Personal Memoirs Women

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.

Born into a political dynasty, Jenna and Barbara Bush grew up in the public eye. As small children, they watched their grandfather become president; just 12 years later they stood by their father's side when he took the same oath. They spent their college years being trailed by the Secret Service and chased by the paparazzi, with every teenage mistake making national headlines. But the tabloids didn't tell the whole story of these two young women forging their own identities under extraordinary circumstances.

From the star of TLC's My Big Fat Fabulous Life and the YouTube sensation "A Fat Girl Dancing" comes an empowering memoir about letting go of your limitations and living the life you deserve. Right now. Whitney Way Thore stands five feet two inches tall and weighs well over 300 pounds, and she is totally, completely, and truly...happy. But she wasn't always the vivacious, confident woman you see on TV. Growing up as a dancer, Whitney felt the pressure to be thin.

Sally grew up in a dilapidated house by the sea where men were forbidden, her childhood world filled with mystery and intrigue. Hippies trailed through the kitchen looking for God - their leader was Aunt Di, who ruled the house with charismatic force. When Sally’s baby brother vanished from his pram, she became suspicious of the activities going on around her. What happened to Baby David and the woman called Poor Sue? And where did all the people singing and wailing prayers in the front room suddenly go?

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?

Kym Gold's mantra - "never settle for a no, always look for a yes" - is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that she sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, she finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted,went on to become a giant, revolutionizing player in the fashion industry.

Discover a story of healing and personal transformation. Marlena’s childhood was full of contradictions. Her father was both a heroic doctor for people with leprosy and an abusive parent. Her Mennonite missionary community was both a devoted tribe and a controlling society. And Marlena longed to both be accepted in Paraguay and escape to somewhere new. In Nothing Bad Between Us, follow Marlena’s journey as she takes control of her life and learns to be her authentic self, scars and imperfections included.

The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls “this strange American weather.”

When Christa Brown first spoke out about the sexual abuse she endured in her Texas childhood church, she never imagined it would expose the ethical chasm at the core of the Southern Baptist Convention: male religious leaders so focused on institutional protection that they sacrifice the safety of children. A book about speaking out and speaking up, Baptistland weaves together Christa’s revealing story of hope amid Southern patriarchy and religious fundamentalism.

A dramatic and remarkable narrative of an extraordinary teacher's determination, from the author of the Sunday Times bestsellers The Tiger's Child and One Child. Torey Hayden faced six emotionally troubled kids no other teacher could handle - three recent arrivals from battle-torn Northern Ireland, badly traumatized by the horrors of war; an eleven-year-old boy, who only knew life inside an institution; an excitable girl, aggressive and sexually precocious at the age of eight; and seven-year-old Leslie, perhaps the most hopeless of all, unresponsive and unable to speak.

One woman's journey through unbearable loss. A true story.

From the author of the popular newsletter That’s What She Said, Nobody Cares is a frank, funny personal essay collection about work, failure, friendship, and the messy business of being alive in your 20s and 30s. As she shares her hard-won insights from screwing up, growing up, and trying to find her own path, Anne T. Donahue’s debut book offers all the honesty, laughs, and reassurance of a late-night phone call with your best friend.

Diane Keaton has spent a lifetime coloring outside the lines of the conventional notion of beauty. In Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, she shares the wisdom she’s accumulated through the years as a mother, daughter, actress, artist, and international style icon. This is a book only Diane Keaton could write—a smart and funny chronicle of the ups and downs of living and working in a world obsessed with beauty.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of How to Be an Overnight Success by Maria Hatzistefanis. 'You are not born an entrepreneur. It's a skill that you learn along the way.' When the skincare company Rodial launched its cult 'snake' serum, the press quickly called the business an 'overnight success'. However, Rodial's founder, Maria Hatzistefanis, had been toiling for 18 years, building the company from scratch in her bedroom. Now, the beauty boss sets out to demonstrate in this very accessible book that its success stemmed from sheer hard work, tireless efforts and a lot of patience.

C'est l'histoire d'une nana qui ne voulait pas de mec, pas d'enfant, qui voulait faire la fête tout le temps et qui se retrouve maman d'un enfant et demi, pacsée, et qui trouve toujours des excuses pour annuler les soirées auxquelles elle est invitée. C'est l'histoire d'une nana qui a fait une fausse couche et qui a décidé de ne pas taire sa peine. C'est l'histoire d'une nana qui a décidé de raconter tout ce qu'on n'a jamais voulu lui dire sur la grossesse et la maternité.

Raised up from poverty by a determined single mother, gifted and beautiful twin sisters Christa and Cara Parravani were able to create a private haven of splendor and amusement that they shared between themselves. They earned their way into a prestigious college, established careers as artists (a photographer and a writer, respectively), and entered young marriages. But plagued by their father's early rejection of them and further damaged by being raped as a young woman, Cara veered into depression, drugs, and a shocking early death.

Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays.

With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country, to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They

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.

Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love, and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long, difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.