Personal Memoirs Women

As a young adult, years after her physical abuse has ended, Maggie Walters struggles with an unpredictable temper and socially difficult behaviour. After several false starts she finds a therapist who she trusts, just enough, to start talking about the childhood locked away behind the anger and isolation she has learnt to live with. Eventually she is diagnosed with Multiple Personality Disorder, MPD (now known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID). Gradually, she understands.

In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just 15 years old, she was diagnosed with a form of leukemia called Natural Killer, named "the rarest and worst malignancy". The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is 58 days. There are no known survivors. There were no known survivors. Fifteen years after Harriet's diagnosis, she became pregnant, despite having been told that her chemotherapy treatment would likely make conception impossible. To be a mother is to make a death, as death is bound up in life.

Born into a political dynasty, Jenna and Barbara Bush grew up in the public eye. As small children, they watched their grandfather become president; just 12 years later they stood by their father's side when he took the same oath. They spent their college years being trailed by the Secret Service and chased by the paparazzi, with every teenage mistake making national headlines. But the tabloids didn't tell the whole story of these two young women forging their own identities under extraordinary circumstances.

Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency all while raising her children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya’s mother had always been a source of support - until Maya became a mother herself. Then the parent who had once been so capable and attentive became suddenly and inexplicably unavailable.

When Kelly Corrigan was in high school, her mother neatly summarized the family dynamic as "Your father’s the glitter but I’m the glue." This meant nothing to Kelly, who left childhood sure that her mom - with her inviolable commandments and proud stoicism - would be nothing more than background chatter for the rest of Kelly’s life, which she was carefully orienting toward adventure. After college, armed with a backpack, her personal mission statement, and a wad of traveler’s checks, she took off for Australia to see things and do things and Become Interesting.

In Vindicated: Confessions of a Video Vixen, Ten Years Later, Karrine takes listeners into the belly of the beast as she harrowingly chronicles the systematic breakdown of her mind, body, and spirit at the hand of one man and the events that propelled her back to prosperity after losing everything. She candidly shares her struggle to be what others demand, her obsession with the American dream, her desperation to appear normal, the lengths to which she went, and the price she paid for it all.

In this irresistible memoir, the New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Anna Quindlen writes about looking back and ahead - and celebrating it all - as she considers marriage, girlfriends, our mothers, faith, loss, all the stuff in our closets, and more. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life.

Dr. Kerry McAvoy was juggling the life of an overly-committed mom, wife, and psychologist when the loss of her husband brought her world to a crashing halt. Then she meets Cesar, a charming, handsome, and ambitious man who sweeps her off her feet with the promise of new love.

Each time she knelt to "catch" another wriggling baby - nearly 3,000 times during her remarkable career - California midwife Peggy Vincent paid homage to the moment when pain bows to joy and the world makes way for one more. With every birth, she encounters another woman-turned-goddess: Catherine rides out her labor in a car careening down a mountain road. Sofia spends hers trying to keep her hyper doctor-father from burning down the house. Susannah gives birth so quietly that neither husband nor midwife notice until there's a baby in the room.

In The Wheel of Life, when Kübler-Ross was 71 years old and facing her own death, this world-renowned healer told the story of her extraordinary life. Having taught the world how to die well, she offered a lesson on how to live well. The Wheel of Life is an adventure of the heart - powerful, controversial, inspirational - a fitting legacy of a powerful life.

In the summer of 1962, 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley arrived by train in Washington, D.C., to begin an internship in the White House press office. The Kennedy Administration had reinvigorated the capital and the country - and Mimi was eager to contribute. For a young woman from a privileged but sheltered upbringing, the job was the chance of a lifetime. Mimi made an impression on Kennedy's inner circle and, after just three days at the White House, she was presented to the President himself....

From the creator of the blog Renegade Mothering, Janelle Hanchett's forthright, darkly funny, and ultimately empowering memoir chronicling her tumultuous journey from young motherhood to abysmal addiction and a recovery she never imagined possible. Pregnant at 21 by a man she'd known three months, Janelle Hanchett embraced motherhood with the determined optimism of the recklessly self-confident. After giving birth, she found herself bored, directionless, and seeking relief in wine, which she justified as sophisticated and going well with chicken.

When her children left for college, Melissa Shultz was certain that she had prepared them well for their new lives - but her own life was a different matter entirely. Her house was empty, her purpose unclear. If her life was no longer dominated by the day-to-day demands of being "Mom", then who exactly was she? And how would she ever move forward?

In this deeply moving and myth-shattering work, Ann Fessler brings out into the open for the first time the astonishing untold history of the million and a half women who surrendered children for adoption due to enormous family and social pressure in the decades before Roe v. Wade.

In the spring of 1972, Joyce Maynard, a freshman at Yale, published a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about life in the sixties. Among the many letters of praise, offers for writing assignments, and request for interviews was a one-page letter from the famously reclusive author, J.D. Salinger. At Home in the World is the story of a girl who loved and lived with J.D. Salinger, and the woman she became. A crucial turning point in Joyce Maynard's life occurred when her own daughter turned eighteen--the age Maynard was when Salinger first approached her.

It’s not like she’s the only woman to ever have a baby. At 35. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all-important first year. From finding out her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out her best friend and greatest supporter, Pam, will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events making up a woman’s life.

Almost There begins at that moment when Nuala O'Faolain's life began to change. It tells the story of a life in subtle, radical, and unforeseen renewal. It is a tale of good fortune chasing out bad - of an accidental harvest of happiness. But it is also a provocative examination of one woman's experience of the "crucible of middle age."

Alexandra Fuller won worldwide attention, popular acclaim, and critical accolades for her memoir of her childhood in Africa, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight. This engaging follow-up explores Fuller’s parents’ childhoods and charts the trajectories of their lives through all the British couple’s experiences in war-torn Africa. With the same sharply etched narrative that has earned the author such immense praise, Fuller expands on and offers new insights into her family’s remarkable trials and successes.

An exquisite and inspiring memoir about one mother's unimaginable choice in the face of oppression and abuse in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Devastating in its power, Dancing in the Mosque is a mother's searing letter to a son she was forced to leave behind. In telling her story—and that of Afghan women—Homeira challenges you to reconsider the meaning of motherhood, sacrifice, and survival. Her story asks you to consider the lengths you would go to protect yourself, your family, and your dignity.

In the days before Roe v. Wade, an ambitious young journalist, abandoned by her beau, leaves Michigan for a dream job on the city desk of a Rochester, NY newspaper. Burned once, she's eager for love, but as the only "girl" in the newsroom, she's more concerned about finding allies and making friends. When a new leading man appears, she recognizes a kindred spirit. Soon her bylined stories claim front-page space. However, when she becomes pregnant, she must switch her attention from deadlines to decisions.