Empfehlungen basierend auf "Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated"

Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for BiographyLonglisted for The Orwell Prize for Political WritingAn electric portrait of the artist as a young woman that asks how a writer finds her voice in a society that prefers women to be silentIn Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit describes her formation as a writer and as a feminist in 1980s San Francisco, in an atmosphere of gender violence on the street and throughout society and the exclusion of women from cultural arenas. She tells of being poor, hopeful, and adrift in the city that became her great teacher, and of the small apartment that, when she was nineteen, became the home in which she transformed herself. She explores the forces that liberated her as a person and as a writer--books themselves; the gay community that presented a new model of what else gender, family, and joy could mean; and her eventual arrival in the spacious landscapes and overlooked conflicts of the American West.Beyond being a memoir, Solnit's book is also a passionate argument: that women are not just impacted by personal experience, but by membership in a society where violence against women pervades. Looking back, she describes how she came to recognize that her own experiences of harassment and menace were inseparable from the systemic problem of who has a voice, or rather who is heard and respected and who is silenced--and how she was galvanized to use her own voice for change.

“Rarely do memoirs of grief combine anguish, love, and fury with such elegance.” ― Entertainment Weekly In 2002, Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood―an accomplished novelist―was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter―“the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang ‘Eight Days a Week.’” One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and different forms, still held the family. What they could not know was that comfort would come, and in surprising ways. Hood traces her descent into grief and reveals how she found comfort and hope again―a journey to recovery that culminates with a newly adopted daughter.

This is the heartbreaking story of the murder of 16-year-old Bristol schoolgirl Becky Watts, a personal and heartfelt account of a crime that shocked the nation in a unique way and tore a family in two.

From the creator and star of Florida Girls comes a hilarious and profound memoir about family, happiness, and really aggressive acne.Despite having dirty-blonde hair and fair skin, Laura Chinn is mixed-race: the daughter of a Black father and a white mother, which on its own makes for some funny and insightful looks at identity. Laura’s parents were both Scientologists and nonconformists in myriad ways. They divorced early in Laura’s childhood, and she spent her teen years ping-ponging back and forth between Clearwater, Florida, and Los Angeles (with an extended stint in Tijuana for good measure).Laura lived alone and raised herself for long periods of time, but don’t worry! Her mom’s alcoholic boyfriend was always nearby to supervise. She also lost family members to horrific tragedies, started drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes when she was eleven years old, and dropped out of school when she was fifteen, all the while completely obsessed with and scarred by her severe acne condition.This is not a sad story. There is Jell-O wrestling. There is an abnormal amount of dancing. There is information about whether you can drink gallons of sangria while taking unregulated Accutane acquired in Mexico. But mostly there is love, and ultimately there is redemption. Laura explores her trauma through anecdotes riddled with grit and humor, proving that in the face of unspeakable tragedy, it is possible to find success, love, and self-acceptance, zits and all.

Winner of the California Bookseller Association's Golden Poppy Award for NonfictionFinalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for AutobiographyA San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller“A portrait of a heroics, innovation, grit, and pot-baking . . . strikingly relevant . . . beautifully written.”—Entertainment Weekly"A raunchy and rollicking account of a vanished era told by someone who paid very close attention to her larger-than-life parents. I gobbled it up like an edible."—Armistead MaupinIn the 1970s, when cannabis was as illicit as heroin, Alia Volz’s mother ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, a pioneering underground bakery that delivered ten thousand marijuana edibles per month to a city in the throes of change—from the joyous upheavals of gay liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple. Dressed in elaborate costumes, Alia’s parents hid in plain sight, parading through the city’s circus-like atmosphere with the goods tucked into her stroller. When HIV/AIDS swept San Francisco in the 1980s, Alia’s mom turned from dealer into healer, providing soothing edibles to those fighting for their lives at the dawn of medical marijuana.By turns heartbreaking, exhilarating, and laugh-out-loud funny, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.Now with extra material, including a reading group guide, author Q&A, and additional photos!

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience―does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful―I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!"So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag's voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag's complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself―all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

In a beautifully written, science-packed, and inspirational memoir, Egyptian-American astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance shares how she boldly carved out a place in the field of astrophysics, grounding herself in a lifelong love of the stars to face life’s inevitable challenges and embrace the unknown. As a child, Sarafina El-Badry Nance spent nearly every evening with her father gazing up at the flickering stars and pondering what secrets the night sky held. The daughter of an American father and Egyptian mother who both pushed her toward academic excellence, Sarafina dreamed of becoming an astronomer and untangling the mysteries of the stars overhead. But it wasn’t long before she was told, both explicitly and implicitly, that girls just weren’t cut out for math and science. In Starstruck, Sarafina invites us to consider the cosmos through fascinating science lessons to open each chapter. But she also traces more earthbound obstacles—of misogyny and racism, abuse and intergenerational trauma, anxiety and self-doubt, cancer diagnoses and recovery—she faced along the way. As her career and passion for space brought her from UT Austin to UC Berkeley, and even to a Mars astronaut simulation in Hawai’i, Sarafina learned how to survive—and ultimately thrive—in a space that was seldom welcoming to women, and especially not to women of color.   Honest and empowering, Starstruck sits at the intersection of the study of our cosmos—itself constantly changing—and the transformative experience of embracing resilience to pursue one’s passion.

The memoirs of Mary Rodgers—writer, composer, Broadway royalty, and “a woman who tried everything.”“What am I, bologna?” Mary Rodgers (1931–2014) often said. She was referring to being stuck in the middle of a talent sandwich: the daughter of one composer and the mother of another. And not just any composers. Her father was Richard Rodgers, perhaps the greatest American melodist; her son, Adam Guettel, a worthy successor. What that leaves out is Mary herself, also a composer, whose musical Once Upon a Mattress remains one of the rare revivable Broadway hits written by a woman. Shy is the story of how it all happened: how Mary grew from an angry child, constrained by privilege and a parent’s overwhelming gift, to become not just a theater figure in her own right but also a renowned author of books for young readers (including the classic Freaky Friday) and, in a final grand turn, a doyenne of philanthropy and the chairman of the Juilliard School. But in telling these stories—with copious annotations, contradictions, and interruptions from Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times—Shy also tells another, about a woman liberating herself from disapproving parents and pervasive sexism to find art and romance on her own terms. Whether writing for Judy Holliday or Rin Tin Tin, dating Hal Prince or falling for Stephen Sondheim over a game of chess at thirteen, Rodgers grabbed every chance possible—and then some. Both an eyewitness report from the golden age of American musical theater and a tale of a woman striving for a meaningful life, Shy is, above all, a chance to sit at the feet of the kind of woman they don’t make anymore—and never did. They make themselves.

"When Truddi chase began therapy she was already building a successful carrer, a marriage, and a family. But what she was seeking most were explanations for her extreme anxiety, mood swings, and periodic blackouts..."-- Back cover.