Women Memoirs

Poet, memoirist, labor organizer, and Episcopal priest, Pauli Murray helped transform the law of the land. Arrested in 1940 for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus, Murray propelled that life-defining event into a Howard law degree and a fight against "Jane Crow" sexism. Now Murray is finally getting long-deserved recognition: The first African American woman to receive a doctorate of law at Yale, her name graces one of the university's new colleges.

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.

This riveting narrative explores the lives of six remarkable female pharaohs, from Hatshepsut to Cleopatra - women who ruled with real power - and shines a piercing light on our own perceptions of women in power today. Female rulers are a rare phenomenon - but thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, women reigned supreme. But throughout human history, women in positions of power were more often used as political pawns in a male-dominated society. What was so special about ancient Egypt that provided women this kind of access to the highest political office?

When Barbara Walters launched The View, network executives told her that hosting it would tarnish her reputation. Instead, within 10 years, she’d revolutionized morning TV and made household names of her cohosts: Joy Behar, Star Jones, Meredith Vieira, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck. But the daily chat fest didn’t just comment on the news. It became the news. And the headlines barely scratched the surface. Based on unprecedented access, award-winning journalist Ramin Setoodeh takes you backstage where the stars really spoke their minds.

In this moving collection of thought-provoking essays infused with her unique wisdom and deep humor, Union tells astonishingly personal and true stories about power, color, gender, feminism, and fame. Union tackles a range of experiences, including bullying, beauty standards and competition between women in Hollywood, growing up in white California suburbia and then spending summers with her Black relatives in Nebraska, coping with crushes, puberty, and the divorce of her parents.

The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn’t fashion - it was a stolen book. She spent her teens hitchhiking, committing petty theft, and dumpster diving. By twenty-two, she had resigned herself to employment, but was still broke, directionless, and working a mediocre day job she’d taken for the health insurance. It was there that Sophia decided to start selling vintage clothes on eBay. Eight years later, she is the founder, CEO, and creative director of Nasty Gal, a $100 million plus online fashion retailer with more than 350 employees.

Over the past twenty years, Melissa Etheridge has been blessed with success, love, joy, contentment, freedom, and release. She became a mother again, recorded eleven albums, toured the world, performed at the Grammy Awards, won an Oscar, discovered her one true love, and underwent a profound spiritual awakening. She also experienced illness, incomparable loss, heartache, guilt, shame, and devastating grief. Yet through it all, Melissa found the strength and courage to carry on. Talking to My Angels is a profoundly honest look into her inner life as a woman, an artist, a mother, and a survivor.

Consent is the story of one precocious young girl’s stolen adolescence. Devastating in its honesty, Vanessa’s painstakingly memoir lays bare the cultural attitudes and circumstances that made it possible for a 13-year-old girl to become involved with a 50-year-old man who happened to be a notable writer. As she recalls the events of her childhood and her seduction by one of her country’s most notable writers, Vanessa reflects on the ways in which this disturbing relationship changed and affected her as she grew older.

L’incroyable destin de Coline, kidnappée à la naissance. "J’ai 34 ans, je suis mariée et mère de deux merveilleux enfants. J’aime jouer du piano et la photographie me passionne. Je suis presque comme tout le monde. Presque, car j’ai été adoptée. L’histoire dit que ma mère biologique, trop pauvre, m’aurait abandonnée. On est bien loin de la vérité. À 31 ans, j’ai entamé des démarches pour connaître mes origines et j’ai découvert l’indicible."

It's never too late to chase your dreams: Before she discovered running, Nita Sweeney was 49-years-old, chronically depressed, occasionally manic, and unable to jog for more than 60 seconds at a time. Using exercise, Nita discovered an inner strength she didn't know she possessed, and with the help of her canine companion, she found herself on the way to completing her first marathon. In her memoir, Sweeney shares how she overcame emotional and physical challenges to finish the race and come back from the brink.

On the last night of the 2021 CrossFit Games, ten thousand fans watched in horror as Brooke Wells’ elbow dislocated under the weight of a 190-pound barbell. This is the extraordinary story of what happened next: How Wells pulled off a highly improbable comeback that transformed her mentally and physically into one of the fittest women in the world. In Resilient, Wells provides a refreshingly honest, authentic account of how she overcame fear, self-doubt, and a slew of unexpected obstacles to return to the CrossFit Games less than a year after undergoing total elbow reconstruction.

Hilarious best friends Cat and Nat created a massive online community of moms by sharing their ultra-real and just a bit R-rated dispatches from the mom trenches. From what not to eat a few days after giving birth (chicken wings) to the most effective ways to dodge post-partum sex, Cat & Nat’s Mom Truths shares everything no one will tell you about having kids.

For the first time, Hillary Rodham Clinton reveals what she was thinking and feeling during one of the most controversial and unpredictable presidential elections in history. Now free from the constraints of running, Hillary takes you inside the intense personal experience of becoming the first woman nominated for president by a major party in an election marked by rage, sexism, exhilarating highs and infuriating lows, stranger-than-fiction twists, Russian interference, and an opponent who broke all the rules. This is her most personal memoir yet.

With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes listeners through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.

When journalist Annabelle Tometich picks up the phone one June morning, she isn’t expecting a collect call from an inmate at the Lee County Jail. And when she accepts, she certainly isn’t prepared to hear her mother’s voice on the other end of the line. However, explaining the situation to her younger siblings afterwards was easy; all she had to say was, “Mom shot at some guy. He was messing with her mangoes.” They immediately understood.

Educated meets The Vow in this story of liberation and self-empowerment - an inspiring and stranger-than-fiction memoir of growing up in and breaking free from the Children of God, an oppressive, extremist religious cult.

Nancy Wake, nicknamed 'the white mouse' for her ability to evade capture, tells her own story. As the Gestapo's most wanted person, and one of the most highly decorated servicewomen of the war, it's a story worth telling. After living and working in Paris in the 1930's, Nancy married a wealthy Frenchman and settled in Marseilles. Her idyllic new life was ended by World War II and the invasion of France. Her life shattered, Nancy joined the French Resistance and, later, began work with an escape-route network for Allied soldiers.

Born White in the heart of Zululand during the racial apartheid, Lisa-Jo Baker longed to write a new future for her children—a longing that set her on a journey to understand where she fit into a story of violence and faith, history and race. Before marriage and motherhood, she came to the United States to study to become a human rights advocate. When she naïvely walked right into America’s own turbulent racial landscape, Baker experienced the kind of painful awakening that is both individual and universal, personal and social.

This extraordinary account, originally published in 1973, bravely explores the poverty, oppression, alcoholism, addiction, and tragedy Maria endured throughout her childhood and into her early adult life, underscored by living in the margins of a country pervaded by hatred, discrimination, and mistrust. Laced with spare moments of love and joy, this is a memoir of family ties and finding an identity in a heritage that is neither wholly Indigenous or Anglo; of strength and resilience; of indomitable spirit.

On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Sonali Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since. She has written an engrossing, unsentimental, beautifully poised account: as she struggles through the first months following the tragedy, furiously clenched against a reality that she cannot face and cannot deny....