Memoirs Books

In this hard-hitting collection of essays, D.B. Maroon presents a personal biography of America, Blackness, and racial politics with unflinching style, and delivers a relentless truth-telling on some of the country's fiercest debates and most profound...

This celebrated memoir, one of the most notable literary debuts of 2023 tells of a young woman's coming-of-age in the bohemian '90s, as her adolescence gives way to a struggle with dissociative disorder.Alice Carrire tells the story of her unconventional...

Whether you hike, bike, camp, climb, hunt, ride, paddle, paint, garden-whatever way you get out and enjoy nature, you leave an impact on the outdoors every time you step out your front door. Every step your boots take down dusty trails, every bolt your...

Bev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years, working next to a man described by theNew York Timesas "arguably the most important intellectual...

Martha Shelley didn't start out in life wanting to become a gay activist, or an activist of any kind. The daughter of Jewish refugees and undocumented immigrants in New York City, she grew up during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and 1950s, was...

From the depths of the '70s rock 'n' roll excesses through unimaginable personal losses to an inspiring late-life transformation, Cidny Bullens's story is an utterly compelling journey about living and singing with your authentic voice.An androgynous...

Lisa Cornwell never shied away from standing up to bullies.When she was a freshman in college, she saw a manhit a woman in the face with a closed fist while aparalyzed crowd stood by and watched. Secondslater, she took matters into her own hands-with...

You want to know why dying is like orgasm? Blayney Colmore, thirty years an Episcopal priest and life escort, explains: Does death make hash of all our efforts? Is there a dimension beyond what we know? Can normal people access it? As we burn down our...

All Of Us Together In The End is a lyrical examination of transformation after loss, by a writer the New York Times calls "irresistible" and "utterly convincing."Vollmer's family memoir shimmers with wonder and enchantment and begins with the death of...

How does a secular, non-practising Jew who has lived most of her life outside the Jewish communitysuddenly find herself in the front rows of a Nazi war crimes tribunal?In 2015, the award-winning writer Judith Kalman was invited to Lneburg to testify at...

Dispatches from modern motherhood by a reluctant suburbaniteSend Me Into The Woods Alone is an honest, heartfelt, and often hilarious collection of essays on the joys, struggles, and complexities of motherhood.These essays touch on the major milestones...

Up-Rooted: Climbing Through Family Chaos details the conflict in T.J. Kyri's life, from marriage to adoption to divorce, despite being a conflict resolution professional. It describes her harrowing mission to adopt her older daughters from Ukraine and...

When the Bough Breaks, True Stories of Hope and Encouragement of Mothers Who Have Had to Reinvent Their Relationships with Their Children, seeks to shed light on that moment when Mom has to reach into the well of courage and ask for outside help.

The beard was never far from my mind. Twice daily, I shaved. I blended foundation into my skin with a practiced touch. I hoped for the miracle that never showed its face: smooth skin instead of the prickly surface I felt every time I ran my hand across...

"I loved-and to a slightly uncomfortable degree related to-this book."Charles Bethea, staff writer at The New YorkerFunny, perceptive, and deeply personal, Mediocre Monk follows Grant Lindsley's rocky journey toward spiritual growth-one that ultimately...

IPPY Awards Gold Medal Winner in the memoir categoryColorado Independent Book Publishers Association (CIPA) Gold Medal Winner in the memoir categoryNational Indie Excellence Awards finalist in the new non-fiction categoryA deeply personal memoir about...

True stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told through five generations of a Shanghai family, from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.A high position bestowed by China's empress dowager grants power and wealth to the Sun family...

Engaging, funny, and unflinching essays about coming of age as a transplant patient and living each day as a giftAdina Talve-Goodman was born with a congenital heart condition and survived multiple operations over the course of her childhood, including a...

Winner of the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award * 2022 Nautilus Book Awards Gold Winner * Shortlisted for the John Burroughs Medal * Finalist for the Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize * Shortlisted for a Reading the West...

HONORABLE MENTION, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award, Autobiography & Memoir!Lifelong activist Judy Gumbo, an original member of The Yippies, a 1960s anti-war satirical protest group, offers an insider feminist memoir of her involvement with the...

As necessary conversations about racism, state violence, and the legacy of American slavery continue, it is important to consider the myriad forms of violence that living in a racialized society can take. In We Are Bridges, Cassandra Lane explores the...

In this disarming and candid memoir, cultural critic Clarkisha Kent unpacks the kind of compounded problems you face when you're a fat, Black, queer woman in a society obsessed with heteronormativity.There was no easy way for Kent to navigate personal...

"We were invisible. We had to be. We took an oath of absolute secrecy. We never even told our immediate families who we were. We went about our lives in New York City. Just like you. We were your accountants, money managers, lawyers, executive...

Winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, The Loved Ones presents an intimate portrait of family grief, for fans of Maggie Nelson's Jane: A Murder and Kristin Prevallet's I, AfterlifeThere are so many ways to bury the dead. In an autobiographical series of...

In (Low)life, Charles Farrell lets the public in on his gripping, harrowing, rich, and often amusing life that transverses his path from a teenage jazz prodigy, to mob-involved boxing fight-fixer, to his business partnership with the legendary Floyd...

Nonwhite and Woman celebrates how women of color live and thrive in the world, and how they make their lives their own. The anthology's title is from Lucille Clifton's luminous poem, "won't you celebrate with me," which serves as the anthology's epigraph.

Adam Lorenzo owned a college bar while attending college at Syracuse University. No joke. Working and laughing with people from all over the world, he learned invaluable life lessons in that cathedral of knowledge known as a . . . college bar! Adam...

In his late thirties, John Julius Reel left his native New York for Seville, hoping to reinvent himself, find his voice as a writer, and cast off the shadow of his famous father. When his girlfriend dumped him after a month-long visit, the last tie was...

A touching and thought-provoking account of how a woman explored a spectrum of religions--ancient and new--and ended up, unexpectedly, becoming a bona fide witch--plus a celebration of modern Wicca and witchcraft, spell books, broomsticks, holiday...

Joseph Di Prisco's anticipated memoir brings the hustler, gambler, criminal, bookmaker, and confidential informer-Joe's father-back to life, and reveals the fascinating and unsettling truths that simultaneously bound and separated father and son. On the...

Beth Kephart is a writing teacher and the award-winning author of more than thirty books; her many fans and students will embrace this intimate and beautiful memoir in essays The author's books on how to write memoir as well as previous memoirs have...

In this searing, honest memoir, a Black queer emergency-room nurse works the front lines of care during COVID-19.Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been...

As the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Anna Salton Eisen's memoir, Pillar of Salt: A Daughter's Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust, breaks down the barrier of silence that was intended as a protective shield for her parents and their children. From...

Nicholas Ray was cinema. The legendary director of such classic films as Rebel Without a Cause was an innovative force who dramatically changed the Hollywood landscape. He was also Nicca Ray's dad, Nick. After he disappeared from her life in...

"Engrossing ... The book reads like a detective story."-The Washington PostIt all started with a list of paintings. There, scribbled by a cousin she hadn't seen for years, were the names of the masters whose works once belonged to her great-grandfather,...

This singular autobiography unfurls from author Marina Jarre's native Latvia during the 1920s and 30s, and expands southward to the Italian countryside. In distinctive writing as poetic as it is precise, Jarre depicts an exceptionally multinational and...

In autumn 1942, Anna Goldenberg's great-grandparents and one of their sons are deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Hans, their elder son, hides in Nazi-controlled Vienna, and never sees his family again. Goldenberg reconstructs this unique...

The Silver Invicta is a stream of impressions from a fishing life, in its varying moods, coloured with plenty of whisky and eccentric company. Join Tom Harland on his light-hearted journeys with his fly rod; take part in his triumphs and disasters on...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

In 2003 the former Women's Press editor and critic Sarah LeFanu published her acclaimed biography of Rose Macaulay with Virago Press.'A magnificent job ... imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information ... LeFanu offers a skilled, visual,...

An urgent, funny, shocking, and impassioned memoir by the winner of the Spectrum Art Prize 2018, How To Be Autistic presents the rarely shown point of view of someone living with autism.Poe's voice is confident, moving and often funny, as they reveal to...

'Where is home, Mum?' From the foothills of the Himalayas in the Kashmiri valleys to bustling Green Street in East London, Sabba Khan researches her identity from the global to the local, covering partition, displacement, and clothing choices for an...

Looking to commission an introduction from a fan of Norah Lange's previous works. Translated by award winning translator Charlotte Whittle and we may commission translators note. First translation in English of Norah Lange's memoir. An influential...

How would you make sense of your life if you thought it might end tomorrow? In this captivating and best-selling memoir Vesna Goldsworthy tells the story of herself, her family and her early life in her lost country. There follows marriage, a move to...

In the late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites travelled from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour following their path, fascinated...

Karoline Kan was born in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre: her generation has always been caught between China's authoritarian politics and its hyper-modern technology and economic boom. In her quest to understand the shifting sands of...

The emotion and trauma of the Partition are buried deep, but Aanchal Malhotra has found a way to recover them. Through the possessions saved by her own great-grandparents as they fled their homes, she discovers the unique power of such objects: to unlock...