Personal Memoirs

Having spent over twenty years building her hugely successful beauty empire, Maria Hatzistefanis managed to achieve all her childhood dreams and goals. Whilst this life of glamour and success is exhilarating, Maria is shocked to find that the happiness it brings is fleeting. This leads her to realize that her life needs a new focus. In this easy-to-follow guide, Maria asks the fundamental question: "What is happiness?" Brimming with good sense, great advice and clear tips, How to Live Your Best Life will equip you with the tools you need to be in control of your own destiny.

Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a black sheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder.

In June 2008, Florida-based victims’ rights attorney Bradley J. Edwards was 32-years-old and had just started his own law firm when a young woman named Courtney Wild came to see him. She told a shocking story of having been sexually coerced at the age of 14 by a wealthy man in Palm Beach named Jeffrey Epstein. Edwards, who had never heard of Epstein, had no idea that this moment would change the course of his life. Over the next 10 years, Edwards devoted himself to bringing Epstein to justice, and came close to losing everything in the process.

Held against her will and raped by her 38-year-old boss, 19-year-old Anna tries to make sense of her unbelievable situation. How did an innocent friendship with her boss turn into weeks of forced sex and the inability to leave her oppressor's side? Furthermore, what happens when weeks of rape result in a pregnancy? This true-life novel depicts a graphic and raw recounting of the unimaginable horrors of the Summer of 2010.

Follow Ruth through a rip-roaring, hilarious decade of not quite making it as a supermodel. Fueled by little more than cigarettes and the stress of her spiraling debt she crisscrosses the world in pursuit of fame and fortune. But how far is she willing to go for this wildly unrealistic dream?

As her marriage collapses, the author of the international best-seller Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight relearns the fearless ways of her father to find her own true north. Standing in the wreckage of her marriage, in her adopted country America, Alexandra Fuller revisits the continent she loves and finds in her father's harsh, simple, and uncompromising ways the key to her salvation.

Over a three-decade span, more than 20 women - many teenagers - died mysteriously in the small towns bordering Interstate 45, a 50-mile stretch of highway running from Houston to Galveston. The victims were strangled, shot, or savagely beaten.

Anna Faris has advice for you. And it's great advice, because she's been through it all, and she wants to tell you what she's learned. Her comic memoir and first book, Unqualified, will share Anna's candid, sympathetic, and entertaining stories of love lost and won. Part memoir, part humorous, unflinching advice from her hit podcast Anna Faris Is Unqualified, the book will reveal Anna's unique take on how to navigate the bizarre, chaotic, and worthwhile adventure of finding love.

In The Rule, legendary trader and hedge fund pioneer Larry Hite recounts his working-class upbringing in Brooklyn as a dyslexic, partially blind kid who was anything but a model student - and how he went on to found and run Mint Investment Management Company, one of the most profitable and largest quantitative hedge funds in the world.

When he set out to play each of Golf Digest’s 100 greatest American golf courses in one year, Jimmie James knew he was attempting the impossible. But then again, he’d spent his entire life defying the odds. Playing from the Rough is a remarkable memoir of race, class, family, and the power of perseverance, as James braids his love of golf with reflections on the path that took him from childhood poverty to the most exclusive and opulent golf courses in America.

A practical and inspiring guide to transformational personal storytelling, The Story You Need to Tell is the product of Sandra Marinella’s pioneering work with veterans and cancer patients, her years of teaching writing, and her research into its profound healing properties. Riveting true stories illustrate Marinella’s methods for understanding, telling, and editing personal stories in ways that foster resilience and renewal. She also shares her own experience of using journaling and expressive writing to navigate challenges including breast cancer and postpartum depression.

"There is really no better indicator you're a mother than acquiring the ability to catch throw-up in a plastic bag, disinfect your hands, and immediately ask your friend to pass the beef jerky as you put on another Taylor Swift song and act as if nothing has happened." This is the type of insight Melanie Shankle offers in this quirky memoir of motherhood.

KISS did not become one of the most successful rock bands in history by accident. Long before they first took the stage, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley had a clear-cut operating plan for their business. Over the past forty years, KISS has sold over 100 million CDs and DVDs worldwide and manages over 3,000 licensed merchandise items. In addition to KISS, Simmons’ lucrative ventures include two hit reality shows, a professional sports team, a restaurant chain, and a record company.

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.

We live in an era of low expectations. In fact, we tend to celebrate low expectations. The way in which we choose to live and work today is a far cry from the purposeful living of our parents. Have we reached the point in our society where it is more important to look good rather than be good? This book reacquaints listeners with the wisdom - the common sense that was practiced simply and unwittingly by those who represent a generation gone by: a generation that worked hard without complaining; a generation that did whatever was necessary to support their families....

A hilarious and heartbreaking memoir-in-remedies by a self-described "professional soul-searcher" that details a journey of self-discovery through more than 160 tonics, seminars, regimens, and transformative therapies. With a voice that is at once intimate and hilarious, Megan captures the openness and honesty necessary for people to take a new path in life. Listeners will open the audiobook with curiosity about all the different healing therapies that Megan tries, but leave with a new understanding of themselves.

From the creator of the blog Renegade Mothering, Janelle Hanchett's forthright, darkly funny, and ultimately empowering memoir chronicling her tumultuous journey from young motherhood to abysmal addiction and a recovery she never imagined possible. Pregnant at 21 by a man she'd known three months, Janelle Hanchett embraced motherhood with the determined optimism of the recklessly self-confident. After giving birth, she found herself bored, directionless, and seeking relief in wine, which she justified as sophisticated and going well with chicken.

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.

Though Chris and Taya Kyle's marriage had its difficult moments, it was always a love story. Together they'd endured military service, a best-selling book, unexpected fame, and a film deal starring a hot Hollywood actor. But just when Taya thought that she and Chris were finally going to live their dream together, her husband was murdered. In the wake of his death, a grieving Taya was left to raise her two young children and handle the many things Chris left behind.

A shocking true story that reveals how one woman was tormented to the very depths of despair by her husband through coercive control and continual physical and sexual abuse. Broken in mind, body and spirit and completely isolated from the rest of the world, Hannah thinks she’ll never find the strength to escape, until one day an opportunity arrives....