Motherhood Memoir

Maya Shanbhag Lang grew up idolizing her brilliant mother, an accomplished physician who immigrated to the United States from India and completed her residency all while raising her children and keeping a traditional Indian home. Maya’s mother had always been a source of support - until Maya became a mother herself. Then the parent who had once been so capable and attentive became suddenly and inexplicably unavailable.

An inspiring memoir, reminding us that whether life's lessons arrive through illness, trauma or any other unexpected upheaval, life really does love us. As a free-spirited, independent woman, Bronnie Ware was used to donning a variety of hats: singer, songwriter, author, speaker, traveller and adventurer. And as her soul would have it in her mid-40s, she felt the urge to add one more: mother.

Louie Anderson has been channeling his beloved mom in his iconic stand-up comedy for decades - but she passed away before getting to see him reach new heights with his breakout role. Hey Mom is Louie's way of catching Ora Zella Anderson up on everything that has been going on in his life, including his continued struggles with food and family, but also how so much has changed for the better. He also has plenty of laugh-out-loud stories about his incredibly resilient mother and his 10 siblings, as well as observations on the absurdities of life.

In the opening of this “unexpectedly uplifting...masterfully crafted memoir” (Shelf Awareness, starred review) Cindy, twenty years into recovery after a heroin addiction, grapples with how to tell her nine-year-old son about her past. She wants him to learn this history from her, not anyone else; but she worries about the effect this truth may have on him.

When Vanessa Williams was growing up, she had a plan: She'd go to college and major in musical theater; afterward she'd get her MFA from the Yale School of Drama, and then she would embark on a successful career on Broadway. But her life took a detour and she wound up the first black Miss America in September 1983 (an accomplishment that she never planned for or desired), only to be forced to resign ten months later due to a nude photo scandal - much to the shock of her mother, Helen, who had told her, "never pose nude for anyone."

Diane Keaton has spent a lifetime coloring outside the lines of the conventional notion of beauty. In Let’s Just Say It Wasn’t Pretty, she shares the wisdom she’s accumulated through the years as a mother, daughter, actress, artist, and international style icon. This is a book only Diane Keaton could write—a smart and funny chronicle of the ups and downs of living and working in a world obsessed with beauty.

A moving, candid account of one woman’s experience with stillbirth. Emma Hansen is 39 weeks and six days pregnant when she feels her baby go quiet inside of her. At the hospital, her worst fears are confirmed: doctors explain that her baby has died, and she will need to deliver him, still. At once honest, brave, and uplifting, Still is about one woman’s search for her own definition of motherhood, even as she faces one of life’s greatest challenges: learning to live after loss.

Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time—abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage, and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning--a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

In the streaming reality series Selling Sunset, Mary Fitzgerald Bonnet is the charismatic, calm, and level-headed agent who effortlessly lands multi-million-dollar homes while sidestepping the drama of a cutthroat business in one of the wealthiest and most glamorous places in the world. Often thought of as the “big sister” of her co-stars for her compassionate advice and uplifting attitude, Mary is admired for her unwavering kindness. But behind her sunny personality is a remarkable story of resilience, forged by a life filled with profound challenges.

A bicultural child of a Malay mother and an Indian father, Amelia Zachry was different from the get-go, never quite fitting in. In this raw, inspiring memoir, she chronicles the long, winding journey that brought her from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Kentucky, USA the place she and her family now call home.

An inspiring and revealing essay about motherhood, self-acceptance, and overcoming the fears that hold you back by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Open Book.

Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, unforgiving Italian town north of Boston where in the seventeenth century women were hanged as witches. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious figure in this hardscrabble place, was a drug addict and sometime dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches, whose highbrow taste was at odds with her base appetites.

From teaching consent to counteracting problematic messages from the media, well-meaning family, and the culture at large, we have big work to do when it comes to our boys. Informed by the author's work as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media, as well as by conversations with psychologists, experts, and other parents and boys, this book follows one mother's journey to raise a feminist son as a single immigrant woman of color in America.

Sonya Curry’s journey, like those of her extraordinary sons and daughter, was filled with defeats and hard-fought victories, but hers took place out of the limelight, without the eyes of the world watching, cheering, or drawing inspiration from her example. Until now. In this inspiring memoir, Sonya tells her story for the first time, beginning with her childhood in rural Virginia and moving through the peaks and valleys of an incredible life.

We have descriptors for many periods of life, but there is a period of profound change that many women face, often in their late 20s to early 40s, that does not yet have a name. Nell Frizzell is calling this period of flux “the panic years", and it is often characterized by a preoccupation with one major question: Should I have a baby? Frizzell uses personal stories from her own experiences in the panic years to illuminate the larger social and cultural trends and gives voice to the uncertainty, confusion, and urgency that tends to characterize this time of life.

Hilarious best friends Cat and Nat created a massive online community of moms by sharing their ultra-real and just a bit R-rated dispatches from the mom trenches. From what not to eat a few days after giving birth (chicken wings) to the most effective ways to dodge post-partum sex, Cat & Nat’s Mom Truths shares everything no one will tell you about having kids.

On May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith drove to the middle of the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and dropped her two children into the Willamette River. Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Everybody knows that Patricia Heaton plays the hilarious, wise, and tempestuous married-with-kids everywoman on Everybody Loves Raymond. What they might not know is that in real life, she is married, has four boys under eight years old, and is just as funny offscreen as on. Motherhood and Hollywood is Patricia Heaton’s humorous and poignant collection of essays on life, love, marriage, child-rearing, show business, having parents, being a parent, spousal rage, surviving fame, success, and the shame of underarm flab. She is warm, witty, and refreshingly irreverent.

Kristina, the second of four children, begins by telling how a little sip of vodka sipped secretly at a party her parents were giving started her on a pathway to addiction. In that instant, alcohol became her pathway to comfort. Over the next eight years, she sank further into addiction, moving on to cocaine and methamphetamines. In telling her story, she gives a brutally honest description of her addiction and crimes.

Have you ever been told to “Just Have Sex" [and you'll get pregnant]? Yeah, me too. That doesn't always work. Read this encouraging and captivating memoir that illuminates the trials, emotions, and hidden struggles of infertility diagnosis and treatment Ashley was living her life's dream: married to her high school sweetheart, working as a newly minted CPA, and creating a new life and name for herself since coming back home from college. Fate had always been good to her... until it wasn't. Month after month, she stared at her negative pregnancy tests and wondered why she wasn't getting ...