women authors, american

The acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut is a memoir about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager within the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking social and racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight. As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance--from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoes, she had plenty to envy. But beneath the surface, life in "the rat's mouth" of Boca Raton was dangerous. Left to her own devices as both parents battled drug addiction, Kira navigated the perils of coming of age too quickly, and without guidance--oblivious parents and misguided babysitters at home, tormentors at school, sexual predators at the mall, and the confused, often destructive, desperately loving friendship of fatherless girls. With unflinching honesty and moving, lyrical prose, and spanning from 1960's Hawai'i to the nip and tuck rooms of 1990s Florida to the present-day struggle of a young woman in a culture of harassment, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is the story of families both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

"Goodbye to All That is a collection of essays about loving and leaving the magical city of New York. Inspired by Joan Didion's well-loved essay by the same name, this anthology features the experiences of 28 women for whom the magic of the city has worn off-whether because of loneliness after many friends marry, have kids, and head to the suburbs; jadedness about their careers; or difficulty finding true love in a place where everyone is always looking to trade up to a better mate, a better job, a better apartment. With contributions from authors such as Cheryl Strayed, Ann Hood, Dani Shapiro, and Emma Straub, this collection is relatable to anyone who arrived with stars in their eyes, hoping to make it. Each essay reveals the author's own unique relationship with New York City, and together they encompass the complicated emotions all New Yorkers have about leaving"--.

""In this wondrous and richly detailed coming of age story, Tyler Wetherall follows the breadcrumbs of her childhood to discover a family home that is unlike any other." --Katy Lederer, author of Poker Face Tyler had lived in fifteen houses and five countries by the time she was nine. She didn't think this was strange until Scotland Yard showed up in her bucolic English village, and she discovered her family had been living a lie. Her father was a fugitive and their family name was an alias. They had been living in California back in 1983 when the Feds originally caught up with her dad; it was the same year Tyler was born. Her parents decided to go on the run with the three young children, and they spent the next few years traveling across Europe, assuming different identities, living in a series of beautiful places, from Portugal to Tuscany, paid for with drug money. Now her dad had fled once more, except this time he didn't take her with him. Despite the danger involved, for the following two years he flew Tyler and her siblings out to see him in secret wherever he was in hiding, until on her 12th birthday Scotland Yard followed Tyler to the Caribbean island of Saint Lucia, where her father was eventually captured. It was over the summers spent visiting her dad in prison in California, as she grew into an increasingly self-destructive teenager, that he told her the truth about his criminal life. He had been a pot smuggler in the seventies, and his organization had b[r]ought in marijuana worth nearly a half billion dollars from Thailand. In this emotionally detailed and carefully wrought memoir about growing up as a fugitive's daughter, Tyler Wetherall pieces together the story of her parents' past, which ultimately helps her understand her own" --.

"Born into a world of make-believe as the daughter of a larger-than-life film producer, Joan Juliet Buck's childhood was a whirlwind of famous faces, ever-changing home addresses, and a fascination with the shiny surfaces of things. When Joan became the first and only American woman ever to fill Paris Vogue's coveted position of Editor-in-Chief, a "figurehead in the cult of fashion and beauty," she had the means to recreate for her aging father, now a widower, the life he'd enjoyed during his high-flying years, a splendid illusion of glamorous excess that could not be sustained indefinitely"--Back cover.

This volume, covering entries A-D, presents essays offering critical, biographical, and bibliographical information on each writer.

In the 1970s, Nigeria is flush with oil money, building new universities, and hanging on to old colonial habits. Abeer Hoque is a Bangladeshi girl growing up in a small sunlit town, where the red clay earth, corporal punishment and running games are facts of life. At thirteen she moves with her family to suburban Pittsburgh and finds herself surrounded by clouded skies and high schoolers who speak in movie quotes and pop culture slang. Finding her place as a young woman in America proves more difficult than she can imagine. Disassociated from her parents, and laid low by academic pressure and spiralling depression, she is committed to a psychiatric ward in Philadelphia. When she moves to Bangladesh on her own, it proves to be yet another beginning for someone who is only just getting used to being an outsider - wherever she is. Arresting and beautifully written, with poems and weather conditions framing each chapter, Olive Witch is an intimate memoir about taking the long way home.

"A memoir of mothers and daughters -- and mothers as daughters -- traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Mauscreator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers -- French-born New Yorker art director Fran?oise Mouly -- exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand," their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother's past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Fran?oise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. It had taken an ocean to allow Fran?oise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother's memories contradicted her mother's at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in this gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir, which helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most"--.

"Discusses the life and works of author Suzanne Collins"--.

In this invigorating mix of natural history and adventure, artist-naturalist Ellen Meloy uses turquoise?the color and the gem?to probe deeper into our profound human attachment to landscape. From the Sierra Nevada, the Mojave Desert, the Yucatan Peninsula, and the Bahamas to her home ground on the high plateaus and deep canyons of the Southwest, we journey with Meloy through vistas of both great beauty and great desecration. Her keen vision makes us look anew at ancestral mountains, turquoise seas, and even motel swimming pools. Throughout, Meloy invites us to appreciate along with her the endless surprises in all of life and celebrates the seduction to be found in our visual surroundings.

Children's author Helen Lester describes her life from age three to adulthood and discusses how she writes.