Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

When fourteen-year-old Lamya H realizes she has a crush on her teacher—her female teacher—she covers up her attraction, an attraction she can’t yet name, by playing up her roles as overachiever and class clown. Born in South Asia, she moved to the Middle East at a young age and has spent years feeling out of place, like her own desires and dreams don’t matter, and it’s easier to hide in plain sight. To disappear. But one day in Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam that changes everything: When Maryam learned that she was pregnant, she insisted no man had touched her.

In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth is visiting a friend at the hospital when she notices that the door to one of the hospital rooms is painted red. She witnesses nurses drawing straws to see who will tend to the patient inside, all of them reluctant to enter the room. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and immediately begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. Before she can even process what she’s done, word spreads in the community that Ruth is the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS.

As the youngest of three daughters, and the only one born in Canada soon after her parents' emigration from Iran, Roza Nozari began her life hungry for a sense of belonging. From her early years, she shared a passion for Iranian cuisine with her mother and craved stories of their ancestral home. Eventually they visited and she fell in love with its sights and smells, and with the warm embrace of their extended family. Yet Roza sensed something was amiss with her mother's happy, well-rehearsed story of their original departure. 

This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.

Over the past twenty years, Melissa Etheridge has been blessed with success, love, joy, contentment, freedom, and release. She became a mother again, recorded eleven albums, toured the world, performed at the Grammy Awards, won an Oscar, discovered her one true love, and underwent a profound spiritual awakening. She also experienced illness, incomparable loss, heartache, guilt, shame, and devastating grief. Yet through it all, Melissa found the strength and courage to carry on. Talking to My Angels is a profoundly honest look into her inner life as a woman, an artist, a mother, and a survivor.

Vivek Shraya has reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she's endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and not feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive childhood, she had to learn to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult, she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate.

In in his debut book for adults, Jeffery Self invites listeners into his world, taking them through the usual foibles of gay adolescence, amplified in the vast wasteland of the American South and the odd characters who peopled it, from shoddy community theater productions to underage drinking with Broadway stars, from downtown comedy rooms to adventure-filled bedrooms.

Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.

'Between the Stops is a sort of a memoir, my sort. It's about a bus trip really, because it's my view from the Number 12 bus (mostly top deck, the seat at the front on the right), a double-decker that plies its way from Dulwich, in South East London, where I was living, to where I sometimes work - at the BBC, in the heart of the capital. It's not a sensible way to write a memoir at all, probably, but it's the way things pop into your head as you travel, so it's my way'.

In this unflinchingly honest documentary and memoir, comedian Josh Thomas asks the big question: how do I be gay? Irreverent but informative, Josh Thomas speaks to a party of hilarious and experienced queer storytellers as they share true tales and advice on how to be gay. When I was a teenager trying to work out how to be gay I would ask google impossible questions. 'Am I gay?' 'How can I test if I’m gay?' 'If I’m gay do I have to do anal?' It didn’t work....

Cody Rigsby has a lot of opinions: Kevin is the hottest Backstreet Boy; grape jelly is a crime against nature; if you wear flip-flops in New York City, you do not love yourself. But if there is one opinion—one truth—that he holds above all others, it’s that we shouldn’t let the fear of looking stupid or being judged hold us back from living our best lives.

All Amanda Jetté Knox ever wanted was to enjoy a stable life. She never knew her biological father, and while her mother and stepfather were loving parents, the situation was sometimes chaotic. At school, she was bullied mercilessly, and at the age of 14, she entered a counselling program for alcohol addiction and was successful.

In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking piece went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: Finding and giving love. Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: Showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman - accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. "Everything I know about love," she writes, "I learned from dogs."

Brutally frank but buoyed throughout by McLeod’s unquenchable spirit, Peyakow - a title borrowed from the Cree word for “one who walks alone” - is an inspiring account of triumph against unimaginable odds. McLeod’s perspective as someone whose career path has crossed both sides of the Indigenous/White chasm resonates with particular force in today’s Canada.

In this intimate memoir, Luke takes us behind the scenes of his career on the stage and screen. He writes beautifully of the relationship he now has with his family and the respect they all have for one another on their different paths. Luke's story is a powerful tale of resilience, courage, and the pursuit of finding a sense of belonging and identity, but mostly (and hopefully) a story of inspiration.

Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison-abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. Angela Davis: An Autobiography, first published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in these struggles. Read by Angela Davis herself, this autobiography, told with warmth, brilliance, humor, and conviction, is a classic account of a life in struggle, with echoes in our own time.

At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten lands in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey Jr. are immediately dashed by grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. When Augusten is forced to examine himself, he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life - and live it sober. Dry is the story of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power

The relationship between Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton evolved over several months in 1984 and 1985. Even when they first slept together, Hutton had no idea who Mercury was, and, when the star told him his name, it meant nothing to him. Hutton worked as a barber at the Savoy Hotel and retained his job and his lodgings in Sutton, Surrey, for two years after moving in with Mercury. He was never fully assimilated into Mercury's jet-setting lifestyle, but, from 1985 until Mercury's death in 1991, he was closer to him than anyone and knew all Mercury's closest friends.

Award-winning actor, creator of a myriad of memorable characters from Lady Whiteadder to Professor Sprout, Miriam Margolyes is a national treasure. Now, at last, at the age of 80, she has finally decided to tell her extraordinary life story. And it's far richer and stranger than any part she's played.

In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.