Personal Memoirs

When Misty was six years old, her family started to live and dress like the Amish. Misty and her sister were kept as slaves on a mountain ranch where they were subjected to almost complete isolation, sexual abuse, and extreme physical violence. When Misty reached her teens, her parents feared she and her sister would escape and took them to an Amish community where they were adopted and became baptized members. Misty was devastated to once again find herself in a world of fear, animal cruelty, and sexual abuse.

Abused from the age of eight by her older brother and then her step-father, Maureen Wood quickly became numb to the constant suffering. But Maureen’s world crumbled when her own mother started to abuse her too. A Family Secret is the harrowing true story of how one little girl survived sickening abuse by the people who should have loved her most and how an innocent baby finally saved her.

When Kristina Kuzmič started to see signs that her otherwise sunny, resilient teenage son was struggling, she was sure a few simple fixes could right the ship. But over the following months, the issues her family faced became more nuanced, complicated, and pervasive than she could've predicted—and what began as a clear to do list spiraled into an emotionally fraught and seemingly endless push and pull between signs of progress and overwhelming fear.

Kate, born to abusive, drug addicted parents, identifies an inner God voice when she is very young. This voice, and the support of her grandmother, helps her overcome her circumstances instead of falling victim to them. However, as she grows up she finds that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and she discovers that she is an addict herself. Deciding not to go down the path her parents went, she rises above her circumstances again and chooses the path of recovery.

Helene Hadsell was "the woman who won every contest prize she desired". In Contesting: The Name It & Claim It Game, she shares her winning secrets in the vibrant, warm, and folksy manner that was uniquely her.

#1 New York Times Bestseller An Oprah Book Club Selection "Riveting…a worthy investment…this book has real wisdom."—New York Times Book Review "Provocative... I adore her honesty, her vulnerability, and her no-nonsense wisdom, and I know you will, too."—Oprah Winfrey The highly...

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

Kym Gold's mantra - "never settle for a no, always look for a yes" - is what led her to co-create True Religion Brand Jeans, a major retail clothing company that she sold for close to a billion dollars in 2013. In Gold Standard, she finally gives her side of the story of how the once fledgling jeans company that nobody wanted,went on to become a giant, revolutionizing player in the fashion industry.

Miles to Run Before I Sleep is the true story of Sumedha Mahajan, a married working woman who undertook an extraordinary journey. At an age when most women worry about household finances and the responsibilities of starting a family, she wanted to break the mould and follow her dreams. Sumedha was born with asthma, and the hospital was her second home throughout her childhood. She started running to keep herself fit and to prevent asthma attacks, but it developed into a way of life.

Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am—that so many women are—is just the best time of my life."

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope - the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman....

Writing has been medicine for Nancy Slonim Aronie. At nine months old, her son Dan was diagnosed with diabetes. Then, at twenty-two, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. During the years she and her husband took care of Dan, and when he died at age thirty-eight, Aronie could not find the book she needed. So she wrote her memoir. Over decades of writing and teaching, Aronie has created a set of prompts, directions, and examples that she shares in Memoir as Medicine. Listeners will learn how to write through where they have been and into understanding, healing, and even joy.

When a fancy car pulls up outside six-year-old Marie's home in 1959, her dad tells her she is going on holiday. But little does she know she will not see her home again for four long years. Her family cannot afford to keep her at home. Marie tells the story of how she was taken away from a poor but happy and loving home life to live in a convent - away from everyone and everything she holds dear. Her hair is bluntly chopped, her clothes are taken away and her name is changed. Then a horrific ritual of physical, sexual and mental abuse begins.

By the time she was in her late 20s, Tara Schuster was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown-up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self-medicating mess. No one knew that her road to adulthood had been paved with depression, anxiety, and shame. Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies is the story of Tara’s path to re-parenting herself and becoming a "ninja of self-love".

From Melissa Febos, the national bestselling author of Girlhood, comes an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of celibacy and a wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge. “Only Melissa Febos could convince us of the...

I start all of my true crime books with a quick word of warning. Most news articles and television true crime shows skim over the vile details of truly horrible crimes. In my books, I don’t gloss over the facts, regardless of how disgusting they may be. I try to give my listeners a clear and accurate description on just how demented the killers really were. I do my best not to leave anything out. The stories included in these books are not for the squeamish.

One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.

After completely and independently conquering a debilitating eating disorder, Kathryn Hansen wrote Brain over Binge to share her struggle with those still trapped in the compulsive binge-purge cycle. Since the book’s initial release in 2011, it has endured as an essential road map for using the power of the brain to erase harmful habits and create lasting change. The second edition is fully revised and updated with new information, compelling insights, and uplifting success stories that will inspire listeners to break free from their own self-defeating behaviors.

In Sisters Loved and Treasured: Stories of Unbreakable Bonds, award-winning ABC News journalist and New York Times best-selling author Deborah Roberts curates a giftable collection of conversations, meditations, and anecdotes from her own sisters, celebrity friends, and everyday people alike who share deeply personal accounts of how their relationships as sisters shaped their lives.

Society, films, song lyrics and our parents are adamant that a happy ending has to be couple-shaped. Catherine Gray took a whole year off dating to find single satisfaction. She lifted the lid on the reasons behind the global single revolution, explored the bizarre ways cultures single-shame, detached from 'all the good ones are gone!' panic and debunked the myth that married people are much happier.