Women Memoirs

In 2022, Clea Shearer thought: This is going to be the best year of my life. The Home Edit, the company she had cofounded and worked so hard to grow, was acquired by Hello Sunshine. She had just finished filming the second season of her Emmy-nominated show Get Organized with The Home Edit. She turned forty surrounded by candles, flowers, friends, and family. And then, on March 8, 2022, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her life as she knew it was over.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and a militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, was obsessed with the ever-present threat of the corrupting evils of the Western world outside their home, and worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure. For him, a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

Dans Entre nous. Mieux se connaître, mieux s’aimer, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau nous invite à entreprendre un voyage à travers notre paysage émotionnel, de l’enfance à l’âge adulte, en s’appuyant sur l’intervention de spécialistes parmi les plus réputés dans les domaines de la santé mentale et du bien-être (psychologues, neuroscientifiques, experts en relations, enseignants de la pleine conscience).

Following her retirement from Princeton University, celebrated historian Dr. Nell Irvin Painter surprised everyone in her life by returning to school - in her 60s - to earn a BFA and MFA in painting. In Old in Art School, she travels from her beloved Newark to the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design; finds meaning in the artists she loves, even as she comes to understand how they may be undervalued; and struggles with the unstable balance between the pursuit of art and the inevitable, sometimes painful, demands of a life fully lived.

For years, Jessica struggled with fluctuating weight and bouts of unhappiness. Like many of us, she found comfort in food and craved cigarettes and self-confidence. Then one day Jessica took her first yoga class in Katmandu. She lost 40 pounds and changed her life forever. In enLIGHTened, Jessica shares the core principles of yoga philosophy—not the poses and postures, but the ancient system of ideas that lies behind them, drawn from a 2000-year-old text called the Yoga Sutras.

A powerful memoir from the Saturday Night Live cast member Cecily Strong about grieving the death of her cousin - and embracing the life-affirming lessons he taught her - amid the coronavirus pandemic.

In this raw and revealing memoir, The Secrets We Keep: Spilling the Beans, Tania J. Wilson takes listeners on a courageous journey across continents, through family silence, and into the heart of what it means to finally speak. Raised in Durban during the 1960s and ’70s, Tania’s story blends the nostalgia of South African life with the stark realities of generational trauma. From the shadow of secrecy to the light of reinvention, she invites you inside a narrative that is at once deeply personal and profoundly universal.

Maria Ressa is one of the most renowned international journalists of our time. For decades, she challenged corruption and malfeasance in her native country, the Philippines, on its rocky path from an authoritarian state to a democracy. As a reporter from CNN, she transformed news coverage in her region, which led her in 2012 to create a new and innovative online news organization, Rappler.

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.

What could possibly be “lucky” about addiction? Absolutely nothing, thought Laura McKowen when drinking brought her to her knees. As she puts it, she “kicked and screamed . . . wishing for something - anything - else” to be her issue. The people who got to drink normally, she thought, were so damn lucky. But in the midst of early sobriety, when no longer able to anesthetize her pain and anxiety, she realized that she was actually the lucky one. Lucky to feel her feelings, live honestly, really be with her daughter, change her legacy.

At twenty-five years old, Parvati Shallow was plunged into fame and fortune after becoming the million-dollar winner of the reality television series Survivor. But despite her success, the ghosts of her traumatic past, coupled with the harsh glare of the public eye, kept her locked in a survival cycle of fear and shame that sabotaged her self-confidence and eroded her self-trust.

A collection of women's sexual fantasies from women around the world, Want is a revelatory, sensational and game-changing exploration of women's sexuality that asks, and answers: How do women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally anonymous?

Sharon Osbourne has lived - in her own words - 'fifty lives in fifty years'. As the daughter of notorious rock manager Don Arden, Sharon's childhood was a chaotic mix of glamour and violence, villains and diamonds. In rock star Ozzy Osbourne, Sharon found her soul mate, yet Ozzy's drug- and alcohol-fuelled excesses - which culminated in his attempt to strangle her - made their marriage a white-knuckle ride from the start; only her devotion to their three children gave her the will to survive.

Sourcebooks is bringing the internationally acclaimed New York Times bestseller back for a new generation of listeners. Jennie Churchill was not merely Winston’s mother. She was the most captivating and desired woman of her age. Originally from Brooklyn, Jennie became the reigning queen of British society. Beautiful and defiant, she lived with an honesty that made her the talk of two continents.

The Liars’ Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr’s comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger’s—a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all.

Sex, drugs, and...bug stew? In the vein of The Glass Castle and Wild, Cea Sunrise Person's compelling memoir of a childhood spent with her dysfunctional counter-culture family in the Canadian wilderness - a searing story of physical, emotional, and psychological survival.

Not long before her 50birthday, Mackenzie Phillips walked into Los Angeles International Airport. She was on her way to a reunion of One Day at a Time, the hugely popular 70s sitcom on which she once starred as the loveable rebel Julie Cooper. Within minutes, Mackenzie was in handcuffs, arrested for possession of cocaine and heroin. But the star who turned up High on Arrival has finally come back down to earth - to stay.

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."

The revealing and inspiring memoir of a woman forced into polygamous marriage in FLDS Church and her brave struggle to protect others from the same fate. Rebecca Musser grew up in fear, concealing her family's polygamous lifestyle from the "dangerous" outside world. Covered head-to-toe in strict, modest clothing, she received a rigorous education at Alta Academy, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints' school headed by Warren Jeffs.

Every writer's origin story is different. In How I Became a Writer, Gloria Steinem charts her unlikely journey from restless teen in Toledo, Ohio, to professional magazine writer in Manhattan - with sage advice and "random directives" for getting started.