biography & autobiography / women

"A ... biography that places an obsessive, unrequited love at the heart of the writer's life story, transforming her from the tragic figure we have previously known into a smoldering Jane Eyre. Famed for her beloved novels, Charlotte Bront? has been known as well for her insular, tragic family life... This biography ... delves behind this image to reveal a life in which loss and heartache existed alongside rebellion and fierce ambition"--Provided by publisher.

"A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"--Provided by publisher.

"This...dual biography brings to life a pioneering English feminist and the daughter she never knew. Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley have each been the subject of numerous biographies, yet no one has ever examined their lives in one book - until now. In 'Romantic Outlaws,' Charlotte Gordon reunites the...author who wrote 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' and the Romantic visionary who gave the world 'Frankenstein'- two courageous women who should have shared their lives, but instead shared a powerful literary and feminist legacy" --amazon.com.

Shares the author's memories of growing up in the South as the daughter of a small-town undertaker.

Allison Moore's account of her life as a Hawaii vice cop who became addicted to meth which eventually led her to a life of prostitution, torture, and prison. She found the strength to escape her addiction and during her rehabilitation she began to redeem herself by apologizing for the many deceptions (among them faking major illnesses) she perpetrated with her police collegues and other friends, as well as her own family.

In this witty and warm memoir of her family's life in rural Vermont, Shirley Jackson exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist's gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.

On March 26, 1942, the first mass registered transport of Jews arrived in Auschwitz--all young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two. Among those nine hundred and ninety-seven young Jewish women was #1716, Rena Kornreich, a Pole hiding in Slovakia. A few days later, her sister Danka #2779 arrived and so began a trial of love and courage that would last three years and forty-one days, from the beginning of the Auschwitz death camp, to the death march, and on to the end of the war. Rena's Promise stands out from other Holocaust memoirs not only in the length of time she spent in the camps, but in the spirit of love she maintains throughout her ordeal. No other survivor from the first transport has ever written about her experience (too few survived) when the women's camp was part of the men's camp, and the only men were Polish and Russian POWs. Within a few days that would all change.

Twenty-two-year old Su Meck was married and the mother of two children in 1988 when a ceiling fan in the kitchen of her home fell from its mounting and struck her in the head. She survived the life-threatening swelling in her brain that resulted from the accident, but when she regained consciousness in the hospital the next day, she didn't know her own name. She didn't recognize a single family member or friend, she couldn't read or write or brush her teeth or use a fork--and she didn't have even a scrap of memory from her life up to that point. The fiercely independent and outspoken young woman she had been vanished completely. Most patients who suffer amnesia as a result of a head injury eventually regain their memories, but Su never did. After three weeks in the hospital she was sent back out into a world about which she knew nothing: What did it mean to be someone's wife? To be a mother? How did everyone around her seem to know what they were supposed to do or say at any given moment? Adrift in the chaos of mental data that most of us think of as everyday life, Su became an adept mimic, fashioning a self and a life out of careful observation and ironclad routine. She had no dreams for herself, no plans outside the ever-burgeoning daily to-do list of a stay-at-home mom. The Meck family left Texas to start over in Maryland, and told almost no one in their new life about Su's accident. Nearly twenty years would pass before Su understood the full extent of the losses she and her family suffered as a result of her injury. As a series of personally devastating events shattered the "normal" life she had worked so hard to build, Su realized that she would have to grow up all over again, and finally take control of the strange second life she had awoken into.

A memoir of Jenifer Ringer, principal dancer with the New York City Ballet, discussing her childhood, her journey to from student to star, her struggle with an eating disorder, and her professional career.

"In 1994, director Peter Jackson released the movie Heavenly Creatures, based on a famous 1950s matricide committed in New Zealand by two teenage girls embroiled in an obsessive relationship. The movie launched Jackson's international career. It also forever changed the life of Anne Perry, an award-winning, bestselling crime writer, who at the time of the movie's release was publicly outed at Juliet Hulme, one of the murderers. A new light was now cast, not only on Anne's life but also on her novels, which feature gruesome and violent deaths and confront dark issues, including infanticide and incest. Acclaimed literary biographer Joanne Drayton was given unparalleled access to Anne Perry, her friends, relatives, colleagues, and archives to complete this book. She intersperses the story of her life with an examination of her writing, drawing parallels between Perry's own experiences and her characters and storylines. Anne Perry's books deal with miscarriages of justice, family secrets exposed, punishment, redemption, and forgiveness, themes made all the more poignant in light of her past. She has sold 25 million books worldwide and published in 15 different languages, yet she will now forever be known as a murderer who became a writer of murder stories. The Search for Anne Perry is a gripping account of a life, and provides understanding of the girl Anne was, the adult she became, her compulsion to write, and her view of the world. "--.