Personal Memoirs Women

One year after her astonishing victory at the Badwater Ultramarathon, Pam Reed again made distance running history when she braved the hottest weather in years - 135 degrees - to successfully defend her title. How does this 100-pound mother and stepmother of five muster the endurance and courage for the 28-hour climb from the hottest desert floor on Earth to the shadow of the continental United States' tallest point?

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

Beth Moore is widely known and respected as an engaging and effective speaker, Bible teacher, and bestselling author. Feathers from My Nest reveals a more contemplative and personal side of Beth, very much in the spirit of her work, Things Pondered. Feathers from My Nest is a collection of vignettes, as Beth reflects on items belonging to her daughters who have left the nest for college.

A riveting glimpse of life and love during and after World War II - a heartwarming, touching, and thoroughly absorbing true story of a world gone by. In the spring of 1939, with the Second World War looming, two determined 24-year-olds, Heather Jenner and Mary Oliver, decided to open a marriage bureau. They found a tiny office on London's Bond Street and set about the delicate business of matchmaking.

A weave of biography, criticism, and memoir, Shine Bright is Danyel Smith’s intimate history of Black women’s music as the foundational story of American pop. Smith has been writing this history for more than five years. But as a music fan, and then as an essayist, editor (Vibe, Billboard), and podcast host (Black Girl Songbook), she has been living this history since she was a latchkey kid listening to “Midnight Train to Georgia” on the family stereo.

If you think sexism thrives only on Wall Street or Hollywood, you haven’t visited a lab, a science department, a research foundation, or a biotech firm. Rita Colwell is one of the top scientists in America: the groundbreaking microbiologist who discovered how cholera survives between epidemics and the former head of the National Science Foundation. But when she first applied for a graduate fellowship in bacteriology, she was told, “We don’t waste fellowships on women.” A lack of support from some male superiors would lead her to change her area of study six times.

Katie Piper's extraordinary story of strength and recovery after a brutal rape and acid attack has captivated Britain. In this powerful sequel to her bestselling memoir, Katie tells the remarkable story of what's happened in the years since she bravely left the safety of her parents' home. With her trademark honesty, humour and heartfelt emotion, Katie shares the highs and lows she has faced as her life changed in ways she never thought possible.

In A Year by the Sea, Joan Anderson documented her brave decision to take a year of solitude away from her marriage. In this moving sequel, Anderson gives fresh hope for all women and men negotiating their own marital passages. Using the same approach, she explores the challenges of rebuilding and renewing a marriage with her trademark candor, compassion, and insight. Anderson shows us her own rocky path to renewing a marriage gone stale and charts the new journey that she and her husband began, seasoned by years of marriage but awakened to the possibilities for their future.

Critics, readers, and listeners loved Lisa Scottoline's first collection of true-life stories, which only encouraged her—now she's back with these all-new, exciting adventures. She's farther down the road now, and the scenery has changed—ex-husbands Thing One and Thing Two are in her rear-view mirror, daughter Francesca has moved into an apartment, and Lisa's finding the silver lining in her empty nest, which has lots more room for her shoes. And some things have stayed the same.

At 49, famed Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales was nursing a broken heart and wondering, “How did I wind up alone?” On the advice of a young friend, she downloaded Tinder, then a brand-new dating app. What followed was a raucous ride through the world of online dating. Sales, an award-winning journalist and single mom, became a leading critic of the online dating industry, reporting and writing articles and making her directorial debut with the HBO documentary Swiped: Hooking Up in the Digital Age. Meanwhile, she was dating a series of younger men.

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African-American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

Though Chris and Taya Kyle's marriage had its difficult moments, it was always a love story. Together they'd endured military service, a best-selling book, unexpected fame, and a film deal starring a hot Hollywood actor. But just when Taya thought that she and Chris were finally going to live their dream together, her husband was murdered. In the wake of his death, a grieving Taya was left to raise her two young children and handle the many things Chris left behind.

Fight Like a Mother is the incredible account how one mother’s cry for change became the driving force behind gun-safety progress. Along with stories of perseverance, courage, and compassion, Watts shines a light on the unique power of women - starting with what they have, leading with their maternal strengths, and doubling down instead of backing down.

Everyone is afraid of the boogie man. Society has been conditioned to view “real rape” as that which is perpetrated on a virtuous woman by a horrible, psychotic stranger. The truth is, you are more likely to be sexually assaulted by someone you know. People turn to victim blaming to retain some measure of control and to help conceal the harsh reality that the boogie man could actually be anyone.

Just when Stacy Morrison thought she had it all, her husband of 10 years announced that he wanted a divorce. She was left alone with a new house that needed lots of work, a new baby who needed lots of attention, and a new job in the high-pressure world of New York publishing. Morrison had never been one to believe in fairy tales. As far as she was concerned, happy endings were the product of the kind of ambition and hard work that had propelled her to the top of her profession.

Alyssa Mastromonaco is back with a bold, no-nonsense, and no-holds-barred 21st-century girl's guide to life, tackling the highs and lows of bodies, politics, relationships, moms, education, life on the internet, and pop culture. Whether discussing Barbra Streisand or The Bachelor, working in the West Wing or working on finding a wing woman, Alyssa leaves no stone unturned...and no awkward situation unexamined.

When Meaghan O'Connell got accidentally pregnant in her twenties and decided to keep the baby, she realized that the book she needed - a brutally honest, agenda-free reckoning with the emotional and existential impact of motherhood - didn't exist. So she decided to write it herself. And Now We Have Everything is O'Connell's exploration of the cataclysmic, impossible-to-prepare-for experience of becoming a mother. With her dark humor and hair-trigger B.S. detector, O'Connell addresses the pervasive imposter syndrome that comes with unplanned pregnancy, among other issues.

Playwright, author, and activist Eve Ensler has devoted her life to the female body - how to talk about it, how to protect and value it. Yet she spent much of her life disassociated from her own body - a disconnection brought on by her father’s sexual abuse and her mother’s remoteness. “Because I did not, could not inhabit my body or the Earth,” she writes, “I could not feel or know their pain.” But Ensler is shocked out of her distance.

With a successful speaking career putting her on the road 250 days a year, a slew of prestigious awards for her activism, the hugely successful book I Am That Girl, and a happy marriage, Alexis Jones was living a seemingly charmed life. But the principles of self-care, setting boundaries, and eschewing perfectionism that she espoused in her talks didn’t seem to translate into her own life; she still never seemed to feel “enough” inside. Then, in a matter of months, things started to fall apart on the outside, too.

In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift, questioning her marriage, her profession, and her place in the larger world. Into her stagnant routine dropped Dodo, her three-year-old daughter Maya's curiously disruptive imaginary friend. Worried about how to handle Dodo's apparent hold on their daughter, she and her husband made the unlikely choice to take Maya to healers in Belize, hoping that a shaman might help them banish Dodo, and all he represented, from their lives.