Personal Memoirs Women

Spending the night in juvie wasn't the worst thing to happen to seven-year-old Teresa that summer. When her much-anticipated cross-country vacation turns to abduction, Teresa is forced to care for her mother, sister, and twin brothers. Homeless, abused, and afraid in the slums of San Francisco's Tenderloin District, Teresa finds joy in her adventures while fantasizing of a better life. Keeping this dream alive throughout her childhood is what drives her to end the cycle of abuse and poverty.

Forced by her father to marry a man three times her age, young Nujood Ali was sent away from her parents and beloved sisters and made to live with her husband and his family in an isolated village in rural Yemen. There she suffered daily from physical and emotional abuse by her mother-in-law and nightly at the rough hands of her spouse. Flouting his oath to wait to have sexual relations with Nujood until she was no longer a child, he took her virginity on their wedding night.

After failing at 22 other jobs, Barbara Corcoran borrowed $1,000 from her boyfriend, quit her job as a diner waitress, and started a tiny real estate office in New York City. Using 24 unconventional lessons learned from her mom, Barbara built that tiny company into a $4 billion business, and today she's richer than her wildest childhood dreams.

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug" - the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing - cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family - nearly to the point of collapse.

Zoe Zolbrod remained silent about her early childhood molestation for nearly a decade. When she finally decided to tell, she wasn't sure what to expect or what to say. Through a series of experiences - Zolbrod hitchhikes with a boyfriend from one coast to another, hangs out in a strip club in Philadelphia, meets and marries her husband, and gives birth to her children - she traces the development of her sexuality, her relationships with men, and the cultivation of her motherhood in the shadow of her childhood sexual abuse.

Here is an audiobook that transcends the limits of how-to guides and honors the act of childbirth in the 21st century. Eleanor Henderson and Anna Solomon have gathered true birth stories by women who have made self-expression their business, including Cheryl Strayed, Julia Glass, Lauren Groff, Dani Shapiro, and many other luminaries. In Labor Day, you'll hear about women determined to give birth naturally and others begging for epidurals; women who pushed for hours and women whose labors were over practically before they'd started; women giving birth to twins and to 10-pound babies.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

Ann is 60 and suffering from celibacy. Going through two divorces has made her skittish; having two children has made her cautious. But finally her longing for sex and romance sends her hurtling out of her comfort zone. Her adventure begins with a very nice transvestite and gets more interesting from there.

People ask me when I first knew I was female. Would you believe me if I told you that I don't know if I've ever known, since I don't really know what a woman is, other than a concept that exists outside me - still, I know that I have felt like one, a woman I mean, yet the only way I first knew was from males? Will you suspend prejudgment long enough to entertain the possibility that gender can be so relative?

When writer Catherine Deveny faced the end of a 17-year relationship with the father of her children, she had no idea what lay on the other side of the months of tumult—she just knew she had to create space for a new life. But this wasn’t the first time Deveny had taken a plunge into the unknown or let go of conventional assumptions. In True North, she shares how she emerged from an oppressive Catholic upbringing in working-class Reservoir, found her tribe in Fitzroy’s share houses in the '80s and learnt to live life on her own terms.

As a 12-year-old girl, Maria Housden's vision of a happy future included everything that society expects girls to yearn for: a home, a husband, and, of course, children. Life had other plans.

This book was comprised from close to 40 years of involvement in the professional sports and media industry of one way or another and is written as a teaching guide...as we all need to go back to basics once in a while to try to understand why things are thought, said, and done by the other person. The lessons are about the relationships that go on in our everyday lives, and the intention is to present scenarios and for the listeners to put themselves in each of those different roles throughout the book to have a better understanding of what others go through on a daily basis.

In this brave and shocking memoir, the author masterfully guides us through the pivotal points of her life, from an abusive upbringing that destroys her self-confidence, to the wreckage of an ill-conceived marriage, and on to a defining moment, full of grace and mercy, which gave her the wings to become the conquering and triumphant phoenix she is today.

Jeanne Darst was born the youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated family long past its glory days. For the early part of her life, the family survived on the memory of past generations' grandeur, and the romantic belief that Darst's father would restore that greatness with his destined career as a novelist. Within a few years, however, it was abundantly clear to everyone but him that despite the many years enslaved to the writer's craft and lifestyle, he was never going to sell a book.

Through Donna Edwards-Hawthorne's personal life story, she intends to remind you that your hope will be the light in all the darkness. Having grown up in Jamaica, Donna narrates her tell-all tale about all the hardships in her childhood life, aiming to inspire you towards an attitude of never giving up. Why not be your biggest supporter and make it through life's darkest days instead of putting yourself down and struggling? After all, it will only be you sticking up for yourself till the end of time—no one else.

In this cohesive collection of provocative stories, West details the precarious journey of raising her daughter while going through a quarter-life crisis of her own. She writes intimately about their mother-daughter relationship and how it, and Savannah's belief in her, kept her going every day despite their brush with homelessness, an attempted sexual assault on West, and multiple career derailments including losing a job at a major sports league.

Michelle Marez was raised in Pueblo, a culturally diverse town in Southern Colorado. She is half Slavic and half Hispanic. The identities were like costumes, worn one over the next. These costumes became so heavy and itchy that she finally took them all off and exposed her true self. It took a devastating discovery to begin the painful work that leads her to love, belonging, freedom, and happiness. This is her journey.

In the 10 years since the publication of her beloved, groundbreaking Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, number-one New York Times best-selling author Amy Krouse Rosenthal has been quietly tinkering away. Using her distinct blend of nonlinear narrative, wistful reflections, and insightful wit, she has created a modest but mighty new work.

A stunning blend of the personal and professional, The Archaeology of Loss is Sarah Tarlow’s first memoir. An accomplished archaeologist, much of Sarah’s work is concerned with the ritual and belief behind the practice of grief. In 2012, she was awarded the Chair in Archaeology at the University of Leicester. But in the years that followed this appointment, Sarah’s husband, Mark, would begin to suffer from a progressive but undiagnosed illness, finally resulting in his inability to drive, to walk, to taste or to care for himself.

Like all mothers, Emily Rapp had ambitious plans for her first and only child, Ronan. He would be smart, loyal, physically fearless, and level-headed, but fun. He would be good at crossword puzzles like his father. He would be an avid skier like his mother. Rapp would speak to him in foreign languages and give him the best education. But all of these plans changed when Ronan was diagnosed at nine months old with Tay-Sachs disease, a rare and always-fatal degenerative disorder. Ronan was not expected to live beyond the age of three....