Personal Memoirs Women

Some families are created in different ways but are still, in every way, a family. Writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos firmly believed she was supposed to be a mom, but Mother Nature and modern medicine had put her in a headlock. So she made a choice that shocked friends, family, and even herself: with only 14 hours' notice, she adopted a preschooler.

How did she turn a side hustle into a game-changing business, and at the same time, achieve happiness and fulfillment in her life? For Charlotte, it all came down to one thing - jeong. One of the most important Korean cultural concepts, jeong is a deep and meaningful connection that can be felt between people, places, and things. It goes deeper than love and friendship, and grows stronger with time. In South Korea, jeong encourages generosity, empathy, and the cultivation of lasting bonds.

As a 12-year-old girl, Maria Housden's vision of a happy future included everything that society expects girls to yearn for: a home, a husband, and, of course, children. Life had other plans.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was arguably the greatest figure of the 20th century. While FDR's official circle was predominantly male, it was his relationships with women - particularly with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd - that most vividly bring to light the human being beneath this towering statesman.

In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women. In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African-American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write.

Surviving My Mother is the harrowing, candid, beautiful story of a woman’s quest to survive, a mother’s quest to heal, and a daughter’s quest to forgive. Debbie Matzkin shares the life-saving lessons she learned, how she was able to find happiness in even the darkest of depths, and how she ultimately reclaimed her future.

For too long, women have been told that we are terrible at being friends, that we can't help being cruel or competitive, or that we inevitably abandon each other for romantic partners. But we are rejecting those stereotypes and reclaiming the power of female friendship. In Text Me When You Get Home, journalist Kayleen Schaefer interviews more than 100 women about their BFFs, soul mates, girl gangs, and queens while tracing this cultural shift through the lens of pop culture.

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.

At 15, I killed someone. This was just one of many secrets that my brain hid from me. For most of my life, I had barely any memories of my childhood. Except for a few snippets, I lived in the dark. It wasn’t until I turned 36 that my world began to unravel. Slow at first, and then suddenly, all at once, long-buried memories that had been concealed in the depths of my mind for survival now surfaced, shooting to the forefront of my mind.

Eva Hagberg Fisher spent her lonely youth looking everywhere for connection: drugs, alcohol, therapists, boyfriends, girlfriends. Sometimes she found it, but always temporarily. Then, at age 30, an undiscovered mass in her brain ruptured. So did her life. A brain surgery marked only the beginning of a long journey, and when her illness hit a critical stage, it forced her to finally admit the long suppressed truth: she was vulnerable, she needed help, and she longed to grow. She needed true friendship for the first time.

This book honors all the women who ride motorcycles and inspires others with rebel souls to do the same. Women Who Ride is a delightful compilation by, and for, women motorcycle riders, filled with true stories from both youngsters and those with a lifetime of riding experience.

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites.

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....

A wide range of women—actors, athletes, academics, CEOs, writers, small-business owners, birth workers, physicians, and activists—share their experiences of becoming mothers in this multifaceted, moving, and revealing collection.

This is the story of a Canadian woman who was in the Advanced Training Institute, run by Bill Gothard, for fourteen years. The amazing thing is that she never knew she was in a cult until several years after she was out. That's what happened to Christine in 2014. She has spent the past nine years trying to deprogram and change the way she sees the world. Join her as she navigates the cult, goes through a divorce, finds out she was in a cult and subsequently has to unlearn all she believed to be true.

In the autumn of 2000, Hope Edelman was a woman adrift, questioning her marriage, her profession, and her place in the larger world. Into her stagnant routine dropped Dodo, her three-year-old daughter Maya's curiously disruptive imaginary friend. Worried about how to handle Dodo's apparent hold on their daughter, she and her husband made the unlikely choice to take Maya to healers in Belize, hoping that a shaman might help them banish Dodo, and all he represented, from their lives.

In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story. Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

When writer Catherine Deveny faced the end of a 17-year relationship with the father of her children, she had no idea what lay on the other side of the months of tumult—she just knew she had to create space for a new life. But this wasn’t the first time Deveny had taken a plunge into the unknown or let go of conventional assumptions. In True North, she shares how she emerged from an oppressive Catholic upbringing in working-class Reservoir, found her tribe in Fitzroy’s share houses in the '80s and learnt to live life on her own terms.

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug" - the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing - cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family - nearly to the point of collapse.