Personal Memoirs

After years of working as an image-obsessed actress in Hollywood, Roxanne finds herself at rock bottom from a disease that is anything but glamorous. In her first year of recovery, Roxanne has to take accountability for her past. From tales of being mistaken for a prostitute at the Hotel Bel-Air to botching a threesome attempt with an A-list celebrity, she must face the truth about herself and stop playing the victim.

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

Growing up in a small town in Minnesota, Tyler and his two brothers filled their days with chaotic fun, from playing hockey to building forts to making their own home movies. The household was also full of addiction and abuse that ultimately led to their father attempting to murder their mother on Christmas Eve 2007.

Marianne Power was a self-help junkie. For years she lined her bookshelves with dog-eared copies of definitive guide after definitive guide on how to live your best life. Yet one day she woke up to find that the life she dreamed of and the life she was living were not miles but continents apart. So she set out to make a change. Marianne decided to finally find out if her elusive perfect life lay in the pages of those books. So for a year she vowed to test a book a month, following its advice to the letter, taking the surest road she knew to a perfect Marianne.

In 1962, Jerry Sherwood gave up her newborn son, Dennis, for adoption. Twenty years later, she set out to find him - only to discover he had died before his fourth birthday. Harold and Lois Jurgens, a middle-class, churchgoing couple in picturesque White Bear Lake, Minnesota, had adopted Dennis and five other foster children. To all appearances, they were a normal Midwestern family, but Jerry suspected that something sinister had happened in the Jurgens household. She demanded to know the truth about her son's death.

Born in the tough East End of Glasgow and married into one of the city's most notorious criminal families, Janey Godley's young life was far from ordinary. From the grim and far-from-swinging '60s, to the discos of the '70s, to the tidal wave of heroin addiction which engulfed Glasgow's East End during the '80s, Janey was witness to an extraordinary underworld - as well as religious sectarianism, abject poverty and a frightening family of in-laws. Throughout it all, her indomitable spirit - and her vivid sense of humour - kept her alive.

My name is Ashlee. I am a victim of murder. Through a series of events and by two shots of a gun, I was made a widow at the age of 28, with my youngest child just six weeks old. I am a victim of infidelity. I have felt unlovable. I have felt rejected. I have had days in my life when I wasn’t sure if I would ever take a breath again, let alone be able to raise my five children by myself. I have lived in fear. I have felt much heartache. I have felt truly broken to my core. I have carried some heavy burdens...not only of my own, but burdens put upon my shoulders by the death of my husband.

After years of suffering multiple forms of abuse, a vulnerable young girl flees her home only to land straight into the arms of her biological father - a sexual predator. My Daddy the Pedophile tells the harrowing true story of a teenage girl’s affair with her manipulative sociopathic father. After a terrible dark secret comes to light, the real story unfolds and her courageous journey of healing begins.

In The Wheel of Life, when Kübler-Ross was 71 years old and facing her own death, this world-renowned healer told the story of her extraordinary life. Having taught the world how to die well, she offered a lesson on how to live well. The Wheel of Life is an adventure of the heart - powerful, controversial, inspirational - a fitting legacy of a powerful life.

Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves her three young children dearly, but she is vulnerable, naïve and unable to cope on her own. Cathy sets about helping Damian overcome his eating issues, with the hope that he will eventually return home. But when Rachel’s new boyfriend, Troy, arrives on the scene, Cathy becomes deeply concerned. She soon realises that Damian and his siblings are in great danger.

In the 1960s Ram Dass was a Harvard professor who turned to Eastern religion to answer the questions troubling his generation. He shared his story in the landmark classic, Be Here Now, which instantly captured the spiritual longings of his contemporaries. In Still Here, Ram Dass once again brings understanding, common sense, and reassurance for those of us facing the final season of life.

Where does a moderately popular internet star who never leaves her house look for potential suitors? Online. Tinder, Bumble, Match.com, OkCupid - I tried them all. My 31-year-old self clicked and swiped her little heart out, leading to more dates than I could count, and more disappointment than I was prepared for. Maybe you can relate. Maybe you know all too well the perils of modern dating.

In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs-Streets experienced a series of losses: her stepfather, then father, and finally her family’s puppy. Unmoored by grief, she couldn’t sleep. But she discovered something surprising: during her wakeful nights, the darkness became a place of sanctuary, filled with creativity, reflection, and wonder. And once she stopped fighting her insomnia, Annabel tapped into something mysterious and beguiling: her Night Self.

At some point in nearly every marriage, a wife finds herself asking, "What is wrong with my husband?!" In David Finch's case, this turns out to be an apt question. Five years after he married Kristen, the love of his life, they learn that he has Asperger syndrome. The diagnosis explains David's ever-growing list of quirks and compulsions, his lifelong propensity to quack and otherwise melt down in social exchanges, and his clinical-strength inflexibility. But it doesn't make him any easier to live with.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

Held against her will and raped by her 38-year-old boss, 19-year-old Anna tries to make sense of her unbelievable situation. How did an innocent friendship with her boss turn into weeks of forced sex and the inability to leave her oppressor's side? Furthermore, what happens when weeks of rape result in a pregnancy? This true-life novel depicts a graphic and raw recounting of the unimaginable horrors of the Summer of 2010.

Nedd Brockmann isn’t afraid to dream big. Fresh after running fifty marathons in fifty days, the twenty-three-year-old had an idea: a 4000-kilometre run across Australia, averaging 100 kilometres per day with the aim of completing it in the fastest known time of 43 days. He wasn’t chasing fame or public recognition. He just wanted to test his limits and raise a million dollars for homelessness in the process.

After selling her first novel - a dream she'd worked long and hard for - Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she'd left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery.

It's a crazy idea: trying to name the phrases that make love and connection possible. But that's just what Kelly Corrigan has set out to do here. In her New York Times best-selling memoirs, Corrigan distilled our core relationships to their essences, showcasing a warm, easy storytelling style. Now, in Tell Me More, she's back with a deeply personal, unfailingly honest, and often hilarious examination of the essential phrases that turn the wheel of life.

Fleeing intimate partner violence at age 20, Julie was stalked by her ex-partner for more than 10 years, rarely mentioning it to friends, let alone addressing it publicly. The contrast between her public career as a brave champion for women with her own private life of violence and fear meant a shaky and exhausting balancing act. Resilience Is Futile is a story of survival, courage, and ultimately, hope. But it is also a challenge to the ways we understand trauma and resilience. It is the story of one survivor who won’t give up and refuses to shut up.