Personal Memoirs

Known to bodybuilders young and old as The Golden Eagle, the man Arnold Schwarzenegger personally passed the "bodybuilding torch" to, and commonly acknowledged as the most intense bodybuilder who ever trained - a living legend who forged the best legs to ever adorn a bodybuilding stage -Tom never wanted a "normal" life. The dedication and devotion to his calling started when he was barely 10 years old, and propelled him on a trajectory that led to bodybuilding's stratosphere, and beyond - to the top of the world of the social and business elite.

Living in Oklahoma with her maternal grandfather, Mary gets a new name and a new life. But she's haunted by the past: by the baby girls she's sure will come looking for her someday, by the mother she left behind, by the father who left her. Mary is a college student when her sisters start to get back in touch. With each subsequent reunion, her family becomes closer to whole again.

Amy's happy life changed forever when her mother suddenly passed. Abandoned by her family as they struggled to cope, she found herself facing hardships and exploitation alone, which eventually led to severe drug addiction at twelve years old. Now she shares what it was like to survive her new life in UK #1 bestselling author Toni Maguire's latest survivor story, Abandoned Child. This book, full of dark secrets and hard choices, follows Amy's journey from a victim to a fighter. The lesson? Change isn't easy, but it is worth it.

Jenny Brown, an unguarded exotic dancer in Beaverton, Oregon, seeks financial legitimacy for her and her family through higher channels of adult entertainment. The destruction of Jenny's boundaries invites a string of exploitive incidents. To prove herself unaffected, she dissociates her way toward national success as a feature entertainer.

Russell Buddy Helm was classically trained from the age of eight and has performed and recorded with many greats: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Tim Buckley, Allman Brothers, Frank Zappa, Bethlehem Asylum, Mike Bloomfield, Kinky Friedman, Big Joe Turner, and many others, and also on soundtracks for Ron Howard and other filmmakers. He wrote the Star Wars comic strips for George Lucas.

In this raw and poignant memoir filled with gorgeous insights, Leslie Reyes bares her highest highs and lowest lows on the long highway of humanity. And by applying the wisdom she gained in learning to ride a motorbike to her lifelong quest to conquer fear, she offers a guiding hand along the hills and valleys of an unpredictable life.

This program is read by the author. A lightning-strike dispatch of hilarious, intimate, luminous essays from the brain (and voice!) of Emmy Award-nominated actress and writer Betty Gilpin. Oh. Hi. *takes six long gulps of water during which you’re like, may I help you?* My name is Betty. I...

Rebecca Eckler is a popular newspaper columnist who lives the fabulous life and gets paid to write about it. So when a tipsy romp with her fiancé on the night of their lavish engagement party leaves her unexpectedly expecting, she is utterly at a loss. How will a woman who loves nothing more than a night out on the town sipping cocktails with her fellow party girls survive the pregnant life? "Knocked Up" is the witty, engaging and refreshingly frank chronicle of a modern woman's journey into motherhood.

This audiobook is a collection of real-life stories from victims of domestic abuse. As a survivor of domestic violence myself, I know that there's some comfort and strength to be gained from hearing about the events and situations that other people have gone through. To know you're not alone in how you're feeling whilst in an abusive relationship can feel like a God-send. This audiobook is for those who are in, or have been in, a physically abusive relationship. The stories in this short audiobook may sound familiar as you can likely see similarities to your own situation.

What do you do when, just before Thanksgiving at your mother's, your 14-year-old son asks you to iron the dress he recently purchased and plans to wear? Listeners learn the answer and much more in this wonderfully frank, loving, and practical account of parenting a transgender teen. Hassouri chronicles what amounts to a dual transition: as her child transitions from male to female, she navigates through anger, denial, and grief to eventual acceptance. Despite her experience advising other parents in her work as a pediatrician, she was blindsided by her child's gender identity.

A rich, penetrating memoir about the author's relationship with a flawed but influential figure—the painter Lucian Freud—and the satisfactions and struggles of a life lived through art.

An arresting portrait of the pernicious creep of decline, and a powerful cry for environmental justice, Loose of Earth captures the desperate futility and unbending religious faith that devastated a family, leaving them waiting for a miracle that would never come.

Emmy, Tony and Spirit Award-winning actress Sheryl Lee Ralph knows a thing or two about staying power in the capricious world of Hollywood. A seasoned professional who has taken the best lessons learned and used them to move her stellar career forward, she now shares them with you. If you are an aspiring diva in training, regardless of your career choice, much of what she says in DIVA 2.0, you'll find invaluable. These 12 lessons could help elevate your journey to greater heights. You'll get to go behind the scenes of stage, screen, and media to discover what a true Diva must know.

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.

My name is Ashlee. I am a victim of murder. Through a series of events and by two shots of a gun, I was made a widow at the age of 28, with my youngest child just six weeks old. I am a victim of infidelity. I have felt unlovable. I have felt rejected. I have had days in my life when I wasn’t sure if I would ever take a breath again, let alone be able to raise my five children by myself. I have lived in fear. I have felt much heartache. I have felt truly broken to my core. I have carried some heavy burdens...not only of my own, but burdens put upon my shoulders by the death of my husband.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

A remarkable, true story about raising an unusually challenging child, in this case one who struggles to reciprocate love. Unfolding over nearly 20 years, Raising a Thief focuses on the struggles of a Russian orphan Sonya, mistreated early in life and ultimately diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, and the family that adopted and tried to raise her.

Since the publication of their successful book Real Life, Real Love, DJ Envy and Gia, collectively known as the Caseys, have constantly been inundated with questions from people all around the world wondering how they create and maintain the patience, focus, and time to raise happy and successful children after all these years. In Real Life, Real Family, they dive deeper into how they’ve created a family unit that’s filled with unwavering love and share with listeners the ways they manage to raise low-stress children while nurturing a solid and thriving partnership together.

When detective Maggie Oliver first discovered that children as young as 10 were being groomed, abused and trafficked for sex by gangs of men in the Rochdale area, she felt like a lonely voice calling for people to act. Banging on closed doors, it seemed that nobody was able or willing to help her save these vulnerable girls, but she couldn't just sit back while countless lives were being destroyed forever in plain sight. Instead, she launched a one-woman campaign to bring down these sickening gangs.

While patriarchy and misogyny are problems everywhere, they take on a particularly pernicious form in Christian churches, where those with power have been insisting, since many decades before #MeToo, that this sexually dysfunctional environment is, in fact, exactly how God wants it to be. #ChurchToo turns over the rocks of the church's sexual dysfunction, revealing just what makes sexualized violence in religious contexts both ubiquitous and uniquely traumatizing.