Women Memoirs

The daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, author Bracha Horovitz spent her childhood surrounded by people who worked fervently to establish the fledgling nation of Israel after its 1948 independence. Inspired by their resilience and fortitude, Bracha set her heart on living a life that would honor her family, her community, and her heritage. At eighteen, Bracha joined the Israel Defense Forces. Alongside other female soldiers, she parachuted from planes, marched through hot deserts, and learned to shoot machine guns. Intense military training taught her that women, too, can be fierce fighters.

Found in a pillowcase, the fabulous long-lost memoirs of a legendary Hollywood designer - and a genuine Australian original. Orry-Kelly created magic onscreen, from Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon to Some Like It Hot. He won three Oscars for costume design. He dressed all the biggest stars, from Bette Davis to Marilyn Monroe. He was an Australian. Yet few know who Orry-Kelly really was - until now.

Do you ever ask yourself "what the 'F' am I doing?!" when you look at your life? Desiree's book Start. Suck. Get Better. proves you are not alone! In this eye-opening and relatable journey about the struggles of lost identity and dreams, starting a business, growing a family, and dealing with the intense emotions and struggles that come from starting something new, Desiree spills her guts about all the suck and how to get better through it all.

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel - a Jewish woman from Poland - fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin’s first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise’s dream finally shatters on Kristallnacht in November 1938, as hundreds of Jewish shops and businesses are destroyed.

Faye tells her unforgettable story of heroism, hardship, and resistance. Faye was an ordinary teenager when the Nazis invaded her town on the Russian-Polish border. She had a large, loving family, good friends and neighbours, most of whom were lost soon after the horrors of the Holocaust began. But Faye survived, and the photographs she took testify to her experiences and the persecution she witnessed. Decorated for heroism, Schulman uses her biography to tell an extraordinary story not just of survival, but of struggle and resistance against oppression.

Turns out, one lesson applies to living through illness, keeping the show on the road, letting go of the person you love most, and eating fire: The trick is there is no trick. You eat fire by eating fire. Two journeys - a daughter’s and a mother’s - bear witness to this lesson in The Electric Woman.

At 65, artist, writer, and psychologist Sharon Strong doesn’t fit into the cultural stereotype of “senior citizen”—and she has no desire to. Instead, she claims the next decade as the most transformational years of her life. At 66, she erects the first of what will become a series of monumental sculptures on the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man. At 67, she treks in the Himalayas. At 70, she meets the love of her life and begins a new life with him. To honor her 75th year, she delves into an inward journey with psilocybin mushrooms.

In August 2021, Kabul fell under the control of the Taliban, a militant political and fundamentalist religious faction. For Khalida Popal, it signaled the beginning of the most important battle of an already extraordinary young life—to get female soccer players out of a city where they faced imminent threat of execution simply for playing sports. Khalida first began playing soccer in a refugee camp in Pakistan after her parents fled Taliban rule. Returning to Afghanistan, she fell deeper in love with the freedom and comradeship soccer provides.

In 2015, Dionne Searcey was covering the economy for The New York Times, living in Brooklyn with her husband and three young children. Saddled with the demands of a dual-career household and motherhood in an urban setting, her life was in a rut. She decided to pursue a job as the paper’s West Africa bureau chief, an amazing but daunting opportunity to cover a swath of territory encompassing two dozen countries and 500 million people. Landing with her family in Dakar, Senegal, she quickly found their lives turned upside-down as they struggled to figure out their place.

عندما تنظر للأشياء بعين الكاتب لن تراها كما كانت من قبل فتلك العين تلتقط تفاصيلَ مهمَّشة، لم نكن نبالي بها، وتحوُّلها إلى حروف من نّور..ونار.

Sue Greenwood’s instinct was to follow her nose and say ‘YES!’ to everything, shortly followed by, “Oh S*%t! How am I going to get myself out of this one!” Raised in war-torn London in the early '40s in a spiritually rich but penniless bohemian Quaker family, Sue navigated through marriage and motherhood in the '60s before setting off alone to work in Singapore, aged 42. You might call it a fight for survival: she calls it one-helluva serendipitous adventure.

Rajni Raman is an immigrant from India who married her college sweetheart after graduation and moved across the world, leaving behind her family and friends for the promise of a life in America. As she made deep connections in a new land, she also experienced racial, color, and gender bias and struggled to overcome the hurt, trauma, and shame of childhood sexual abuse. She turned to prayer, faith, and holistic modalities as her health battles raged on for 15 years.

Examines how Black women elders have managed stress, emphasizing how self-care practices have been present since at least the mid-19th century, with roots in African traditions. How have Black women elders managed stress? In Black Women's Yoga History, Stephanie Y. Evans uses primary sources to answer that question and to show how meditation and yoga from eras of enslavement, segregation, and migration to the Civil Rights, Black Power, and New Age movements have been in existence all along.

من بين خيباتٍ متتالية وتراكمات مجتمعٍ لا يتغيّر أخرجت "سحر خليفة" قلبها ووضعتها على الورق لتأتي روايتها "مذكرات امرأة غير واقعية" ترصد لنا رحم الواقع عن طريق قصّة "عفاف" الفتاة التي نشأت في مجتمعٍ يحتفل بقدوم الذكر وينثر البخور والزغاريد فرحًا به ويخبِّيء رأسه وصوته عند ولادة الأنثى..

Billierosie rocked the BDSM world with her collection Fetish Worship, and she proves just how good she can be in her new novel. The author says, "I know people who have had their lives changed for the better when they finally embraced their fetish." And with her wonderful new novel, she shows not just that understanding but how great a writer she is!

In April 1969, a day before her 22nd birthday, Judith Ellen Bock gave birth to a 5 pound 15 ounce girl in a Tulsa hospital. Under the secrecy of a “NO SHOW, NO TELL” order, even Bock was kept from knowing much of anything about her newborn. Although she consented to the subsequent relinquishment of her parental rights and her daughter’s adoption, she was haunted by unresolved grief that she submerged for years under the mantra that she had “done the right thing.”

Fanny Hill is an erotic novel that was first published in 1748 and has remained a best seller for over 250 years, in spite of its being banned shortly after publication. In 1966 the US Supreme Court ruled that it was not obscene, shortly after making the same ruling for Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Today, it is considered, by many critics, to be an erotic masterpiece and a true literary classic.

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is the highly explicit account of an innocent country girl who, on being orphaned, finds herself trapped into prostitution in London Town. The precise and intimate descriptions of her professional experiences, albeit couched in elegant language that never stoops to vulgarity, caused a scandal upon the book's publication in 1748, earning a fortune for its publisher and a court summons for its author.

From her childhood, where there was no blueprint for success, to building a career as a bestselling novelist against all odds, Amanda Prowse explores what it means to be a woman in a world where popularity, slimness, beauty and youth are currency—and how she overcame all of that to forge her own path to happiness.

Blackbird - a Memoir addresses these questions through Elena Sada’s humorous and insightful story. It is the uplifting interpretation of a dark tale that begins the day she decides to leave Regnum Christi, a Catholic organization founded by sexual predator and Catholic priest Marcial Maciel. After leaving the order, Elena finds herself in Manhattan, longing for the life she left at 19. There, she faces a difficult decision: whom to trust? A shattered love story is followed by a successful one, and Elena finally understands what happened to her under Maciel.