Women Memoirs

Despite multiple waves of feminist revolution, today's single woman is still mired in judgment or, worse, pity. But for one brief exclamatory period in the 1930s, she was all the rage. Marjorie Hillis was working at Vogue when she published the radical self-help book Live Alone and Like It: A Guide for the Extra Woman. With Dorothy Parker-esque wit, she urged spinsters, divorcees, and old maids to shed derogatory labels, and her philosophy became a phenomenon.

Emma Healey just wants to be a writer, but that’s more a journey than a job, and the journey isn’t free. As a teenager, she begins her adventures in precarious employment when introduced by her actor/playwright mother to the role of “standardized patient,” performing illness as a living training dummy for medical students. In university, she joins a creative writing program, cultivating a poet’s interest in language while learning lessons about the literary world that have more to do with survival than art.

In this intimate, haunting, literary memoir read by the author, an American icon tells her story for the first time, in her own gorgeous words - about a challenging and lonely childhood, the craft that helped her find her voice, and a powerful emotional legacy that shaped her journey as a daughter and a mother.

« Comment une mère peut-elle ne pas savoir ? » C’est une question que l’on pose souvent à propos des familles touchées par l’inceste, et les captivants mémoires d’Eleanor Cowan, Histoire d’une épouse de pédophile, apportent des réponses à la fois courageuses et bouleversantes. L’autrice a grandi au Québec dans les années 1950, au sein d’une famille nombreuse catholique où se mêlaient violences, addictions et méthodes éducatives toxiques.

Betty Boyd Caroli's engrossing and informative First Ladies is an essential resource for anyone interested in the role of America's First Ladies. Caroli observes the role as it has shifted and evolved from ceremonial backdrop to substantive world figure. This expanded and updated fifth edition presents Caroli's keen political analysis and astute observations of recent developments, including Melania Trump's reluctance to take on the mantle and former First Lady Hilary Clinton's recent run for president. Caroli here contributes a new preface and updated chapters.

The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a “compelling” (The Washington Post) account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.

Jane Goodall candidly shares her life, as well as the Gombe chimpanzees she introduced to the world nearly 40 years ago. She gives convincing reasons why we can and must open ourselves to the saints within each of us. At one with nature and challenged by the man-made dangers of environmental destruction, inequality, materialism, and genocide, Dr. Goodall offers her perceptions of these threats and celebrates the people who are working for Earth's renewal. Here, indeed, is Reason for Hope.

A 12 ans, afin de protéger Cathy de sa mère abusive, le juge pour enfants la place dans un centre de l'association Le Patriarche à Toulouse. Hélas, cette institution est une secte. Cathy y subit de nouvelles violences et abus sexuels. Après deux tentatives avortées, elle parvient enfin à s'échapper. À Paris, Cathy est embauchée dans un salon de coiffure. Elle vit dans un petit appartement. Mais une jeune femme, rencontrée au centre du Patriarche et avec laquelle elle est restée en contact, l'entraîne dans la drogue.

This is the riveting story of Noor Inayat Khan, the descendant of an Indian Prince Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, who became a British secret agent for SOE during World War II. Born into an illustrious Indian family in 1914 and brought up in the non-violent Sufi religion, Noor seemed an unlikely secret agent. Yet she became the first female radio operator to be landed in enemy-occupied France, and refused to abandon her post in Paris in 1943, continuing her work under extremely dangerous circumstances.

Just Kids begins as a love story and ends as an elegy. It serves as a salute to New York City during the late 60s and 70s and to its rich and poor, its hustlers and hellions. A true fable, it is a portrait of two young artists' ascent, a prelude to fame.

Called the Jane Goodall of wolves, world-renowned wildlife biologist Diane Boyd has spent four decades studying and advocating for wolves in the wilds of Montana near Glacier National Park. When she started in the 1970s, she was the only female biologist in the United States researching and radio-collaring wild wolves. With her two dogs for company, she faced the rigors of the Montana winter in an isolated cabin.

The sensational biography of Princess Diana, now revised to commemorate the 20th anniversary of her death. When Diana: Her True Story - in Her Own Words was first published in 1992, it forever changed the way the public viewed the British monarchy.

The 1930s was a magical age in Hollywood, with Shirley Temple and Mickey Rooney, Bette Davis, and Clark Gable lighting up the silver screen. But Deanna Durbin’s fame surpassed them all. Born in Canada, Deanna was “discovered” by star-maker Eddie Cantor, producer Joe Pasternak, and director Henry Koster, and she quickly became the world’s most celebrated star. She saved Universal Studios from ruin, she was a favorite of Winston Churchill and Anne Frank, and she became the highest-paid woman in America.

It’s the middle of the summer before her fiftieth birthday and Alexandra is just barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, chafing and straining against the stresses and strictures of midlife as a mother and ex-wife, and piecing her way through a disastrous relationship with a younger woman that lurches and buckles, but never quite breaks. And then—suddenly and incomprehensibly—her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. What happens next is what Alexandra details in this book.

Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero - these are the names history associates with the early Roman Empire. Yet, not a single one of these emperors was the blood son of his predecessor. In this captivating history, a prominent scholar of the era documents the Julio-Claudian women whose bloodline, ambition, and ruthlessness made it possible for the emperors' line to continue. Eminent scholar Guy de la Bedoyere, author of Praetorian, asserts that the women behind the scenes - including Livia, Octavia, and the elder and younger Agrippina - were the true backbone of the dynasty.

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with listeners, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

The moment Diane Burke, an author and mother of two grown sons, received an unexpected certified letter in the mail, she had no idea her life would be shaken to its core. Memories of a past she had buried more than forty years ago suddenly resurfaced and she wasn't prepared to deal with them. Steve Orlandi, happily married, father of two and step-father of three, was living the typical middle class American life. But since the age of eight, when he discovered he was adopted, he had led that life dealing with inner questions about his self-identity and genetic history.

In Geisha, a Life, Mineko Iwasaki tells her story, from her warm early childhood, to her intense yet privileged upbringing in the Iwasaki okiya (household), to her years as a renowned geisha, and finally, to her decision at the age of 29 to retire and marry, a move that would mirror the demise of geisha culture. Mineko brings to life the beauty and wonder of Gion Kobu, a place that "existed in a world apart, a special realm whose mission and identity depended on preserving the time-honored traditions of the past."

Sarah Kurchak is autistic. She hasn’t let that get in the way of pursuing her dream to become a writer, or to find love, but she has let it get in the way of being in the same room with someone chewing food loudly and of cleaning her bathroom sink. In I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder, Kurchak examines the Byzantine steps she took to become “an autistic success story”, how the process almost ruined her life, and how she is now trying to recover.

Jada Pinkett Smith was living what many would view as a fairy-tale of Hollywood success. But appearances can be deceiving, and as she felt more and more separated from her sense of self, emotional turmoil took hold. Sparing no detail, Worthy chronicles her life.