Women Memoirs

Amy Tan has touched millions of people with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

Listen to the New York Times best-selling memoir that is "revealing, humble, and cool-aunt chatty" about the incredible life that inspired the hit Broadway musical Beautiful (Rolling Stone). Carole King takes us from her early beginnings in Brooklyn, to her remarkable success as one of the world's most acclaimed songwriting and performing talents of all time.

Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am—that so many women are—is just the best time of my life."

In 1914 collisions between motor cars and horse-drawn carriages are an everyday occurrence on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey. But when an out-of-control driver smashes into a buggy driven by Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp, their lives change forever. Constance, the oldest, demands payment for the damages but quickly realizes that she is dealing with a madman.

In 2020, Tracy O’Neill began to rethink her ideas of comfort and safety. Just out of a ten-year relationship and thirtysomething, she was driven by an acute awareness that the mysterious mother she’d never met might be dying somewhere in South Korea. After contacting a grizzled private investigator, O’Neill took his suggested homework to heart when he disappeared before the job was done, picking up the trail of clues and becoming her own hell-bent detective. Despite COVID-19, the promise of what she might discover was too tempting.

One girl’s funny and honest account of losing her mum to a cult. Susan Wokoma performs in this teen-spirited and gangsta-rap-fuelled survival guide to growing up with an actual twat as a mum.

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,” writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science—Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant and creative as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally passionate outside it.

When you've come out the other side of the bizarre, twisted world of the Playboy mansion, where do you land? If you're Holly Madison...there's no place like Las Vegas. After making the sudden decision to reclaim her life, Holly broke free from the sheltered, deceptive confines of the mansion (which meant exiting a hit television show) and was determined to start her life over...from scratch. Without the security of a job or a relationship, she set out to reinvent herself on no one's terms but her own.

A commitment to assist my ailing grandmother’s extraordinary plan for a family gathering leads to the revelation of a long-held secret that will have a lasting impact on everyone in our family for the rest of our lives.

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists—a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table—who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.” Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. The Worlds I See is the moving memoir of a scientist coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling at the forefront of the AI revolution.

In 1911 two British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, read a brochure about a revolutionary fasting treatment that promised a lifetime of good health. The sanatorium in the village of Olalla, west of Seattle, was surrounded by a beautiful forest, sparkling waters and fresh air. The sisters agreed it sounded perfect and exactly the restorative holiday they needed. But within a month of arriving, under the supervision of Doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard, Claire and Dora began to realise the frightening truth – they were not patients but prisoners at the isolated sanitorium.

Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met. What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. The person responsible was never identified, but the character created by the press to fill that gap has become far more famous than any of these five women. For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told.

Annabel Abbs's Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women is a beautifully written meditation on connecting with the outdoors through the simple act of walking. In captivating and elegant prose, Abbs follows in the footsteps of women who boldly reclaimed wild landscapes for themselves, including Georgia O'Keeffe in the empty plains of Texas and New Mexico, Nan Shepherd in the mountains of Scotland, Gwen John following the French River Garonne, Daphne du Maurier along the River Rhône, and Simone de Beauvoir - who walked as much as 25 miles a day in a dress.

Abby Wambach has always pushed the limits of what is possible. Named by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of 2015, the iconic soccer player captured the nation's heart when she led her team to its recent World Cup championship. Admired for her fearlessness and passion, Abby is a vocal advocate for women's rights and equal opportunity, pushing to translate the success of her team to the real world.

New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans."

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.

Queen of Thieves is the gritty, fast-paced story of Fredericka "Marm" Mandelbaum, a poor Jewish woman who rose to the top of her profession in organized crime during the Gilded Age in New York City. During her more than twenty-five-year reign as the country’s top receiver of stolen goods, she accumulated great wealth and power inconceivable for women engaged in business, legitimate or otherwise.

For 46 years, Carol Minto has quietly gone about her life, carrying with her the most extraordinary and heartbreaking secrets. In The Asylum, Carol tells the full story of how she overcame unimaginable suffering, to find the happiness and solace she has today as a mother and grandmother.

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.

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.