Childhood Biography

In this insightful, emotional, and thought provoking memoir, fashion mogul Blake Martin bares his soul and guides his audience through his childhood trauma. Through entertaining stories and brutal honesty, Martin stands on the pedestal of his truth.

The eldest daughter of the Times Square “King of Porn”, Romola Hodas recounts her chaotic childhood amid the turmoil of publicly growing up as the daughter of the man who almost single-handedly built New York City’s pornography and adult entertainment empire from the 1960s to the 1980s before his spectacular and public fall from grace.

As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats. She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother. Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

Adopted at six months old by Dubliners Sean and Helen Gallagher, PJ spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - Helen took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story.

In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn's teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving. Before she was a best-selling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.

Kitty Baxter was born in London in 1930, the daughter of a road sweeper and a cleaner and one of five children. War broke out just as Kitty turned nine and she became one of thousands of children evacuated to the countryside. This would be the first of three times that she was rehoused far from home over the course of the war. Sometimes treated more like a servant than a small child, Kitty endured gruelling years cut off from her parents rather than a safe haven from war.

When Jill Sitnick sat on her therapist’s couch trying to stop the panic attack that had lasted for months, she didn’t know she would eventually heal her deeply embedded childhood trauma with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. In Rescuing Jill, Jill shows you why it took a year, and multiple journeys, to fully heal. By describing how MDMA let her view her father’s beatings and mother’s suicide attempts from her adult perspective, she gives you a front-row seat into how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy healed her trauma and transformed her life.

Every great author started out as a kid. Before the best sellers, fan clubs, and beloved stories we know today, the world's most celebrated writers had regular-kid problems just like you. Sam Clemens (aka Mark Twain) loved to skip school and make mischief, with his best friend Tom, of course! A young J. R. R. Tolkien was bitten by a huge tarantula - or as he called it, "a spider as big as a dragon." Toddler Zora Neale Hurston took her first steps when a wild hog entered her house and started chasing her!

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir - the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman) - a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

These are the exotic, funny and sometimes bittersweet family stories and photos of an overseas childhood told by the daughter of a State Department diplomat about her family's travels and experiences living overseas from 1957 to 1972. She and her six brothers spent their childhoods in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Ethiopia. Through her stories, the listener can begin to appreciate the adaptability of children to other cultures and the fortitude and courage of parents trying to raise their children to be good citizens of the world as well as good Americans.

When the Bible talks about the third- and fourth-generational curse, that's so true. If the curse is not broken by you, then who will stop it dead in its tracks? Fierce Wholeness: Finding Myself After Childhood Emotional Trauma is Robin's story—in all of its raw and messy but authentic and beautiful transparency—as she seeks to repair the dam that had been busted, the riverbed that had been washed away, the landscape that had been obliterated by her family of origin. Listeners who grew up in the clutches of the branches of emotional abuse will be empowered by Robin's story.

Vinnie Curto was born in East Boston, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1955. His father Jimmy Curto was a raving, sick, alcoholic homosexual. Vinnie’s father and his drunken friends sexually abused young Vinnie, frequently raping him and performing other deviant sexual acts on him, while his mother Loretta stood by and let it happen.

World-renowned poet and Professor of African American Studies at U.C., Berkeley, June Jordan writes a deeply personal memoir of her formative years. June recalls her childhood experiences and reveals the duality of her parents’ influence on her stellar achievement as a poet. The first 12 years in Harlem were both peaceful and tumultuous for June, as she was raised the daughter of dirt-poor West Indian immigrants.

Growing up in a Chinese takeaway in rural Wales, Angela Hui was exposed from a very young age the struggle of being East Asian in Britain. From attacks on the shopfront (in other words, their home), to verbal abuse from customers and confrontations that ended with her dad wielding the meat cleaver, life growing up in a takeaway was far from peaceful. But alongside the strife, there was also beauty in the rhythm and joy that came from living in the takeaway and being surrounded by the food of her home culture.

Nowhere Like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on Earth. It’s steeped in thinly-veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.

That afternoon was the last time the high-school Patriots would see one another for weeks; some teammates they'd never see again. Hurricane Katrina was about to tear their lives apart. Hurricane Season is the story of a great football coach, his team, his family, and their school - and a remarkable fight back from shocking tragedy.

From Giller-nominated, award-winning Bill Gaston, a tender, wry, and unforgettable memoir about alcohol, fishing, and all the things fathers and sons won't say to each other.

In Outside the Box, you will listen to chapters written by nine contributing authors, each of whom is a female entrepreneur, mom, and world traveler. Authors have committed to sharing their families journeys in the hopes of educating and inspiring other travel-loving moms.

From the ghetto paved and unpaved streets of Indianapolis, Indiana, this book begins telling the story of one fat kid's rise from the projects, to his fall serving over seven years in as many prisons, and how he was able to come out a prison scholar. That led to him to writing 18 phenomenal books about redemption and attending Georgia State University, graduating number one in his undergraduate class. He earned a 4.13 GPA and went on to grad school, where he excelled, graduating at top of his class, before becoming a very popular African-American Studies professor at Georgia State University.

One of the best-loved men in Britain, Alan Titchmarsh brilliantly recalls his childhood in 1950s Yorkshire. Alan Titchmarsh grew up and developed his passion for nature in the wild and beautiful landscape of Yorkshire. A real treat for his millions of fans, the ever-popular presenter vividly depicts a childhood of simple pleasures like climbing trees and fishing in streams in a time of post-war austerity.