Personal Memoirs Women

Jean Carnahan was the first lady of Missouri when her husband, Governor Mel Carnahan, who was running for the U.S. Senate, and their son, were killed in a plane crash. When Mel Carnahan was elected posthumously (beating John Ashcroft), Jean agreed to take his seat in Washington and served in the U.S. Senate during 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and the vote to go to war in Iraq. During a time of intense and almost unimaginable personal loss, she managed to keep her head up and her heart open.

In 2006, Mary Turner Thomson’s world shattered when she discovered her husband Will was a bigamist, con man and convicted sex offender. Unbeknownst to her, this would be the start of a bold new chapter in her life, fighting to protect other women from his heartless gaslighting campaigns—and putting a stop to his endless deception. Mary thought her story would end with the revelation that Will in fact had several families—and numerous children. But when she discovered that he had continued to prey on new victims, she vowed to turn his betrayal into a force for good.

Fleeing intimate partner violence at age 20, Julie was stalked by her ex-partner for more than 10 years, rarely mentioning it to friends, let alone addressing it publicly. The contrast between her public career as a brave champion for women with her own private life of violence and fear meant a shaky and exhausting balancing act. Resilience Is Futile is a story of survival, courage, and ultimately, hope. But it is also a challenge to the ways we understand trauma and resilience. It is the story of one survivor who won’t give up and refuses to shut up.

Hearts get broken, and even life's best-planned journeys can drop you somewhere unexpected, leading you to ask yourself, 'How did I get here? And, more importantly, who can I blame?' But Christina Ford is here to tell you that is exactly where the real adventure begins. This book will help you redefine love, womanhood, and what it means to come of age ... middle age.

In Cowgirl Power, advertising CEO and cowgirl Gay Gaddis shares insights and examples for women to lead like fearless, risk-taking cowgirls: enhance and exude confidence, developing personal power on all fronts. As the owner of one of the largest female-owned independent agencies in the U.S. and former chairman of C200, one of the country’s top women’s business organizations, Gay Gaddis knows a thing or two about empowerment. Gay’s secrets of success have roots in the spirited strength of real cowgirls who were fearless risk-takers in everything they did.

In the wake of his deeply powerful viral videos ("Before You Call the Cops" and "Walking While Black"), Tyler Merritt shares his experiences as a black man in America with truth, humor, and poignancy. Tyler Merritt's video "Before You Call the Cops" has been viewed millions of times. He's...

The funny, sad and compelling diary kept by an overweight teenage girl that became the basis for the British television sensation of the same name available to stream on HULU. It's 1989 and Rae Earl is a fat, boy-mad 17-year-old girl, living in Stamford, Lincolnshire with her mum and their deaf...

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.

Growing up, Lisa Nikolidakis tried to make sense of her childhood, which was scarred by abuse, violence, and psychological terrors so extreme that her relationship with her father was cleaved beyond repair. Having finally been able to leave that relationship behind, surviving meant forgetting. For years, “I’m fine” was a lie Nikolidakis repeated. Then, on her twenty-seventh birthday, Nikolidakis’s father murdered his girlfriend and her daughter, and turned the gun on himself.

The Big Sick meets Dad is Fat in this funny and heartfelt New York Times bestselling memoir from writer, director, wife, and mother, Jeannie Gaffigan, as she reflects on the life-changing impact of her battle with a pear-sized brain tumor. In 2017, Jeannie's life came to a crashing halt when she...

In Shark Tales, Barbara shares her hilarious stories about growing up, getting into trouble, failing miserably, and then starting over again. In each chapter, she comes back to one of her mom's unconventional lessons, and how it applies in the real world of business. Whatever your calling, the homespun lessons that work for Barbara will help you use what you've got to create success in your life.

A six-year journey: six losses and three beautiful angels. After losing her son Jude in August 2020, a spark was ignited in Carmen Grover as she read through every diary that she kept for each of her babies. Rather than have them remain stacked, Carmen decided that her journals would make a difference. The result has been an honest and poignant compilation of the ups and downs of Carmen’s experience with pregnancy loss, from rolling in the grass and convulsing on the kitchen floor in her cycle of grief, to seeing the strength she could gain in the signs and special moments all around her.

Lynn grew up the carefree daughter of a Miami undercover narcotics agent—until her dad snuck out of the house in the dark of night without a glance back. She never knew what happened to her father until she was in high school, and he was in prison for drug smuggling. By then, Lynn had developed a dangerous drug and alcohol habit of her own. It was the perfect setup for her to latch onto the only connection to her dad that remained when he was paroled from prison—cocaine.

From acclaimed poet and creator of the popular twitter account @SoSadToday comes the darkly funny and brutally honest collection of essays that Roxane Gay called "sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous." Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went...

When a scandalous news story splashed across mainstream media about an elite escort agency in Las Vegas, people were shocked to learn there was a tiny mastermind behind the company: a small town girl from Oregon named Jami Rodman who went by the pseudonym Haley Heston.

The Mama Sutra spans an 18-year journey through motherhood as a spiritual practice, chronicling Cushman’s first pregnancy, her daughter's tragic stillbirth, the joyful birth of her son, the “home retreat” of early motherhood, the challenges of parenthood, the diagnosis and gifts of her son’s developmental differences, the meltdown of her nuclear family and its reconfiguration into a new and joyful form, and more. This is a powerful story of the rawness and beauty of life.

Anna Prushinskaya explores the deep life shifts of pregnancy, birth and motherhood in the United States, a world away from the author's Soviet homeland. Drawing from inspirations as various as midwife Ina May Gaskin, writer and activist Alice Walker, and frontierswoman Caroline Henderson, Prushinskaya captures the inherent togetherness of motherhood alongside its accompanying estrangement. She plumbs the deeper waters of compassion, memory and identity, as well as the humorous streams of motherhood as they run up against the realities of work and the ever-present eye of social media.

As her marriage collapses, the author of the international best-seller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight relearns the fearless ways of her father to find her own true north. Standing in the wreckage of her marriage, in her adopted country America, Alexandra Fuller revisits the continent she loves and finds in her father's harsh, simple, and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation.

"Bracing, brilliant, and fury-inducing.... a survival story like no other. With positively outstanding storytelling, this is a book that cannot be put down." —Booklist, starred review AN OPEN FIELD PUBLICATION FROM MARIA SHRIVER One of Booklist’s Best Memoirs of 2024 One of Booklist...

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.