Autobiography PDF EBooks
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The Gastronomy of Marriage
“On our first date, Rich ordered a chocolate soufflé at the beginning of the meal, noting an asterisk on the menu warning diners of the wait involved. At the time, I imagined he did it partly to impress me, which it did, though today I know...
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A Slant of Sun
There are things about this book that are both powerful and difficult to read. I wonder if this is because Kephart has worked so hard to be honest, maybe with herself first. Here is a quotation:"Imagining motherhood is like imagining...
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This I Believe 2
This second collection of This I Believe essays gathers seventy-five essayists— ranging from famous to previously unknown— completing the thought that begins the book’s title. With contributors who run the gamut from cellist Yo-Yo Ma to...
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Laughing All the Way to the Mosque
A hilarious memoir about growing up Muslim from the creator of Little Mosque on the Prairie.Zarqa Nawaz has always straddled two cultures. She's just as likely to be agonizing over which sparkly earrings will 'pimp' out her hijab as to be...
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The Hurry-Up Song
Out of love, anger, and grief Clifford Chase has crafted a moving and brilliant memoir of loss and family bonds. With startling honesty, he evokes scenes of life in a suburban American family and illuminates the strong ties that are woven between...
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Inside Out
Ten years after the publication of her bestselling memoir, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid, Evelyn Lau reflects on her life, relationships and her identity as a writer.Moving seamlessly between past and present, Lau describes how her...
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The Last Time I Wore a Dress
At fifteen years old, Daphne Scholinski was committed to a mental institution and awarded the dubious diagnosis of "Gender Identity Disorder." She spent three years--and over a million dollars of insurance--"treating" the...
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Saffron Sky
This lyrical memoir evinces the author's passion for constructing an American life with the spiritual fervor and deeply aesthetic rituals that were part of her childhood in Iran. Asayesh, who immigrated to North Carolina as a girl, writes too of her...
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Gone to the Crazies
As a child, Alison Weaver's life shone with surface-level perfection—full of nannies, private schools, and ballet lessons. She had all the luxuries of a wealthy Manhattan upbringing, and all the makings of a perfect Upper East Side miss. But her...
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I Had Brain Surgery, What's Your Excuse?
Now in paperback, the ingenious illustrated memoir that is widely praised: “Hilarious, hell-raising, and frequently heart-wrenching.” —Booklist “[A] unique tragicomedy of a memoir . . . The author is so likable, even in...
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Loud in the House of Myself
Stacy Pershall grew up depressed and too smart for her own good, a deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas (population 1,000), where the prevailing wisdom was that Jesus healed all. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak, through a...
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Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8)
Think Word Freak with international flair. A nonfiction Ella Minnow Pea with a built-in book-length puzzle. Pretty Girl in Crimson Rose (8) will enthrall (or obsess!) anyone interested in words. Born and raised in South...
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Lulu
Lulu Auger's life is what fairy tales are made of: a poor farm girl from rural Minnesota goes to Washington, D.C., to seek her fortune. On the way, she meets a dashing prince who sweeps her into marriage. Wealth and fame eventually follow as they...
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Catatan Perjalanan Haji Seorang Muslimah
Berhaji adalah cita-cita hampir setiap Muslim. Tidak seperti ibadah shalat yang dapat dilakukan kapan saja dan di mana saja, atau kewajiban puasa yang datang setiap tahun yang dapat diganti dengan fidyah kalau ada uzur (halangan tertentu), ibadah...
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You Saved Me, Too
Aron Lieb approached Sue Resnick at a Jewish Community Center fifteen years ago, and found a companion and soul mate who was steadfastly by his side for the rest of his life. You Saved Me, Too is the incredible story of how two people...
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Searching For The Secret River
Searching for the Secret River is a memoir about the writing of Kate Grenville's international bestseller, The Secret River.It tells the story of the research behind the novel - from the transcript of Grenville's ancestor's trial at...
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The O Manuscript
The O Manuscript, a real-life Gnostic thriller, has sold over 60,000 copies in Denmark, the equivalent of 3 million in the United States, since it was first published in 2000. Lars Muhl was for many years a successful pop star who...
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The Last of the Live Nude Girls
In the last of Times Square’s peep shows, a man pays $40 to watch a girl strip naked behind glass. These institutions, left over from the days when 42nd Street was the vicious center of vice, will soon disappear completely from a rapidly gentrifying...
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Run, Brother, Run
A searing family memoir of a tempestuous Texas boyhood that led to the vicious murder of the author’s brother As William Faulkner said, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.” This observation seems...
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Unpacking the Boxes
Donald Hall’s remarkable life in poetry — a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 — comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.Hall’s invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his...
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Stet
A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house Andre Deutsch, Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate portrait of the glories and...
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Boy, Lost
A powerful family memoir from the award-winning author of The China GardenKristina Olsson’s mother lost her infant son, Peter,when he was snatched from her arms as she boarded a train in the hot summer of 1950. She...
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Ambulance Girl
Five years ago Jane Stern was a walking encyclopedia of panic attacks, depression, and hypochondria. Her marriage of more than thirty years was suffering, and she was virtually immobilized by fear and anxiety. As the daughter of parents who both...
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Half a Life
“Half my life ago, I killed a girl.”So begins Darin Strauss’ Half a Life, the true story of how one outing in his father’s Oldsmobile resulted in the death of a classmate and the beginning of a different, darker life for the author....
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Lights on a Ground of Darkness
Like the yellow, pink, and blue irises that had been transplanted from house to house over the years, the stories of poet Ted Kooser’s family had been handed down until, as his mother lay ill and dying, he felt an urgency to write them down. With a...
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Of Walking in Ice
Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić) is a German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder,...
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Telling
She invites the reader into her life and into the questions raised by a crime with no obvious solutions or easy answers. We see the dimensions of a human struggle often kept hidden from view. While there are an estimated twelve million rape...
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The Girl I Left Behind
At the height of the Vietnam War protests, twenty-eight-year-old Judith Nies and her husband lived a seemingly idyllic life. Both were building their respective careers in Washington—Nies as the speechwriter and chief staffer to a core group of...
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Let's Take the Long Way Home
“It’s an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.”So begins this gorgeous memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Gail Caldwell, a testament to the power of friendship, a story of how an...
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Memoirs of a Sword Swallower
Memoirs of a Sword Swallower is Daniel P. Mannix's autobiography as a sword-swallower with a traveling sideshow, illustrated with photos from the 30s and 40s taken by the author. An example of Classic Americana, this book offers a portrayal...
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Still Life With Chickens
In this beautifully written and frequently funny memoir, Catherine Goldhammer, newly separated, along with her twelve-year-old daughter, starts life anew in a cottage by the sea, in a rustic town where live bait is sold from vending machines. Partly...
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All Will Be Well
From award-winning author John McGahern, a memoir of his childhood in the Irish countryside and the beginnings of his life as a writer.McGahern describes his early years as one of seven children growing up in rural County Leitrim, a childhood was...
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She's Not Herself
On the surface, her childhood seemed normal—even idyllic. Linda grew up in the iconic immigrant community of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, with her parents and a gifted older brother. But she spent her days at home alone with a mother who suffered major...
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The Low Road
"This is the story I have been writing for my whole life. With my life, " writes Valerie Miner in this elegant and compassionate account of her family's migration from Edinburgh's tenements across the world. The Low Road explores location and...
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Eating My Words
As one of the country's foremost restaurant reviewers, Mimi Sheraton set the standard for food writing and criticism. In this engrossing memoir, the doyenne of food criticism explains how she developed her passion for writing about food and wine,...
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Close to the Knives
In Close to the Knives, David Wojnarowicz gives us an important and timely document: a collection of creative essays -- a scathing, sexy, sublimely humorous and honest personal testimony to the "Fear of Diversity in America." From the author's...
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Dream Catcher
In her much-anticipated memoir, Margaret A. Salinger writes about life with her famously reclusive father, J.D. Salinger -- offering a rare look into the man and the myth, what it is like to be his daughter, and the effect of such a charismatic...
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I Don't Have a Happy Place
When a trip to the therapist ends with the question “Can’t Kim be happy?” Kim Korson responds the way any normal person would—she makes fun of it. Because really, does everyone have to be happy?Aside from her father wearing makeup and her...
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How I Shed My Skin
"White people declared that the South would rise again. Black people raised one fist and chanted for black power. Somehow we negotiated a space between those poles and learned to sit in classrooms together . . . Lawyers, judges, adults...
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She's Not There
The provocative bestseller She’s Not There is the winning, utterly surprising story of a person changing genders. By turns hilarious and deeply moving, Jennifer Finney Boylan explores the territory that lies between men and women,...
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Ladies Gallery, The
A shred of black lace. A broken hand mirror. A spidery strip of false eyelash. These are the fragments left to Irene Vilar, granddaughter of Lolita Lebrón, the revered political activist for Puerto Rican independence who in 1954 sprayed the...
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Companion to an Untold Story
When Marcia Aldrich’s friend took his own life at the age of forty-six, they had known each other many years. As part of his preparations for death, he gave her many of his possessions, concealing his purposes in doing so, and when he committed his...
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Sir Vidia's Shadow
This heartfelt and revealing account of Paul Theroux's thirty-year friendship with the legendary V. S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on...
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Why I Stayed
On November 2, 2006, Gayle Haggard's life changed forever when her husband, Ted Haggard, founder of the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs and president of the National Association of Evangelicals, was publicly exposed in a scandal....
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In the Long Run
It’s 2008. Jim Axelrod—once among the most watched correspondents on network news and the first television reporter to broadcast from Saddam International Airport in 2003—is covering the final stages of the race for the Democratic presidential...
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Her Last Death
Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir of growing up the privileged, peripatetic daughter of an eccentric mother falls somewhere in the middle of the contemporary memoir continuum: not as gripping as Jeannette Walls's Glass Castle or Augusten...
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Too Late to Die Young
A Washington Post Book World RaveHarriet McBryde Johnson's witty and highly unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a bold and unsentimental sermon on pleasure. Born with a...
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The Sacred Thread
A touching and surprising memoir about one woman's journey to motherhood and family that illustrates the power of love and triumph of the human spirit.After three heartbreaking losses, Adrienne Arieff thought her dreams of becoming a mother...
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Stranger Here
The brutally honest, surprisingly hilarious story of one woman's journey from one extreme of the weight spectrum to the other, and of the unexpected emotional chaos it created.Jen Larsen always thought that if she could only...
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The Child Who Never Grew
One might consider The Good Earth as Pearl S. Buck's magnum opus, after all she did win a Pulitzer Prize because of it. She also won a Nobel Prize for Literature for many of her other literary works. However, for one to really understand the drive...
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Messages From My Father
Calvin Trillin, the celebrated New Yorker writer, offers a rich and engaging biography of his father, as well as a literate and entertaining fanfare for the common (and decent, and hard-working) man.Abe Trillin had the western...
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Hammered
I have come know Mr. Braun as a personal friend over the last couple of years. Having said that I wouldn't provide a positive review if I didn't believe that his work was worth it.To say that Hammered: Memoir of an Addict, is a compelling...
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The Folded Clock
A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of one year in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits Like many young girls, Heidi Julavits wrote in her diary every day. Years later, she found her old...
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Most Talkative
The man behind the Real Housewives writes about his lifelong love affair with pop culture that brought him from the suburbs of St. Louis to his own television showFrom a young age, Andy Cohen knew...
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Whore Diaries II
This is the journal of a girl who lives far away in the arctic wilderness, in a tiny one room cabin far from roads and towns, except that one weekend a month she travels to a faraway big city to make her living as an independent escort. Read her...
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Uphill Walkers
In 1952, Madeleine Blais's father died suddenly, leaving his pregnant wife and their five young children to face their future alone. Uphill Walkers is the story of how the Blais family pulled together to survive and ultimately thrive in an era when...
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One Man's West
"The country in which I grew up-the rugged areas of southwestern Colorado-was changing rapidly in the 1930s. I sensed that something unique in the nation's experience was ending, and I tried to capture a segment of the passing on paper-the breakup...
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The Man from Essence
Essence magazine is the most popular, well respected, and largest circulated black women’s magazine in history. Largely unknown is the remarkable story of what it took to earn that distinction.The Man from Essence...
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Charlotte Au Chocolat
Like Eloise growing up in the Plaza Hotel, Charlotte Silver grew up in her mother's restaurant. Located in Harvard Square, Upstairs at the Pudding was a confection of pink linen tablecloths and twinkling chandeliers, a decadent backdrop for...
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The House at Sugar Beach
Helene Cooper is “Congo,” a descendant of two Liberian dynasties—traced back to the first ship of freemen that set sail from New York in 1820 to found Monrovia. Helene grew up at Sugar Beach, a twenty-two-room mansion by the sea. Her childhood was...
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Burying the Typewriter
Winner of the Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction, a childhood memoir of political oppression and persecution during Romania's Ceausescu years Carmen Bugan grew up amid the bounty of the Romanian...
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Family Trouble
Whenever a memoirist gives a reading, someone in the audience is sure to ask: How did your family react? Revisiting our pasts and exploring our experiences, we often reveal more of our nearest and dearest than they might prefer. This volume...
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How Do We Know When It's God?
Ten years ago, after decades of atheism and hard living, Dan Wakefield experienced a profound religious awakening that led him back to the church. Now he continues his quest, describing a religious journey over the long haul ... after the first...
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Living in the Past
When Arthur Magennis was put on chemotherapy in 2012, he found that he had two sleepless nights each week. To fill the dark hours, he began to write the story of his childhood in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and 30s, through WWII and up to leaving...
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Laid Off and Crazy Happy - Memoirs of a Houseband
Author Andy Weisberg chronicles his transformation from corporate executive to “Houseband”, detailing the ups and downs of the journey and his unique perspective for dealing with it all. Chapters range from routine housekeeping tasks to the nature...
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Red Dirt
A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl...
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The Pharmacist's Mate
Named "It" Discovery Writer of the Year by Entertainment Weekly, Amy Fusselman took readers and critics alike by storm when McSweeney's published this powerful little book. In The Pharmacist's Mate, she writes of her father's death and her...
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Keeper
Five years ago, Andrea Gillies— writer, wife, and mother of three—seeing that her husband's parents were struggling to cope, invited them to move in. She and her newly extended family relocated to a big Victorian house on a remote, windswept...
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Acedia & Me
View our feature on Kathleen Norris’s Acedia & Me.Kathleen Norris’s masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores...
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Dizzy & Jimmy
A long time ago, when I was a young dancer inNew York City, I fell in love with Jimmy Deanand he fell in love with me.So begins this beguiling memoir of Liz "Dizzy" Sheridan's passionate yet ill-fated romance with...
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Unearthing Venus
In the tradition of Eat, Pray, Love and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild comes a fresh voice in women’s non-fiction.Cate Montana was raised in a man's world to be "just one of the guys" and swiftly rose to success as a network TV...
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A British Picture
Most memoirs and biographies are usually perfect for the summer. You can sit by a beach and dip into the self ramblings without having to interrupt your sand count. But this is a book of a different grade, mainly because it's the autobiography of...
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Any Day a Beautiful Change
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the minister with the baby carriage. In this collection of interrelated personal essays, Katherine Willis Pershey chronicles the story of her life as a young pastor, mother, and wife. At turns...
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My Brother
Jamaica Kincaid's brother Devon Drew died of AIDS on January 19, 1996, at the age of thirty-three. Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother’s life and death is also a story of her family on the island of...
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Holy Ghost Girl
Donna Johnson's remarkable story of being raised under the biggest gospel tent in the world, by David Terrell, one of the most famous evangelical ministers of the 1960s and 70s. Holy Ghost Girl is a compassionate, humorous...
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House of Happy Endings
Howard Garis, creator of the famed Uncle Wiggily series, along with his wife, Lilian, were phenomenally productive writers of popular children's series--including "The Bobbsey Twins "and "Tom Swift--"from the turn of the century to the 1950s. In a...
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Drinking
Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the...
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The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5
I read this because a friend often refers to her writing. "The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."The diary takes place in the 1950s...
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Tied in Knots
Your wedding — the moment you’ve been waiting for your whole life — is tomorrow. The invitations have been sent out, the caterer and florist are lined up, and the bridesmaid dresses have all been exquisitely hand tailored. The location is...
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Flying Close to the Sun
Flying Close to the Sun is the stunning memoir of a white middle-class girl from Connecticut who became a member of the Weather Underground, one of the most notorious groups of the 1960s. Cathy Wilkerson, who famously escaped the Greenwich Village...
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Run Away
Although this was interesting enough to finish, the writing was not great. This is a rags to riches story of a girl who grew up very poor in South Korea, had a series of setbacks, and eventually made it to America and became very materialistically...
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Screw Everyone
Screw Everyone is comedian Ophira Eisenberg’s wisecracking account of how she spent most of her life saying "yes" to everything —and everyone— and how that attitude ultimately helped her overcome her phobia of commitment.Skeptical...
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Well Enough Alone
A hilarious first-person account of life as a hypochondriac, as well as a look at the condition's history and broader cultural context, from the critically acclaimed author of Devil in the Details.The good news is...
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Hellfire and Herring
Christopher Rush returns, decades later, to rediscover his childhood and offers a frank account of his youth. This evocation of a way of life now vanished demonstrates the timeless power of the word in resurrecting the past. Rush writes of family,...
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The Prisoner's Wife
As a favor for a friend, a bright and talented young woman volunteered to read her poetry to a group of prisoners during a Black History Month program. It was an encounter that would alter her life forever, because it was there, in the prison, that...
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Electroboy
Electroboy is an emotionally frenzied memoir that reveals with kaleidoscopic intensity the terrifying world of manic depression. For years Andy Behrman hid his raging mania behind a larger-than-life personality. He sought a high...
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Accidentally In Love
Chhavi Mukharjee has just settled into the cut-throat modelling industry when, all too soon, things begin to fall apart. When she meets Tushar, a successful photographer, sparks fly between them.But Chhavi doesn't believe in love or...
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Deeply Superficial
Michael Menzies has led the picaresque life many of us only dream of, and he sets it down with such wit and grace it's hard to know which to envy more, his wealth of once-in-a-lifetime experiences or his skill with a pen.”—Christopher Lloyd, Emmy...
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An Unnatural Pursuit And Other Pieces
Simon Gray circa 1985 sounds much like the Simon Gray I've come to know from The Smoking Diaries--expecting the worst; thrashing about in agony when his plays are being written, when they're being casted and rehearsed, when they're in...
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A Step from Death
Larry Woiwode's literary fame began with his first novel, the 1969 classic What I’m Going to Do, I Think, and continued unabated through his brilliant 2000 memoir What I Think I Did. In this deeply affecting follow-up to the...
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Mermaid Singing
Why this isn't considered an Australian classic is beyond me. A vivid, lyrically-written account of the author's re-location to the Greek island of Kalymnos with her husband and two children in the early 1950s. She draws scenes from their life on...
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People Who Led to My Plays
Have you ever considered spending a few afternoons making lists of things in the phenomenal world which have been the markers of your interests and curiosities? You might remember how you felt while playing a childhood game, or feeling empathy with...
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Things Seen and Unseen
"Gracefully written and moving ... Things Seen and Unseen starts with Nora Gallagher entering the labyrinth of her life ... and ultimately it leads to the center of her being."--The Boston GlobeIt started with an...
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This Family of Mine
For decades, scandalous rumors and sensational tabloid headlines have obscured the truth about one the most famous and intriguing families in modern history: the real players, the real relationships, behind the closed doors of the Gotti...
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The Summer of Ordinary Ways
Practicing baseball with Dad, then watching him go after a cow with a pitchfork in a fit of rage. Playing chicken on the county road with semi trucks full of hogs. Flirting with the milkman. Chasing with your sisters after Wreck and Bump, mangy...
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The Love of Impermanent Things
At midlife, Mary Rose O'Reilley reflects on her past and her hard-won sense of self. She is determined, now, not to sacrifice or waste her self. She has struggled for years along the paths set by her suburban childhood, her Catholic upbringing, her...
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Travels in Vermeer
A lyrical and intimate account of how a poet, in the midst of a bad divorce, finds consolation and grace through viewing the paintings of Vermeer, in six world cities. In the midst of a divorce (in which the custody of his young daughter is at...
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Turbulent Souls
I’ve become a big Freakonomics fan in recent weeks. Not only have I read both books, I’ve watched the DVD, and listened to every podcast on Freakonomics Radio. So...
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Henna for the Broken Hearted
How far would you go to change your life?Sharell Cook is 30 years old and living a privileged life in Melbourne’s wealthy suburbs. She has it all: the childhood-sweetheart husband, the high-powered job and plenty of cash to...
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Childhood at Brindabella
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born in 1879 in rural Australia. My Brilliant Career, her first novel, was published to much excitement and acclaim. She moved to Sydney where she became involved in feminist and literary circles and then onto...
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Heart Songs
Laurel Holliday, formerly a college teacher, editor, and psychotherapist, now writes full time in Seattle. She is the award-winning author of the Children of Conflict series. The three volumes were collected and abridged in the Archway...
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My Life As a Traitor
It was part youthful zeal and part teen crush that led Zarah Ghahramani to join a student protest movement. But dabbling in student politics was to lead to disaster when one day she was bundled into a car and taken to Tehran's most notorious prison:...
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Losing It All to Sprawl
As development threatens his very sense of place, an award-winning nature writer finds hope in the rediscovery and appreciation of his historic Cracker farmhouse. Losing It All to Sprawl is the poignant chronicle of...
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Love in Condition Yellow
Berkeley peace activist Sophia Raday never imagined she would fall in love with an Oakland police officer and major in the Army Reserve, much less marry one. Barrett is loving and loyal, but in his world a threat lies around every corner, and so he...
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Cathedral of the Wild
A colorful, moving, and dramatic memoir of personal transformation, set against one of the most famous game reserves in the world.When Nelson Mandela was released after twenty-seven years of imprisonment, he needed a place...
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The Man Who Left
THE MAN WHO LEFT is about the importance of fathers. It's about the men who leave, and the men who stay.It's a familiar story. Father leaves his wife and children and never looks back. Theresa Weir was five when her father left his family...
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Guarding the Moon
This is a poetic memoir detailing the author's feelings during her pregnancy and her child's first year. The language was beautiful and felt like an honest recounting of the joys, fears, and sleep-deprived craziness of new motherhood. Though the...
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A Common Pornography
In 2008, Kevin Sampsell's estranged father died of an aneurysm. When he returned home to Kennewick, Washington for the funeral, Kevin's mother revealed to him disturbing threads in their family history — stories of incest, madness, betrayal, and...
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Call the Nurse
Tired of the pace and noise of life near London and longing for a better place to raise their young children, Mary J. MacLeod and her husband encountered their dream while vacationing on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides. Enthralled by its...
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This and That
Once available and appreciated only by researchers, these stories remained buried in the British Columbia Archives until 2007. Finally, readers are given a new glimpse into Emily Carr's life with this collection. Carr began to write these stories in...
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The Black Seasons
A mosaic of memories from a childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto and a life in hiding on the other side of the wall When six-year-old Michal Glowinski first heard the adults around him speak of the ghetto, he understood only that the word was...
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Talking to High Monks in the Snow
A moving story - cross cultural, cross generational - of Japanese immigrants in America and their Japanese American daughter traveling abroad. Offered insight and perspective otherwise unavailable to me as an American child of German/English...
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Love, Loss, and What I Wore
Ilene "Gingy" Beckerman's beloved and bestselling book has been adapted for the stage by Nora and Delia Ephron. The star-studded Off-Broadway show is receiving rave reviews, as did the book: “Illuminates the experience of an entire...
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Driving with Dead People
Small wonder that, at nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. With a father who drives his Ford pickup with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies...
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Smashed
Garnering a vast amount of attention from young people and parents, and from book buyers across the country, Smashed became a media sensation and a New York Times bestseller. Eye-opening and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story...
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Beautiful Just!
On the Hebridean island of Bruach, life among the crofters is as happy and full of humour as ever. Beckwith tells enchanting tales about the islanders' wit, their canny resourcefulness and their gossipy interest in outsiders. There is Flora and the...
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Surprised by God
At thirteen, Danya Ruttenberg decided that she was an atheist. Watching the sea of adults standing up and sitting down at Rosh Hashanah services, and apparently giving credence to the patently absurd truth-claims of the prayer book, she came to a...
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The Rules of Inheritance
Claire Bidwell Smith -- an only child -- was just fourteen years old when both of her parents were diagnosed with cancer within months of each other. "I've already come to the conclusion that I will probably be parentless by the time I am thirty,"...
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For You Mom, Finally
Bestselling author Ruth Reichl examines her mother's life-and gives voice to the unarticulated truths of a generation of exceptional women A former New York Times restaurant critic, editor in chief of...
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She Broke Up, I Didn’t! .... I just kissed someone else!
She Broke Up, I Didn’t! is a novel that takes a nasty dig at relationships, love and fidelity and what it means today. It tackles some of the very uncomfortable questions and tries to put those into perspective.It’s the story of Deb and...
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You Better Not Cry
You’ve eaten too much candy at Christmas…but have you ever eaten the face off a six-footstuffed Santa? You’ve seen gingerbread houses…but have you ever made your own gingerbread tenement? You’ve woken up with a hangover…but have you ever woken up...
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Secret Life
At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an...
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Augie's Quest
The inspiring story of a fitness pioneer whose ALS diagnosis leads him to create a new and revolutionary model for private medical research and development. What happens to "orphan" diseases that aren't big enough profit...
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Season to Taste
An aspiring chef's moving account of finding her way--in the kitchen and beyond--after a tragic accident destroys her sense of smellAt twenty-two, just out of college, Molly Birnbaum spent her nights reading cookbooks and her days working at...
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The Cancer Journals
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in...
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Clearly, I Didn't Think This Through
In Her Defense, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time...Although Anna Goldfarb is very tall, she can't seem to grow up. While her friends lead lives seemingly plucked out of the pages of an Ikea catalog, she is still trying to figure out...
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Girls Only
Alex Witchel manages to struggle through a full, challenging and frequently hilarious life. And In Girls Only she goes on a soul-searching and shopping spree - with the ever-present help of her wise (and occasionally exasperating) mother, Barbara,...
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Der patagonische Hase
It seems like the bookshelves are lousy with limp memoirs - have shitty parents and a creepy late-night uncle? Hike the Adirondack Trail after getting dumped by a guy who married your mom? Kick heroin or do a stretch in the penitentiary after...
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Walking Through Walls
"Running with Scissors" meets "Bewitched" in this irresistible memoir, as Philip Smith describes growing up in 1960s Miami with his decorator father, who one day discovers he has the miraculous power to talk to the dead and heal the sick.After a...
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Lulu in the Sky
Concluding the trilogy that started with her bestselling memoir, First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung illuminates her struggle to reconcile with her past while moving forward toward happiness.When readers first met Loung Ung in...
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Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
In Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller remembers her African childhood with candor and sensitivity. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to...
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Eleven Stories High
Eleven Stories High is a memoir of a middle-class New York childhood, the perceptions of a girl growing up in a housing project that she deemed a "utopia of the fifties." The story follows the process of memory, rather than the conventions of...
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Surviving the Shark
In Surviving the Shark, Jonathan Kathrein describes his incredible shark attack experience. The book covers all aspects of Kathrein s survival, beginning with the eerie moments just before the attack, when something smashes into Kathrein s hand as...
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Restless Wave
With this critically acclaimed 1940 memoir, pioneering Japanese writer and activist Ayako Ishigaki made history. Restless Wave is the first book written in English by a Japanese woman, introducing Western readers to a largely unknown world;...
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Limping through Life
Families throughout the United States lived in fear of polio throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, and now the disease had come to our farm. I can still remember that short winter day and the chilly night when I first showed symptoms. My life...
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Swallow the Ocean
Charismatic, beautiful Sally Flynn was the center of her daughters' imaginations, particularly Laura's. Without warning, life as they knew it changed as paranoid schizophrenia overtook Sally. Whether it was accusing Laura’s father of trying to win...
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Departures
Departures is Paul Zweig’s celebration of life and love. Zweig thought of himself as a sojourner, a contemporary Wandering Jew, a man with “a loose wire in his genes.” He led a number of distinct lives: as a Jewish child in Brooklyn and on...
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Entangled Lives
From my original blog review -“Lives” includes memoirs by Bill Brent, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Amie Evans, Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Ian Philips & Greg Wharton & Adam, and Rob Stephenson. My hands down favorites are the essays by Bill Brent and...
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My Judy Garland Life
An irresistible mixture of memoir, biography, cultural analysis, hero worship, and sequinstudded self-help that will speak to anyone who’s ever nursed an obsession. Judy Garland has been an important figure in Susie Boyt’s...
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Learning to Breathe
A searing and uplifting account of one woman’s spiritual journey from surviving a terrible accident to a triumphant ascent of Kilimanjaro On the second day of this century, world- renowned photojournalist Alison Wright was...
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In Fond Remembrance of Me
In the fall of 1977, Howard Norman went to Churchill, Manitoba, to translate Inuit folktales, and there he met Helen Tanizaki, an extraordinary linguist translating the same tales into Japanese. In Fond Remembrance of Me recaptures their...
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When the Piano Stops
Catherine McCall appeared to have all an American girl could want: well-to-do cosmopolitan parents, a private education, a strong faith foundation — even two baby grand pianos at her fingertips. But beneath this perfect façade, her family hid a...
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The Color of Love
Gene Cheek's devastating memoir of loss growing up in a poor family that suffered under untreated alcoholism and institutionalized racism and his lifelong pursuit of healing and forgiveness. Gene's first loss is the emotional loss of his...
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Praise of Motherhood
I thought I left the star rating here blank and I think it should remain blank but I guess I put four stars there for some reason so I guess I'll keep it for now. It makes no sense for me to give a book like this a rating. Not because it's bad or...
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I'm Down
Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. “He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esqe sweater, gold chains and a Kangol—telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving...
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My Foreign Cities
Growing out of a spellbinding “Modern Love” column in the New York Times, a fresh, wrenching story of young love and mortality.As a teenager, Elizabeth Scarboro imagined an adventurous future for herself in which...
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A Pepys Anthology
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703) is known as the first published diarist. His eleven-volume work, written between 1660 and 1669, was first published in 1825. Ever since, this chronicler of his time has held readers' fascination. The essential anthology of...
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Maggie's American Dream
This inspiring black family success story centers on an exceptional woman, Maggie Comer, whose American dream brought her from abject poverty in the rural South to become the mother of five outstanding achievers. Told first through Maggie's own...
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Poster Child
Emily Rapp was born with a congenital defect that required, at the age of four, that her left foot be amputated. By the time she was eight she'd had dozens of operations and her entire leg below the knee had been amputated. She had also become the...
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My Body Is a Book of Rules
As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from...
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Leap
With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval...
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Blackbird
With the startling emotional immediacy of a fractured family photo album, Jennifer Lauck's incandescent memoir is the story of an ordinary girl growing up at the turn of the 1970s and the truly extraordinary circumstances of a childhood lost....
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The Man I Might Become
Few men, straight or gay, find the father-son relationship easy, which explains why men's groups overflow with stories of fathers who ignored, brutalized, or otherwise wounded their sons. But gay men find the subject particularly problematic: When...
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Like Sound Through Water
A mother knows when something is wrong with her child. If the problem is physical, she takes the child to a doctor. But if the problem is a misunderstanding of her child's mind, where does she turn for help? This is Ben's story. He was a...
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Shirt of Flame
I'm going to start with my only quibble about this book, partly to get it out of the way: Shirt of Flame is structured as one of those "I did X for a year and now I'm writing a book about it" memoirs that are all over the place right now, but it...
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My Teenage Werewolf
"Straight from the trenches, a mom's tale of weathering her daughter's transformation from sweetheart to snark mouth." - PeopleWith the eye of a reporter, the curiosity of an anthropologist, and the open-and...
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Safe from the Past
"Riveting!", "Gripping", "A Motivational Tour De Force". A kidnapping, the divorce of her parents, the loss of her father, temporary abandonment and extreme poverty are just some of the issues the author dealt with as a young child....
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Bad Girl
Three years ago, fifteen year old Abigail Vona lived a life so far out of control (booze, boys, drugs, stealing, and runaway charges) that her father committed her to Peninsula Village, a controversial treatment facility for "behavior modification"...
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Pretty is What Changes
A timely, affecting memoir from the front lines of medical science: When genetics can predict how we may die, how then do we decide how to live?Eleven months after her mother succumbs to cancer, Jessica Queller has...
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Love Among the Daughters
This memoir is subtitled, "Memories of the Twenties in England and America." It begins when Elspeth Huxley moves to England in order to attend school, staying, at first, with her Aunt Madge and a colorful family at Nathan's Orchard, a...
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Nackt schlafen ist bio
Ist Duschen im Dunkeln wirklich sinnvoll, um Strom zu sparen? Wofür entscheidest du dich, wenn im Supermarkt der gespritzte Granny Smith aus der Region neben dem Bioapfel aus Neuseeland liegt? Und welche Shampoo-Experimente aus der...
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Wanted
Interweaving his own story with moving vignettes and gritty experiences in hidden places, a jail chaplain and minister to Mexican gang and migrant worker communities chronicles his spiritual journey to the margins of society and reveals a subversive...
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The House on Dream Street
In this heartfelt memoir, Dana Sachs takes the reader on a sensual and textured voyage to a country most Americans think about only in terms of war. A finalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award, this deftly written narrative reveals how Sachs...
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Curriculum Vitae
This autobiography, now in paperback, offers a wonderfully vivid account of the people and places that inspired so much of Muriel Spark's writing, such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Here, readers will find high comedy, betrayal, rigorous...
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Surviving Freedom
In 1941, as a Red Army soldier fighting the Nazis on the Belarussian front, Janusz Bardach was arrested, court-martialed, and sentenced to ten years of hard labor. Twenty-two years old, he had committed no crime. He was one of millions swept up in...
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'Tis (Frank McCourt, #2)
The sequel to Frank McCourt's memoir of his Irish Catholic boyhood, Angela's Ashes, picks up the story in October 1949, upon his arrival in America. Though he was born in New York, the family had returned to Ireland due to poor prospects in...
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Captain of My Soul
In 2007, I was a young and naive college sophomore. My main concern was being selected to join a prestigious black sorority. Although I was initially apprehensive due to rumors of hazing and pledging, I soon embraced those rumors, wholeheartedly...
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Disguised as a Poem
When Judith Tannenbaum last met with her poetry writing class at San Quentin prison, one of the students commented, "Now I'm going to give you an assignment: write about these past four years from your point of view; tell your story; let us know...
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First Comes Love
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year When Marion Winik fell in love with Tony Heubach during a wild Mardi Gras in New Orleans, her friends shook their heads. For starters, she was straight and he was gay. But Marion and...
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The Duke of Deception
Duke Wolff was a flawless specimen of the American clubman—a product of Yale and the OSS, a one-time fighter pilot turned aviation engineer. Duke Wolff was a failure who flunked out of a series of undistinguished schools, was passed up for military...
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Licking the Spoon
Recipes and cookbooks, meals and mouthfuls have framed the way Candace Walsh sees the world for as long as she can remember, from her frosting-spackled childhood to her meat-eschewing college years to her post-college phase as a devoted Martha...
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Epilogue
Widowed novelist, near seventy, ex-Park Avenue girl, ex-beatnik, ex-many other things too complicated to list here, loves big parties, summers at the beach, grandchildren, seeks interesting man for dinner and a...
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Cartwheels in a Sari
In this colorful, eye-opening memoir, Jayanti Tamm offers an unforgettable glimpse into the hidden world of growing up cult in mainstream America. Through Jayanti's fascinating story - the first book to chronicle Sri Chinmoy, she unmasks a leader...
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Big As All Hell And Half Of Texas
Following the author's wildly beloved award-winning Overlay and City of Angeles memoirs, Big As All Hell And Half Of Texas continues the author's story. This final volume candidly explores the pertinent societal question: how does an ill-equipped...
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I Could Tell You Stories
In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or...
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When We Were on Fire
In the strange, us-versus-them Christian subculture of the 1990s, a person’s faith was measured by how many WWJD bracelets she wore and whether he had kissed dating goodbye. Evangelical poster child Addie Zierman wore three bracelets asking...
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Found
Found is Jennifer Lauck's sequel to her New York Times bestseller Blackbird: A Childhood Lost and Found. More than one woman’s search for her biological parents, Found is a story of loss, adjustment, and survival....
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Young Widower
John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania, when they set off with friends to hike into the...
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The Mighty Queens of Freeville
Amy Dickinson has made a career out of helping others, through her internationally syndicated advice column "Ask Amy." Readers love her for her honesty, her small-town values, and for the fact that her motto is "I make the mistakes so you don't have...
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Incognegro
“[Frank B.] Wilderson [will] become a major American writer. Mark my word.”—Ishmael ReedIn 1995, a South African journalist informed Frank B. Wilderson, one of only two American members of the African National Congress (ANC), that President...
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A Girl from Yamhill
Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful...
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Who Do You Think You Are?
After her mother's death, Alyse Myers covets only one thing: a wooden box that sits in the back of a closet. Its contents have been kept from her for her entire life. When she was thirteen years old her mother promised she could have the box, "when...
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The Ladies' Gallery
"Lolita Lebrón's granddaughter, heir to the most public female embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice in Puerto Rico in this century, [has written] a memoir full of searing, intimate truths, silences broken open to reveal the personal costs of...
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Operating Instructions
The most honest, wildly enjoyable book written about motherhood is surely Anne Lamott's account of her son Sam's first year. A gifted writer and teacher, Lamott (Crooked Little Heart) is a single mother and ex-alcoholic with a pleasingly...
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My Heart Lies South
(3.5 stars) This is the story of a mixed marriage: an American woman who married into a traditional Mexican family in the 1930's. The first half of the book left me under-impressed. The cross-cultural differences seemed clichéd and...
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Autobiography of a Wardrobe
Saddle shoes. Camp shorts. Girdles. Bell-bottoms. Each plays a significant role as we follow B., the wardrobe's owner, through her buttoned-up Midwestern childhood to the freedom of miniskirts, sundresses, and New York City. We watch as B. copes...
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Take This Man
From PEN/Hemingway award winner Brando Skyhorse comes this stunning, heartfelt memoir in the vein of The Glass Castle or The Tender Bar, the true story of a boy’s turbulent childhood growing up with five stepfathers and the mother who was determined...
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Cricket till I die!
Vineet was your average engineer at an IT firm. His office sucked the life out of him making him hate every moment he spent there. Cricket was his passion, a passion which he never had the guts to pursue until fate bestowed upon him an opportunity...
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Nyt ja aina
Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I...
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I Married the Klondike
In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25...
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Eightysixed
“Eightysixed is like a recipe for life and love and I feel honored to be one of the ingredients.” —Celebrity Chef Floris Versluijs Chicagoan Emily Belden has no idea what to do with her twenty-something life — particularly as it pertains to love —...
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Tell Me True
"The memoir has been, on the one hand, a startling success story in American publishing in the past quarter century. But it has also been literature's changeling, the bad apple, ever suspect, slightly illegitimate, a brassy parvenu talking too...
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Hell in the Pacific
In what may be the last memoir to be published by a living veteran of the pivotal invasion of Guadalcanal, which occurred almost seventy years ago, Marine Jim McEnery has teamed up with author Bill Sloan to create an unforgettable chronicle...
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Two Badges
With this riveting autobiography, Mona Ruiz and co-author Geoff Boucher spin a gripping tale of one woman’s private war to escape the tentacles of the street gangs that have carved her barrio into turfs where one misstep leads to violence....
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Floor Sample
A beautifully crafted memoir by the woman who has helped thousands of people uncover their creative inspiration. In Floor Sample, the author of the international bestseller The Artist's Way and twenty-one other classic...
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Hollywood
"One thing I’ve always liked about Hollywood is its zip, or speed. The whole industry depends to some extent on talent spotting. The hundreds of agents, studio executives, and producers who roam the streets of the city of Los Angeles let...
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A Moveable Famine
This is the story of a boy from working class Queens who discovers poetry, an unlikely obsession that leads him from a Jesuit college's all male, sex-starved campus to the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and then to the Iowa Writers Workshop. He makes up...
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Good Stock
Good Stock is the story of Sanford "Sandy" D'Amato's journey from young Italian kid who loved to cook to unknown culinary student with a passion for classical French cuisine to one of the most respected chefs and restaurateurs in the...
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No Saints Around Here
When we promise “in sickness and in health,” it may be a mercy that we don’t know exactly what lies ahead. Forcing food on an increasingly recalcitrant spouse. Brushing his teeth. Watching someone you love more than ever slip away day by day. As...
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Two-Part Invention (The Crosswicks Journal, #4)
"Since her debut with The Small Rain in 1945, L'Engle has continued to write critically acclaimed books for adults and young readers, including a Newbery Medal-winner, A Wrinkle in Time. But this story of her marriage surpasses her best work so far....
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