Women Memoirs

In Episodes, lifelong best friends Kat and Mara take listeners on an unfiltered journey through friendship, mental illness, and survival. Kat, a successful professional, is preparing for marriage and motherhood. On her fourth round of IVF, it happened—a frantic call to Mara. Mara comes over to find Kat, her friend of 25 years—the one who'd always been levelheaded, hilarious, and over-the-top thoughtful—trying to jump through a window.

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.

Coming soon from Penguin Raised by ruggedly independent, scientifically minded parents—entomologist father, dietician mother—Atwood spent most of each year in the wild forest of northern Quebec. This childhood was unfettered and nomadic, sometimes isolated (on her eighth birthday: “It sounds forlorn. It was forlorn. It gets more forlorn.”), but also thrilling and beautiful.House Canada

Ruth Wariner was the 39th of her father's 42 children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turned a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can ascend to heaven only by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible.

In September 2017, a knock on the door upends Michelle Horton’s life: she learns that her sister has just shot her partner and is now in jail. Stunned, Michelle rearranges her life to raise Nikki's two young children alongside her own son. During the investigation that follows, Michelle is shocked to learn that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years. Michelle launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system designed to punish the entire family.

What do you do when, just before Thanksgiving at your mother's, your 14-year-old son asks you to iron the dress he recently purchased and plans to wear? Listeners learn the answer and much more in this wonderfully frank, loving, and practical account of parenting a transgender teen. Hassouri chronicles what amounts to a dual transition: as her child transitions from male to female, she navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventual acceptance. Despite her experience advising other parents in her work as a pediatrician, she was blindsided by her child's gender identity.

Signed to a major recording deal at just 12 years old, JoJo catapulted to the top of the pop-and-R&B-infused charts in the mid 2000's. The relatability of her youth and the appeal of her cool-girl mystique earned her millions of fans around the world. JoJo was an undeniable superstar and pop culture fixture, spanning roles in major studio films, omnipresence on Top 40 radio, frequenting magazine covers, and appearing on national TV. Then, out of the blue, everything came to a halt and JoJo seemingly stepped out of the spotlight, leaving many fans to wonder: What happened to JoJo?

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites listeners into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her - from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work to her time spent at the world's most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it - in her own words and on her own terms.

In 1942, the Gestapo sent out an urgent transmission: "She is the most dangerous of all Allied spies. We must find and destroy her." The target in their sights was Virginia Hall, a Baltimore socialite who talked her way into Special Operations Executive, the spy organization dubbed Winston Churchill's "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare." She became the first Allied woman deployed behind enemy lines and - despite her prosthetic leg - helped to light the flame of the French Resistance, revolutionizing secret warfare as we know it.

In September 1921, four young men and Ada Blackjack, a diminutive 25-year-old Eskimo woman, ventured deep into the Arctic in a secret attempt to colonize desolate Wrangel Island for Great Britain. Two years later, Ada Blackjack emerged as the sole survivor of this ambitious polar expedition. This young, unskilled woman - who had headed to the Arctic in search of money and a husband - conquered the seemingly unconquerable north and survived all alone after her male companions had perished.

Martine Laurier, une ancienne policière, a tenté de se suicider il y a plusieurs années, avec son arme de service. Heureusement, deux collègues l’ont empêchée de commettre l’irréparable et, aujourd’hui, consciente de la chance qu’elle a eue, elle consacre une partie de sa vie à aider ceux et celles qui se retrouvent au bord du gouffre.

On April 15, 1945, Brigadier H. L. Glyn Hughes entered Bergen-Belsen for the first time. Waiting for him were 10,000 unburied, putrefying corpses and 60,000 living prisoners, starving and sick. One month earlier, 15-year-old Rachel Genuth arrived at Bergen-Belsen; deported with her family from Sighet, Transylvania, in May of 1944, Rachel had by then already endured Auschwitz, the Christianstadt labor camp, and a forced march through the Sudetenland.

Jann Arden is funny. And sincere. She has legions of devoted fans. And a radio show. She is a darling of the music scene - always candid, always unplugged. You thought you knew Jann Arden, but there is more - to her listeners' delight, in Falling Backwards Jann reveals her childhood, her bond with family, her struggle in the formative years and what keeps her so grounded in the whirlwind entertainment industry. Jann has always been true to herself, except for a minor lapse when she was young. Oh wait, wasn't that all of us?

At age four, Molly Shannon’s world was shattered when she lost her mother, baby sister, and cousin in a car accident with her father at the wheel. Held together by her tender and complicated relationship with her grieving father, Molly was raised in a permissive household where her gift for improvising and role-playing blossomed alongside the fearlessness that would lead her to become a celebrated actress.

Timea Nagy was 20 years old when she answered a newspaper ad in Budapest, Hungary, calling for young women to work as babysitters and housekeepers in Canada. Hired by what seemed like a legitimate recruitment agency, Timea left her home believing she would earn good money to send back to her family. What she didn't know was that she'd been lured by a ring of international human traffickers - and her life would never again be the same.

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that. Matriarch begins with a precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven.

When Carolyn Weber moved to Oxford University to study, she didn't expect to find God there. But she did. As she grappled with her newest and most important relationship, she also found that there was another invitation: to think bigger about love. In this book we follow Weber through courtship and into marriage and parenthood. Now a literature professor, Weber reflects on her relationship with a sometimes-absent father and how that has shaped her.

After 16 novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her story tackles the difficult, poignant, and fascinating family accounts of her paternal grandfather’s shell shock; her mother’s evacuation from London during the Blitz; and her soft-spoken animal-loving father’s torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII.

New York Times best-selling poet and multiplatinum singer-songwriter Jewel explores her unconventional upbringing and extraordinary life in an inspirational memoir that covers her childhood, rise to fame, marriage, and motherhood. She writes beautifully about growing up amid the natural wonders of Alaska, about pain and childhood trauma, and about discovering her own identity years after the entire world had discovered the beauty of her songs.

On June 22, 1954, teenage friends Juliet Hulme - better known as best-selling mystery writer Anne Perry - and Pauline Parker went for a walk in a New Zealand park with Pauline’s mother, Honora. Half an hour later, the girls returned alone, claiming that Pauline’s mother had had an accident. But when Honora Parker was found in a pool of blood with the brick used to bludgeon her to death close at hand, Juliet and Pauline were quickly arrested, and later confessed to the killing.