Women Memoirs

The wildly funny, occasionally heart-breaking internationally best-selling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride. When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all.

In early 2018, Larry Nassar, the former doctor for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, was sentenced to serve out the rest of his life in prison after pleading guilty to a variety of sex crimes. New York Times best-selling author Mary Pilon and Carla Correa chronicle the scandal from its inception, tracking the institutions that Nassar hid behind, the athletic culture that he benefited from, and the women who eventually brought him to justice.

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family; she called herself an "excitement addict."

Discover why women are so often unhappy with their appearance - and how they can learn to love themselves. When women are told that what is important about us is how we look, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to feel comfortable with our appearance and how we feel about our bodies. We are told, over and over - if we just lost weight, fit into those old jeans, or into a new smaller pair - we will be happier and feel better about ourselves.

Years ago, an overachieving and harried young mother accidentally flushed her gold watch down the toilet. Time passed, but the image of the lost watch continued to haunt her, a symbol of an overcommitted life. Two decades later, propelled by a series of curious coincidences, she leaves behind her busy professional life, her cell phone, and her family to escape the tyranny of time and walk 500 miles across Northern Spain to Santiago de Compostela.

Beryl Markham, the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west, describes her childhood on a farm in Kenya, her apprenticeship as a horse trainer, and her later career as a pioneer aviator who piloted passengers and supplies in a small plane to remote corners of Africa.

Josephine's life story was as turbulent as the age, an era of revolution and social upheaval, of the guillotine and of frenzied hedonism. With telling psychological depth and compelling literary grace, Carolly Erickson brings the complex, charming, ever resilient Josephine to life in this memorable portrait, one that carries the reader from the sensual richness of her childhood in the tropics to her final lonely days at Malmaison.

When Geraldine "Gerry" Largay first went missing on the Appalachian Trail in remote western Maine in 2013, the people of Maine were wrought with concern. When she was not found, the family, the wardens, and the Navy personnel who searched for her were devastated. The Maine Warden Service continued to follow leads for more than a year. They never completely gave up the search. Two years after her disappearance, her bones and scattered possessions were found by chance by two surveyors.

At just under five feet tall, Virginia Prodan was no match for the towering six-foot-ten-inch, gun-wielding assassin the Romanian government sent to her office to take her life. It was not the first time her life had been threatened - nor would it be the last. As a young attorney under Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal communist regime, Virginia had spent her entire life searching for the truth.

In 2006, Kit DesLauriers made history by becoming the first person to climb - and then ski - from the summit of each continent's highest mountain, the famed Seven Summits. Centered on this quest, Higher Love represents a hero's journey, rich with personal insights, life-threatening consequences, and a thrilling crescendo. Spanning seven continents in just two years, this deeply personal memoir recounts Kit's initially secret journey that would change her life forever.

On discovering her murdered husband's body, an 18th-century Irish noblewoman drinks handfuls of his blood and composes an extraordinary lament. Eibhlin Dubh Ni Chonaill's poem travels through the centuries, finding its way to a new mother who has narrowly avoided her own fatal tragedy. When she realizes that the literature dedicated to the poem reduces Eibhlin Dubh's life to flimsy sketches, she wants more: the details of the poet's girlhood and old age; her unique rages, joys, sorrows, and desires; the shape of her days and site of her final place of rest.

A life of Matilda - empress, skilled military leader, and one of the greatest figures of the English Middle Ages.

After graduating from college, Jennifer isn't sure what she wants to do with her life. She is drawn to the Appalachian Trail, a 2,175-mile footpath that stretches from Georgia to Maine. Though her friends and family think she's crazy, she sets out alone to hike the trail, hoping it will give her time to think about what she wants to do next. The next four months are the most physically and emotionally challenging of her life.

Few families can boast of not one but two saints among their ancestors, a great-aunt who was the last tsarina of Russia, a father who was Grace Kelly's pinup, and a grandmother who was not only a princess but could also argue the finer points of naval law. Pamela Mountbatten entered a remarkable family when she was born at the very end of the Roaring Twenties.

This confessional self-help guide explores the complex emotional truth of what it’s like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. Activist author Marissa LaRocca’s revelatory tale includes her struggle with her secrets, including sexuality, and how she emerged as an outspoken advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.

As a child, Roxana Spicer would sometimes wake to the sound of the Red Army choir. She would tip-toe downstairs to find her mother, cigarette in one hand and Black Russian in the other, singing along. Roxana would keep her company, and wonder. Everyone in their village knew Agnes Spicer was Russian, that she had been a captive of the Nazis. And that was all they knew, because Agnes kept her secrets close: how she managed to escape Germany, what the tattoo on her arm meant, even her real name. Discovering the truth about her beloved, charismatic, volatile mother became Roxana's obsession.

In June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, Lyudmila Pavlichenko left her university studies and ignored the offer of a position as a nurse to become one of Soviet Russia's 2,000 female snipers. Less than a year later, she had 309 recorded kills, including 29 enemy sniper kills. She was withdrawn from active duty after being injured. She was also regarded as a key heroic figure for the war effort.

What is the price of honor? It took 10 years for Vietnam War Nurse Diane Carlson Evans to answer that question - and the answer was a heavy one.

​Diane von Furstenberg, entrepreneur and philanthropist, presents her words to live by. In an easy-to-navigate A-Z dictionary format, designed to be browsed or listened to as a whole, Own It offers listeners Diane’s well-earned wisdom for enjoying both personal and professional growth at any age.

In the historical context of the Jim Crow South, Gail explores her mother's decision to pass, how she hid her secret even from her own husband, and the price she paid for choosing whiteness. Haunted by her mother's fear and shame, Gail embarks on a quest to uncover her mother's racial lineage, tracing her family back to 18th-century colonial Louisiana. In coming to terms with her decision to publicly out her mother, Gail changed how she looks at race and heritage.