jamilah Lemieux suffers no fools while also courageously revealing the scars of her own parenting journey and search for self-acceptance in a world that doesn’t see the full worth of women like her. With a particular verve and relatability—honed, in part, from her many years among “Black Twitter’s” most prominent voices—Lemieux puts the lived reality of Black single motherhood: uncertainty, fierceness, and sensuality on full display.

The week before Thanksgiving 2011, Dustin Smiley left for a yearlong military deployment. Soon after, his son Ford, 11, invited Senator Susan Collins to fill his dad's chair at dinner. On January 3, 2012, Senator Collins came to dinner...and brought brownies. So began Dinner with the Smileys, nationally syndicated columnist Sarah Smiley's 52-week commitment to fill her husband's place at the family dinner table with interesting people - from schoolteachers to Olympians, professional athletes to famous authors, comedians to politicians - and unique role models for her three sons, even as she knows Dustin's seat cannot truly be "filled"

Follow this family of six on their passage - extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreakingly poignant-from Bright Lights (of New York City) to the Northern Lights (of Norway) to the City of Light (Paris) to the speed-of-light of the Autobahn (in Munich). Continue deep into the tropics of Southeast Asia (Singapore) and end your voyage in the heights of the Swiss Alps (Geneva).