Women Memoirs

At 23, Carol Schlanger was an insecure upper-middle-class radical. Her parents spoiled her, and she expected the universe to follow. It didn't. After being expelled from Yale, losing a coveted Broadway lead, and seeing a suicide splatter at her feet, she left NYC for the Great Northwest, to live in nature with a man "who made everything beautiful with his hands". At that time she chose love and nature over art and career...until she didn't.

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is one of the most notorious texts in English literature. As recently as 1963, an unexpurgated edition was the subject of a trial, yet in the 18th century John Cleland's open celebration of sexual enjoyment was a best-selling novel. Fanny's story, as she falls into prostitution and then rises to respectability, takes the form of a confession that is vividly colored by copious and explicit physiological details of her carnal adventures.

A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love. "The disease he has is addiction," Nina Renata Aron writes of her boyfriend, K. "The disease I have is loving him."

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its first Assessment Report. By then, award-winning urban planner Wendy Sarkissian had been singing the climate blues for years. Her colleagues dismiss her fears, so she abandons urban life for a solitary retreat to reconsider her professional and activist directions. With no bush skills, this terrified novice confronts many challenges during her harsh, year-long adventure in the Australian outback. As weeks pass, however, she discovers wellsprings of courage.

Following in the grand tradition of such Irish memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and Are You Somebody?, Liam Clancy relates his life’s story in a raucously funny and star-studded account of moving from provincial Ireland to the bars and clubs of New York City, to the cusp of fame as a member of Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.

في كتاب "المرأة التي تجلب المطر" للكاتبة إلينيد جراميش، الحائزة على جائزة الكتابة الويلزية، تأخذنا إلينيد في رحلتها لاكتشاف أرض غريبة، جزيرة هوكايدو في شمال الأرخبيل الياباني. تعايش الكاتبة اليابانيين خطوة بعد خطوة، وتتعلم لغتهم، كما تتنقل بنا بين طبيعة جزيرة هوكايدو وتاريخها وثقافتها. يبدأ الكتاب بتعرف إلينيد على عائلتها المضيفة، حيث تتكيف تدريجياً مع طرقهم في العيش، ويزداد تمكنها من اللغة اليابانية.

The first elected woman president of an African country, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was also listed as one of the world’s 100 Most Powerful Women by Forbes. This evocative memoir recounts Sirleaf ’s childhood upbringing and rise to political power in Liberia. More than a simple biography, Sirleaf ’s account details how she stood firm in the face of physical abuse early in life and carried that strength over into her career as a young economist in Samuel Doe’s regime.

Catherine Corless could not have known where her interest in local history would lead her as she began researching the Tuam Mother and Baby Home in Galway in 2010. Uncovering no less than 796 missing burial records of children born there, the stark truth of their place of rest became clear: a disused sewage tank on the old home site, where two boys had once stumbled upon bones.

Fanny Hill is the first erotic novel ever published and follows the character of Fanny Hill through her adolescent career in prostitution. This novel explores concepts in, not only prostitution, but different sexual fantasies including dominant/submissive relationships, rape fantasies, mutual masturbation, and whether or not it is possible to have sex for pleasure, without love.

Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure was one of the most banned and censored books in the history of literature. John Cleland (a contrary man of letters, prone to boasting and getting into trouble with the law) wrote it while he was in Fleet debtor’s prison. First published in 1748 and withdrawn within a year, it was not legally republished until 100 years later. Widely considered to be the first example of literary erotica and a stylistic tour de force, with its combination of charm, daring, and love of pleasure.

By the time Brittany Penner is seven years old, she has loved and lost twenty-one foster siblings who have come into her family and left—all of them Indigenous like her. "When will it be my turn?" she asks her mother time and time again. "When will I be taken away?" You won't be, she is told. You're adopted. You're here to stay. You're the lucky one.

The second half of life can be just as wild as the first half. This is a true story of love, loss, sex, earth, spirit, writing, and adventure after ‘the change.’ In this story people die, the author sleeps with three men, she ingests magic mushrooms, is threatened by a wild tiger, and dances naked with a famous artist. Then there is the meta layer of what happens after the wild story is written down and shared.

In Almost a Woman, Esmeralda Santiago continues narrating her memoirs, which pick up five years after debut When I Was Puerto Rican left off. In this volume, “Negi” tells the listener all about her teenage years amidst the turbulent mid-'60s. In a small Brooklyn apartment, Negi leaves her childhood behind and starts to become a woman. But she’s still surrounded by 10 siblings and a mother who relies heavily on her on account of her being the eldest.

Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity.

The descendant of survivors of the Armenian genocide, Arlene Avakian was raised in America, where she could live free. But even with that freedom, she found herself a prisoner of both her family and society, denying her heritage along with her true sexuality. After marriage and motherhood, Arlene found herself exploring the growing women’s lib movement of the 1970s, coming to embrace the strength of her grandmother—known as the Lion Woman—and realizing her full potential and personhood.

Raised by powerful women in a restrictive, sheltered Christian community in New England, Ryan Dostie never imagined herself on the front lines of a war halfway around the world. But then a conversation with an Army recruiter in high school changes the course of her life. Hired as a linguist, she quickly has to find a space for herself in the testosterone-filled world of the Army barracks, and has been holding her own until the unthinkable happens: she is raped by a fellow soldier. Struggling with PTSD and commanders who don't trust her story, Dostie finds herself....

Long ago, Liz Perle made a quiet contract with cash: She would do what it took to get it - work hard, marry right - but she didn’t want to have to think about it too much. Since she was a young girl, the subject of money had been quietly sidestepped, a shadowy factor whose private influence was impolite to discuss. When a sudden divorce left Perle with no home, no job, a four-year-old, and a box of toys, she realized she could no longer afford to leave her murky and fraught relationship with money unexamined.

Deep in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, three times farther from the sun than the Earth is, orbits a massive asteroid called (16) Psyche. It is one of the largest objects in the belt, potentially containing the equivalent of the world’s total economy in metals, though they cannot be brought back to Earth. But (16) Psyche has the potential to unlock something even more valuable: the story of how planets form, and how our planet formed.

When Wayétu Moore turns five years old, her father and grandmother throw her a big birthday party at their home in Monrovia, Liberia, but all she can think about is how much she misses her mother, who is working and studying in faraway New York. Before she gets the reunion her father promised her, war breaks out in Liberia. The family is forced to flee their home on foot, walking and hiding for three weeks until they arrive in the village of Lai.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has always been vitally important in American history. This is the autobiographical account of the creation of the boycott by one of its principal organizers. With the publication of this book, the boycott becomes a milestone in the history of American women as well.