Personal Memoirs Women

No one can accuse Diane Danvers Simmons of telling a familiar story. Instead she offers a wickedly witty, candid, irreverent British coming-of-age story with a fresh take on maternal abandonment. In My Mother Next Door she shares the life lessons learned growing up in the revolutionary 1970s while her narcissistic mother charted her own unfathomable course to independence and freedom.

As the voices of transracial adoptees gain prominence in academic, literary, and creative works, Adopting Privilege emerges as both a timely and vital contribution to the discourse. Through the lens of an adoptee, Dr. Hasberry’s debut memoir explores the triumphs, challenges, and complexities of transracial adoption, the nuances that make it difficult to hold space for oneself, and the experience that comes with adopting outside of race.

The crime of rape sizzles like a lightning strike. It pounces, flattens, destroys. A person stands whole, and in a moment of unexpected violence, that life, that body is gone. Award-winning writer and public health executive Michelle Bowdler's memoir indicts how sexual violence has been addressed for decades in our society, asking whether rape is a crime given that it is the least reported major felony, least successfully prosecuted, and fewer than three percent of rapists ever spend a day in jail.

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.

When Nicole Hardy’s eye-opening "Modern Love" column appeared in the New York Times, the response from readers was overwhelming. Hardy’s essay, which exposed the conflict between being true to herself as a woman and remaining true to her Mormon faith, struck a chord with women coast-to-coast. Now in her funny, intimate, and thoughtful memoir, Nicole Hardy explores how she came, at the age of 35, to a crossroads regarding her faith and her identity.

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.

After surviving both the failed chicken farm - and marriage - immortalized in The Egg and I, Betty MacDonald returns to live with her mother and desperately searches to find a job to support her two young daughters. With the help of her older sister Mary, Anybody Can Do Anything recounts her failed, and often hilarious, attempts to find work during the Great Depression.

From Golda to Ginsburg, Yentl to Mama Rose, Tallulah to the Queen of Mean, Tovah Feldshuh has always played powerful women who aren't afraid to sit at the table with the big boys and rule their world. But offstage, Tovah struggled to fulfill the one role she never auditioned for: Lily Feldshuh's only daughter. Tovah shares the highs and lows of a remarkable career that has spanned five decades, and shares the lessons that she has learned, often the hard way, about how to live a life in the spotlight, strive for excellence, and still get along with your mother.

It was a long, sometimes devastating, journey Maxine was forced to undertake through the depths of despair as a preschooler, and then on through a tumultuous adolescence during which she was ignored yet at the same time abused by a uncaring mother who daily left her with a malevolent grandmother who similarly mistreated her. Instructed by her divorced mother to no longer call her Mama, in an effort to enhance her own marketability as a perspective wife to some unsuspecting man.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie's death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life.

After spending her high school years in Hawaii, Kathleen Norris was woefully unprepared for Bennington College in the 1960s, with its culture of drugs, sex, and bohemianism. But it was also at Bennington that she discovered her great love of poetry, which carried her to New York City at a time when a new generation of poets was emerging and shaking up the establishment of time and place.

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.

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.

Surviving My Mother is the harrowing, candid, beautiful story of a woman’s quest to survive, a mother’s quest to heal, and a daughter’s quest to forgive. Debbie Matzkin shares the life-saving lessons she learned, how she was able to find happiness in even the darkest of depths, and how she ultimately reclaimed her future.

Laura June’s daughter, Zelda, was only a few moments old when she held her for the first time, looked into her eyes, and thought, I wish my mother were here. It wasn’t a thought she was used to having. Laura was in second grade when she realized her mother was an alcoholic. As the years went by, she spiraled deeper, and by the time of her death, before Zelda’s birth, the two had drifted apart entirely. In Now My Heart is Full, Laura June explores how raising her daughter forced her to confront this tragic legacy and recognize the connective tissue that binds generations.

"Congratulations on the resurrection of your life", a colleague wrote to Emily Rapp Black when she announced the birth of her second child. The line made Rapp Black pause. Her first child, a boy named Ronan, had died from Tay-Sachs disease before he turned three years old, an experience she wrote about in her second book, The Still Point of the Turning World. Since that time, her life had changed utterly.

Don’t Let Me Down is about a brave girl trying to navigate family secrets and tragedies and escape from small-town small-mindedness. It is a searing and often funny exploration of how women first see themselves through the lens of a parent’s love and of the ties that bind us to our childhood heroes, who ultimately lead us to ask that most profound of questions: Is love really all you need?

Born Again in a Biker Bar depicts the story of a raging codependent and her alcoholic husband. It is centered in the famous Johnny's Bar & Grill in Hollister, California. Johnny's is the bar depicted in the 1953 movie The Wild One featuring Marlon Brando. When Charisse purchased Johnny's in January 1996, she had no idea of its fame. She did however know that her husband was an alcoholic. Within a few months of the purchase, Tommy quit his well-paying job and took his drinking to a whole new level. His health and their marriage deteriorated. On the brink of divorce, Charisse found herself at an Al-Anon meeting.

Growing up in Queens in the 1960s, Alyse Myers always yearned for more in life as she watched her mother settle for an unhappy marriage, an unsatisfying job, and a joyless existence. Alyse rejected everything about her mother's life, but after her death, she inherited a small wooden box whose contents revealed a deeply moving truth.

Throughout her childhood in Detroit, Damian Rogers was never given a satisfactory account of the circumstances that led to her own birth. The "truth" behind the stories she was told by her mother - the free-spirited, beautiful, and troubled Joanna - constantly shifted, and Damian was left only with fragments: her mom's trip to California in 1969 after finishing high school, a mysterious trauma and psychotic break, then a return to Detroit, pregnant.