Women Memoirs

With a sensibility that recalls her beloved screen characters, including Yvette, Queenie, Shug, and the iconic Cookie from Empire, yet is all Taraji, the screen actress writes of her families - the one she was born into and the one she created. She shares stories of her father, a Vietnam vet who was bowed but never broken by life's challenges, and of her mother, who survived violence both in the home and on DC's volatile streets. Here, too, she opens up about her experiences as a single mother.

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.

Jody Wilson-Raybould was raised to be a leader. Inspired by the example of her grandmother, who persevered throughout her life to keep alive the governing traditions of her people, and raised as the daughter of a hereditary chief and Indigenous leader, Wilson-Raybould always knew she would take on leadership roles and responsibilities.

Not many White House Press Secretaries capture the nation’s interest the way Jen Psaki did. Refreshingly candid and clear, Psaki quickly became known for her ability to break through the noise and successfully deliver her message. In her highly anticipated book, Psaki shares her journey to the Briefing Room and beyond, taking you along the campaign trail, to the State Department, and inside the White House under two Presidents.

Sarah Forsyth has spent most of her life in fear. After overcoming the hurt and heartbreak of a horrific childhood, Sarah managed to build a new life for herself as a nursery nurse. Then, one day, she spotted a newspaper advert for a job in a crèche in Amsterdam. Excited by the prospect of a fresh start abroad, she eagerly signed up. But within minutes of stepping off the plane in Amsterdam her life began to fall apart.... There was no crèche and no job. That night, at just 19 years of age, her life - her real life, her life as Sarah Forsyth - ended.

Eighteen-year-old Eva Yin is admitted into an ER in the San Francisco Bay Area for a serious blood infection - the souvenir of a missed shot of heroin. Barely recovered and against medical advice, she leaves the hospital for New York City only to end up homeless and facing prostitution and violence. Being a heroin addict is like running in circles. You run, and you run, and you end up exactly where you started.

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Her husband of 21 years is plotting against her because he feels increasingly threatened - by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and unwillingness to stifle her own thoughts. So Theophilus makes a plan to put his wife back in her place. One summer morning, he has her committed to an insane asylum.

Nearly a half century into being a feminist and legal pioneer, something funny happened to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The octogenarian won the Internet. Across America, people who weren't even born when Ginsburg made her name are tattooing themselves with her face, setting her famously searing dissents to music, and making viral videos in tribute.

"Do you really want to know what it’s like to be a porn star? Brace yourself, because I’m not going to pull any punches. Here’s what a ‘busy day at the office’ might mean for me...." So begins the no-holds-barred autobiography of Monica Mayhem - a porn star and proud of it. In her funny and disarmingly candid voice, she reveals the ins and outs of making it big in Los Angeles, the pornography capital of the world.

Jennifer McGaha never expected to own a goat named Merle, or to be rescuing opossums from her barn and calling it "date night." When Jennifer discovered that she and her husband owed back taxes - a lot of back taxes - her world changed. Now desperate to save money, they foreclosed on their beloved suburban home and moved their family to a 100-year-old cabin in a North Carolina holler. Soon enough, Jennifer's life began to more closely resemble the lives of her Appalachian ancestors than the life she experienced in her middle class upbringing.

At the age of 22, Jennifer Worth left her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in postwar London’s East End slums. The colorful characters she met while delivering babies all over London - from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lived to the woman with 24 children who couldn't speak English to the prostitutes and dockers of the city’s seedier side - illuminate a fascinating time in history.

Extensively researched and told through alternating fiction and nonfiction chapters, this book illuminates a shocking truth: contrary to popular opinion, the witch hunts never ended. Alice shares research that suggests tens of thousands of witch hunt-related deaths have happened all over the world in the last thirty years. The Once & Future Witch Hunt also features tantalizing glimpses into Alice's ancestors' lives and reimagines the trials through fact-based fiction.

In this immersive, spell-binding memoir, an acclaimed screenwriter tells the story of her childhood growing up with the infamous Lyman Family cult—and the complicated and unexpected pain of leaving the only home she’d ever known.

Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor", a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.

Une enfance volée, une vie brisée : Un témoignage qui a bouleversé le monde entier.

Jane n’a que 4 ans quand son cauchemar débute. Son beau-père, un homme violent et terrifiant, commence à abuser d’elle. Viols, coups et sadisme psychologique deviennent le quotidien de la fillette. Elle grandit en restant prisonnière d’une véritable maison des horreurs.

In 1912, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the US government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth's story, incredibly, has never been told.

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, and across a landscape of creative aspirations and inspirations, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in Mexico; to a meeting of an Arctic explorer's society in Berlin; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima.

Tamara Lich: passionate organizer; loving mother and grandmother; proud Metis and proud Albertan; and defiant political prisoner, jailed for daring to criticize the government. Her new book "Hold the Line: My Story from the Heart of the Freedom Convoy" is the inside scoop of what really happened. You’ve heard from the media and the convoy’s critics. Now hear the truth from the woman who inspired the world and made Justin Trudeau blink.

When, at age forty-six, Nancy Pelosi, mother of five, asked her youngest daughter if she should run for Congress, Alexandra Pelosi answered: “Mother, get a life!” And so Nancy did, and what a life it has been. In The Art of Power, Pelosi describes for the first time what it takes to make history—not only as the first woman to ascend to the most powerful legislative role in our nation, but to pass laws that would save lives and livelihoods, from the emergency rescue of the economy in 2008 to transforming health care.

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.