Personal Memoirs Women

The author conceived of this project while a visiting research scholar at Wellesley Centers for Women in the 1990s. The stories were so compelling that she decided they must be made available to the general public rather than merely to an academic audience. The book is based on extensive interviews with highly successful women scientists and artists who were ages 65 to 95 when the author met them.

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Journey to My Daughter is about becoming a mother. It details everything from author Jennifer Rose Asher’s decision to have a child, two miscarriages, a whirlwind trip to Vietnam, and how she eventually found her daughter. Along the way, Jennifer and her husband tried multiple approaches while looking for a child and would never have predicted how and where they would find her.

Through Foster Kid to Executive, Mandy reveals the six essential secrets that propelled her from adversity to achievement. These secrets include the power of choice, the transformative potential of mindset, the importance of relentless effort, the clarity of setting and pursuing goals, the value of nurturing meaningful relationships, and the ability to seize opportunities.

Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love-at least, she thinks it's love.

At twenty-three, Kayli Stollak, like most starry-eyed twenty-somethings, assumed that she and her boyfriend, Charlie, would be together forever. Besides a rockin' sex life, they shared a passion for motorcycle adventures, hedonistic European music festivals, and wearing matching glittery spandex to the disco. What more could a gal ask for? She envisioned their love burning well into their sixties.

With the advent of TV dinners in the 1950s, an intense and entrepreneurial father rises from poverty to build a multi-million-dollar trucking empire hauling frozen food throughout the Northwest. His determination, combined with generosity and strict punishment, leaves his family in a state of emotional paralysis. After his untimely death, his survivors implode in a maelstrom of brutal courtroom drama, illness, and dementia. The estate and family are destroyed.

A relentless evil possessing an already depraved man...gruesome and perverse acts of brutality... Will anyone survive? Centuries ago the natives captured and imprisoned a life force of pure evil and unending hunger. Thirteen years ago, an eight-year-old boy woke the darkness. It grows in strength every day and now the boy is a man. A man skilled in terror and violence, the very things the darkness needs to finally break free.

When Laura Fraser's husband leaves her for his high school sweetheart, she takes off, on impulse, for Italy, hoping to leave some of her sadness behind. There, on the island of Ischia, she meets M., an aesthetics professor from Paris with an oversized love of life. What they both assume will be a casual vacation tryst turns into a passionate, transatlantic love affair, as they rendezvous in London, Marrakech, Milan, the Aeolian Islands, and San Francisco.

In childhood, M.G. adores her old family house as if it were a guardian with heart and soul. After her mother dies, her father soon remarries and sends her brothers and her, one at a time, off to live with older siblings. M.G. buries her affection for that home, along with the family divisions and pain of her mother's departure. She becomes that kid–the one who falls through the cracks, and stumbles into adulthood wrecked, scarred, and undisciplined.

Cresciuta da una madre divorziata che lavora in una casa editrice, V. colma con la lettura il vuoto lasciato dalla figura assente del padre. A tredici anni, durante una cena, incontra G., un celebre scrittore cinquantenne che, sin dal primo sguardo, la colpisce per il suo carisma e le attenzioni che le rivolge. Rassicurata dai suoi modi gentili e galanti e dallo sguardo clemente della madre, lei si offre a lui, corpo e anima.

What would you do with your life if you knew it was half over? It was the question that faced Jennie Smythe during a pivotal point in her early adult life. Becoming Girlilla answers that question and more, as this digital marketing trailblazer candidly shares her path to success, full of sometimes surprising and oftentimes laugh-out-loud moments.

Imagine, if you can, a shy, skinny young girl growing up in a small Southern Patriarchal town in the 1960s and '70s. All she wants is peace, love, normality, and freedom to dream and be who she wants to be. She also wants her mother and siblings to be safe and free from harm. When her alcoholic father - a member of the local KKK - beats the family into submission and demands silence about his ugly secret deeds, everyone is too frightened to cry out for help.

A child of the 1970s, Terry Sidford didn’t realize she was born into an unhappy marriage until the age of five, when drinking tore the family apart. In an attempt to escape her mother’s issues with alcohol, Terry and her sister run away from home one night to join their alternative-lifestyle father, in the hope that they might find some adult stability. Thus begins Terry's unconventional "Wonder Years", in which she endures an absentee mom, teenage self-improvement bootcamp, and an educational system that misdiagnoses her sensitivity and intuitiveness as learning disabilities.

This book is filled with anecdotes of weird and stressful life scenarios and how all we could do was laugh and say "Oki f*cking dokie". This is a lighthearted self-help listen that shows how these past thoughts and experiences are ones we all share. We can laugh out loud and cringe about them together!

Two months to live. That's what the doctor says. Sally responds with grace and optimism. Marisa responds by closing herself off. If her mother is going to die before she graduates from high school, why even try. Cancer has already ruined everything. Honest and heartfelt, The Goodbye Diaries offers a touching glimpse into both sides of a terminal diagnosis - the one who will leave and the one who will be left behind.

Is the glass half-empty or half full? Sometimes life influences our view and alters our perception. In 1997, life changing events almost destroyed me. At my lowest point, and just in time, I met Nigel. He helped me to discover how a positive attitude can change everything.In 2008, with good times ahead of us, my glass was half-full. As a family, we made the biggest and most difficult decision of our lives; part of our family would immigrate to Australia. We lived the Australian dream, embracing adventure until adversity came to test us.

At twenty-three, Michelle Ephraim was failing at everything. The only child of reclusive Holocaust-survivor parents who were dismayed by her literary studies, she found herself dumped by her boyfriend and bombing out of graduate school. Then, one night, she crashed a Shakespeare recitation party. Loopy from vodka and never having read a single line of Shakespeare, she was transfixed. Shakespeare, she decided, was the lifeline she needed.

Dare is a no-holds-barred account of Diane’s rise from being born an illegitimate child given up for adoption to fulfilling her dream in the entertainment industry and directing the largest production shows staged in Australia. But when she was terminated, there were no laws to protect her. Now, Diane reveals the unimaginable public humiliation and heartbreak of losing herself, her career, and her destiny.

Both a hysterical tell-all memoir of the author's stumbles and triumphs in becoming mindfully masculine, as well as a practical drivers manual for navigating the twists and turns of mature manhood, Mindful Masculinity is a joy to read or to listen to. Scott Grace, once a prolific recording artist and stand-up comedian who opened for Robin Williams and many other legends, brings his comic touch to a very serious subject.