Women Memoirs

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband.

Samantha Irby meets Bettyville in this darkly funny and poignant memoir about love, loss, Alzheimer's, and reviving her father's pornographic writing career, from writer and Mortified liveproducer Sara Faith Alterman. Twelve-year-old Sara enjoyed an G-rated existence in suburban New England...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The unforgettable memoir by the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the woman who dared to take on Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell “Make no mistake: this is a book about power, corruption, industrial-scale sex abuse and the way in which institutions sided with...

A queer teen rebel escapes small-town Appalachia and becomes Los Angeles’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix in this searing and darkly funny memoir that upends our ideas about desire, class, and power.

In The Hour of the Wolf, Bhutto weaves reflections on love, loss, and healing with poignant memories of family, a yearning for motherhood, and meditations on literature, cinema, art, politics, and the wild world around her. Heartbreaking yet hopeful, this kaleidoscopic memoir is a testament to resilience, self-acceptance, and the restorative power of friendship—especially that of one small, brave dog.

In "Relentless," Join Manijeh Mazinani on a gripping and inspiring journey that transcends boundaries and proves the power of unwavering determination. Born into a world where her father's mysterious presence cast a shadows and her mother's spiritual strength struggles to overcome family dynamics. Manijeh navigates loneliness and isolation.

There may be no tidy solutions or pithy answers to life’s big challenges, but Michelle Obama believes that we can all locate and lean on a set of tools to help us better navigate change and remain steady within flux. In The Light We Carry, she opens a frank and honest dialogue with listeners, considering the questions many of us wrestle with: How do we build enduring and honest relationships? How can we discover strength and community inside our differences? What tools do we use to address feelings of self-doubt or helplessness? What do we do when it all starts to feel like too much?

They promised her heaven, but there was no savior. Imagine an 18-year-old American girl who has never read a newspaper, watched television, or made a phone call. An 18-year-old-girl who has never danced - and this in the 1960s. It is in Cambridge, Massachusetts where Leonard Feeney, a controversial (soon to be excommunicated) Catholic priest, has founded a religious community called the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

At 43, Ninya was depressed, out of shape, and filled with crippling anxiety after addiction, cancer, and divorce had destroyed nearly everything. One day, she received a message from a stranger. This woman offered to lead her on a self-healing trip hiking through the Scottish highlands. In this memoir, an introverted Pollyanna is paired up with her opposite, a steamrolling, abrasive female with unorthodox healing methods. As they barrel through the winding roads in a rental car, a series of events forces Ninya to find the strength to heal in one of the most beautiful places on earth.

San Francisco, 1967. A teenager comes of age during the Summer of Love at her rock & roll wedding. Her story relates the saga of life and relationships from then until the present through many lessons learned the hard way, until when, in 2005 she transitioned into yet another challenging marriage to the founder of an iconic winery in the Valley of the Moon.

Despite every reason not to, Steph Silver savors the little things wherever she goes—like flowers in a field, sunlight through the trees, and playing with her brother, Bobbie. But, no matter how often she escapes into the light, darkness always threatens to pull her backward. Moving over thirty times before she was seventeen, hopscotching between campgrounds, fully furnished homes, and homeless shelters, Steph’s dysfunctional family takes starting over to the extreme.

Wildflower is a portrait of Drew's life in stories as she looks back on the adventures, challenges, and incredible experiences of her earlier years. It includes tales of living on her own at 14 (and how laundry may have saved her life), getting stuck in a gas station overhang on a cross-country road trip, saying good-bye to her father in a way only he could have understood, and many more adventures and lessons that have led her to the successful, happy, and healthy place she is today.

A fiercely personal memoir about coming of age in the male-dominated literary world of the 90s, becoming the first female literary editor of Esquire, and Miller's personal and working relationship with David Foster Wallace.

From Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Dorit Kemsley comes a candid memoir in which she peels back the layers of her life and shares the unscripted moments that shaped who she is.

This is the story of Rebecca Stirling’s childhood: a young girl raised by the sea, by men, and by literature. Circumnavigating the world on a thirty-foot sailboat, the Stirlings spend weeks at a time on the open ocean, surviving storms and visiting uncharted islands and villages. Ushered through her young life by a father who loves adventure, women, and extremes, Rebecca befriends “working girls” in the ports they visit (as they are often the only other females present in the bars that they end up in) and, on the boat, falls in love with her crewmate and learns to live like the men around her.

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape—drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown—Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories.

In 1977, Kathy Eldon moved with her husband and two children from England to Kenya, where she found freedom as she had never known it before and was ready to push back from her old, restrictive life. Diving into this tumultuous new world as a journalist and writer, she embraced the energy and creativity of Kenyans, both black and white. But her world collapsed when her twenty-two-year-old son, Dan—an artist and photojournalist on assignment for Reuters—was stoned to death by an angry mob in Somalia, killed by the very people he was trying to help.

In this coming-of-age story set in the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom, former Marine Corps officer Teresa Fazio struggles with her past, her sense of authority, and her womanhood. Anger stifles her fear and uncertainty. A forbidden affair placates her need for love and security. But emptiness, guilt, and nightmares plague Fazio through her deployment - and follow her back home.

At 32, Amy Boesky thought she had it all figured out: a wonderful new man in her life, a great job, and the (nearly) perfect home. For once, she was almost able to shake the terrible fear that had gripped her for as long as she could remember. All of the women in her family had died before the age of 45 - from cancer - and she and her sisters had grown up in time's shadow.

Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary’s daughter in Haiti. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the deforested hills to preach the gospel of trees. Her mother and sisters spent their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, it became a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, road blocks and burning tires triggered by political upheaval....