Personal Memoirs Women

On the morning before Halloween in 2007, Sarah receives a phone call from her husband’s arborist colleague: Matt, her spouse of seven years and father of their two small children, has been severely injured by a falling tree branch while working in a neighborhood east of Seattle. Visions of their future go dark as she learns to care for the man she depended on for support. Faced with choices about how to behave through this unexpected journey, she takes as many steps back as she does forward and begins a rite of passage she never imagined.

On August 6, 1993, twenty-year-old Natasha Alexenko was assaulted at gunpoint. After nearly a decade, her backlogged rape kit was finally tested and her rapist, who roamed free for ten years, was brought to justice. On the day he was sentenced, Alexenko vowed that she would no longer be a statistic and would do whatever she could to help police on behalf of other rape victims. In 2011, she founded Natasha’s Justice Project (NJP), a nonprofit committed to ending the rape-kit backlog. This unflinching memoir chronicles her journey from trauma to triumph.

As a child, Susan Silverman was surrounded by a loving family; although her parents weren't happily married, they were devoted to their kids. In a vibrant, funny, imminently relatable voice (think Anne Lamott meets Katrina Kenison), Silverman tells of a family's evolution - from her parents' devastating loss of their infant son to raising bright and wildly unique daughters. It's also the creation story of her own family - raising her own bright and wildly unique daughters and taking a journey to adopt two boys from Ethiopia.

Mary and Me: A Lasting Link through Ink explores a 30-year friendship between two women: one who had never learned to cultivate female friendships, and the other who had managed to gather and maintain a large group of friends throughout her adult life. The fact that thousands of handwritten letters between them linked these two together is just part of the intriguing story.

On a winter's day in 2002, a bottle shaped like a tear washed up on the English coast. It contained a letter written in French, a lock of hair, and a mystery. Only one thing could be known for certain – that the writer of the letter was a mother, grieving for her lost child, Maurice. Moved by the woman’s heartache, Karen Liebreich sets out on an epic journey to piece together the mother’s tale.

Rebooting in Beverly Hills is the witty, charming, and absolutely true account of Marcy Miller, a competent, attractive professional woman, as she struggles to reenter the dating world after an esteem-killing divorce of an adulterous husband.

Set in the opulent oasis of Beverly Hills, Marcy riffs on pickups, fix-ups, Internet dating, matchmaking, divorce, and all the other craziness - like psychics, girlfriends, and sex - that pop up along the road of leaving single life behind.

This fun, engaging memoir, written by a loveable and slightly saucy storyteller, is for anyone who has faced rejection and the need to start again.

A Year and Six Seconds opens on the winter day Isabel Gillies arrives in Manhattan, two young sons in tow, after her husband has left her; she's moving back in with her parents until she can figure out what to do next.

Throughout her life, Alexandra Penney's worst fear was becoming a bag lady. Even as she worked several jobs while raising a son as a single mother, wrote a multimillion-dollar best-selling advice book, and became editor in chief of Self magazine, she was haunted by the image of herself alone, bankrupt, and living on the street. And then, one day, that's exactly what happened.

This guide explores the causes of anxious perfectionism, crippling fear, and anxiety in regards to the impossible expectations society forces upon women. It explains how listeners can find their own voice and teaches them how to ask for help in a society that teaches us to “suffer in silence”. By unraveling that journey for listeners, Fierce Joy reveals how to embrace imperfection and overcome expectations, so that listeners can live a life that is full, unique, and real.

Donna Freitas wants to believe. Raised Catholic, she sang songs about Jesus as a child and lived in a house where nuns and priests were regular guests, yet she found herself questioning the faith of her family, examining the reasons none of it added up, and distancing herself from the God of...

A searing memoir that explores the institutions that defined a Puerto Rican woman and what she unlearned to rediscover herself "A lushly written, deeply felt investigation into the meanings of home, lineage and selfhood." —Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Body Work and Girlhood...

Losing Gerry by Patricia O'Brien is a heartfelt and compelling story that explores the complexities of grief, loss, family and same sex love. The story is autobiographical and revolves around the author Patty, who is deeply impacted by the sudden loss of her lover Gerry (Geraldine). As she struggles with her overwhelming emotions, Patty reflects on her relationship with Gerry, which was both fraught and intimate.

A cabin behind a padlocked gate. No power. No phone. Only Revelation and a .38. A true story of abuse, loss, redemption, and hope that winds from south Texas to a sycamore tree in Tennessee.

In haar bestseller Mijn leven in de hel vertelde Sarah Forsyth hoe ze als jong meisje uit Engeland in de gedwongen prostitutie belandde in de rosse buurt van Amsterdam, en uiteindelijk over haar dramatische ontsnapping. Maar Sarahs donkere jaren waren toen nog niet voorbij. Ze was nog steeds verslaafd aan drugs en drank, en worstelde met het leven, met de liefde en het huwelijk waarvan ze verwachtte dat het haar gelukkig zou maken. Het zou nog drie lange, zware jaren duren voordat ze voorgoed afscheid kon nemen van de verschrikkelijke gevolgen van haar gevangenschap.

When Lu Spinney's 29-year-old son, Miles, flies up on his snowboard, "he knows he is not in control as he is taken by force up the ramp," writes his mother, "skewing sideways as his board clips the edge and then he is hurtling, spinning up, up into the free blue sky ahead.... " He lands hard on the ice and falls into a coma. Thus begins the erratic loss - Miles first in a coma and then trapped in a fluctuating state of minimal consciousness - that unravels over the next five years.

The extraordinary true story of surviving the unimaginable … In 1945, seven-year-old Barbie and her sister Eva were trapped, terrified, in wartorn Germany. With their father missing, and hundreds of miles from their mother, news of the approaching army left them confronted with an impossible choice: to face invasion, or to flee on foot.Eva, aged nineteen, was determined to find her mother.

If Jenn had known her husband's family before they'd gotten married, there might never have been a wedding at all. Now she has to confront the reality that her new family holds ignorant—and, at times, racist—views, and that spending time around them triggers her ingrained trauma of growing up Black in the U.S. Why is it so hard for her to speak out against their prejudice? And, more importantly, what does it mean that her husband is silent in the face of all this?

If you are reading this, chances are you are also at some point in your divorce journey. My heart goes out to you. Thank you for choosing me to walk with you on your journey. Divorce is hard. No matter how amicable. I hope this book makes you feel less alone. I hope it enables you to view the path that has led you to where you are now with kind eyes and explores your future opportunities with excitement. The Divorcee Dish is a memoir about my journey through divorce that includes tips and tricks and a series of journaling opportunities to aid you along your path.

Named by Esquire as one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year: Chanel Miller's Know My Name meets Cheryl Strayed's Wild and Anthony Swofford's Jarhead in this powerful literary memoir of a young soldier driven to prove herself in a man's world. Raised by powerful women in a restrictive...

One minute Elizabeth Crane and her husband of fifteen years are fixing up their old house in Upstate New York, finally setting down roots after stints in Chicago, Texas, and Brooklyn, when his unexpected admission—I'm not happy—changes everything. Suddenly she finds herself separated and in couples therapy, living in an apartment in the city with an old friend and his kid. It's understood that the apartment and bonus family are temporary, but the situation brings unexpected comfort and much-needed healing for wounds even older than her marriage.