Memoir Relationship

A unique survivor memoir. Essays that range from heartwarming to brutal. Individual trigger warnings (TW) allow listeners to practice self-care. Washington State native Mary Knight, MSW, experienced various forms of child sex trafficking, sometimes in her own home. Her parents were her pimps. Knight's current life is filled with safety, love, joy, and children. Happily married, she is a child advocate, a foster parent, and a grandmother.

Ashley is a young single mum raising her daughter, Eden, and working hard to do the very best job she can - until one night she can't find a babysitter and makes the decision to leave Eden home alone for a couple of hours, asleep inside a wardrobe. It is an action that begins a terrible downward spiral for both of them. When Eden arrives at experienced foster carer Louise Allen's home, she has entered the care system because her mother is in prison. Eden is five years old and will not speak to any human.

Timea Nagy was 20 years old when she answered a newspaper ad in Budapest, Hungary, calling for young women to work as babysitters and housekeepers in Canada. Hired by what seemed like a legitimate recruitment agency, Timea left her home believing she would earn good money to send back to her family. What she didn't know was that she'd been lured by a ring of international human traffickers - and her life would never again be the same.

Elizabeth Berg’s father was an Army veteran who was a tough man in every way but one: He showed a great deal of love and tenderness to his wife. Berg describes her parents’ marriage as a romance that lasted for nearly 70 years; she grew up watching her father kiss her mother upon leaving home, and kiss her again the instant he came back. His idea of when he should spend time away from her was never. But then her father developed Alzheimer’s disease, and her parents were forced to leave the home they loved and move into a facility that could offer them help.

In this irresistible memoir, the New York Times best-selling author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize Anna Quindlen writes about looking back and ahead - and celebrating it all - as she considers marriage, girlfriends, our mothers, faith, loss, all the stuff in our closets, and more. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life.

David and Tamela Mann have been married for 30 years, but the singers, actors, and entrepreneurs are just as, if not more than, happily in love as they were in the early days of their relationship. In their new audiobook, the couple will relate the story of their first encounters as teenagers, the importance of communication, and how they’ve been able to keep that spark burning through all these years.

At once provocative and laugh-out-loud funny, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother ignited a global parenting debate with its story of one mother’s journey in strict parenting. Amy Chua argues that Western parenting tries to respect and nurture children’s individuality, while Chinese parents typically believe that arming children with skills, strong work habits, and inner confidence prepares them best for the future.

The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple best-selling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence - a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life.

As far as Jennifer can remember, her father was abusive but her mother wasn’t always. She remembers a time when she felt loved by her mother. All that changed when Jennifer was 11. Her mother snapped and became a monster like her father was. Then they turned on her. Jennifer fought to become who she wanted to be, and not who her parents were trying to make her be. She refused to allow the torture change her, like it changed her mother. This is the story of Jennifer’s past, how she got through it, and how she survived it all.

Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place.

“Have you ever read Lolita?” So begins 17-year-old Alisson Wood’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high-school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing - and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North. He praises her as a special and gifted writer, and she blossoms under his support and his vision for her future.

Deliberate Discomfort follows the journey of Jason Van Camp as a new Green Beret commander taking over a team of combat-hardened Special Forces veterans. This true story tells firsthand the intense, traumatic battles these warriors fought and won, sharing lessons learned from their incredible backgrounds. A cadre of scientists further break down each experience, translating them into digestible and relatable action items, allowing the listener to apply these lessons forged under fire to their own lives.

This profoundly moving memoir is the remarkable and inspiring true story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who tells the tale of how she survived a massacre, immigrated to America, and overcame her trauma through art and activism. Sandra was just 10 years old when she found herself with a gun pointed at her head. She had watched as rebels gunned down her mother and six-year-old sister in a refugee camp.

From being escorted off the Today programme (for saying what we were all thinking) to declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave; from Tales of the Unexpected to Graham Norton's sofa, she is our most loved and most outspoken national treasure. Oh Miriam! takes you inside both her head and her heart. Buckle up for the most irrepressible, hilarious and moving listen of 2023.

Emily has always felt like an outsider, so when a family friend takes her under his wing she is delighted. But soon it becomes clear that his motives are not all they seem. At the age of 11, Emily is groomed into being a ‘county lines’ drug trafficker. It is the beginning of a vicious cycle that sees her become prey to one abuser after another, involving a huge child-sex-trafficking gang. The scale of the abuse—at the hands of hundreds of men—is sickening, and at times it feels like there will never be an escape. But then, in the darkest of moments, a ray of light shines....

At some point in nearly every marriage, a wife finds herself asking, "What is wrong with my husband?!" In David Finch's case, this turns out to be an apt question. Five years after he married Kristen, the love of his life, they learn that he has Asperger syndrome. The diagnosis explains David's ever-growing list of quirks and compulsions, his lifelong propensity to quack and otherwise melt down in social exchanges, and his clinical-strength inflexibility. But it doesn't make him any easier to live with.

As the story opens: Two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss.

From Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed business journalist Charles Fishman comes a brilliantly entertaining peek into the weekly "curiosity conversations" that have inspired Grazer to create some of America's favorite and iconic movies and television shows - from 24 to A Beautiful Mind.

American Sniper meets Make Your Bed in these life lessons from decorated United States service members and New York Times bestselling authors Robert O’Neill and Dakota Meyer—an in-depth, fearless, and ultimately redemptive account of what it takes to survive and thrive on battlefields from Afghanistan and Iraq to our daily lives, and how the perils of war help us hold onto our humanity.

Growing up, Joanne suffered at the hands of a violent boyfriend and controlling relatives, as her mother lapsed into a downward spiral following the break-up of her marriage. But the consequences of her mother's lifestyle turned out to be worse than Joanne could ever have imagined. She already knew about the baby buried in a shallow makeshift grave next to the family plot. But when Joanne came across a red plastic bin in her mother's wardrobe in 2009, she realised that the family home held an even more sinister secret.