Circling My Mother
Circling My Mother

Author: Mary Gordon

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-10-14

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0307277615

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Bringing her exceptional talent for detail, character, and scene to bear on the life of her hard-working single mother, a bestselling author gives us a deeply felt and powerfully moving book about their relationship. “A daring and perceptive work of memory, catharsis and literary grace.” —Los Angeles Times Anna Gagliano Gordon, who died in 2002 at the age of 94, was the personification of the culture of the mid-century American Catholic working class. A hard-working single mother—Mary Gordon's father died when she was still a girl—she managed to hold down a job, dress smartly, raise her daughter on her own, and worship the beauty in life with a surprising joie de vivre. Toward the end of Anna's life, we watch the author care for her mother in old age, beginning to reclaim from memory the vivid woman who helped her sail forth into her own life.

Circling the Sun
Circling the Sun

Author: Paula McLain

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2015-07-28

Total Pages: 377

ISBN-13: 0345534190

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR, BOOKPAGE, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “Paula McLain is considered the new star of historical fiction, and for good reason. Fans of The Paris Wife will be captivated by Circling the Sun, which . . . is both beautifully written and utterly engrossing.”—Ann Patchett, Country Living This powerful novel transports readers to the breathtaking world of Out of Africa—1920s Kenya—and reveals the extraordinary adventures of Beryl Markham, a woman before her time. Brought to Kenya from England by pioneering parents dreaming of a new life on an African farm, Beryl is raised unconventionally, developing a fierce will and a love of all things wild. But after everything she knows and trusts dissolves, headstrong young Beryl is flung into a string of disastrous relationships, then becomes caught up in a passionate love triangle with the irresistible safari hunter Denys Finch Hatton and the writer Baroness Karen Blixen. Brave and audacious and contradictory, Beryl will risk everything to have Denys’s love, but it’s ultimately her own heart she must conquer to embrace her true calling and her destiny: to fly. Praise for Circling the Sun “In McLain’s confident hands, Beryl Markham crackles to life, and we readers truly understand what made a woman so far ahead of her time believe she had the power to soar.”—Jodi Picoult, author of Leaving Time “Enchanting . . . a worthy heir to [Isak] Dinesen . . . Like Africa as it’s so gorgeously depicted here, this novel will never let you go.”—The Boston Globe “Famed aviator Beryl Markham is a novelist’s dream. . . . [A] wonderful portrait of a complex woman who lived—defiantly—on her own terms.”—People (Book of the Week) “Circling the Sun soars.”—Newsday “Captivating . . . [an] irresistible novel.”—The Seattle Times “Like its high-flying subject, Circling the Sun is audacious and glamorous and hard not to be drawn in by. Beryl Markham may have married more than once, but she was nobody’s wife.”—Entertainment Weekly “[An] eloquent evocation of Beryl’s daring life.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

Pieces of My Mother
Pieces of My Mother

Author: Melissa Cistaro

Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Published: 2015-05-05

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1492615390

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"A story that lingers in the heart long after the last page is turned." —HOPE EDELMAN, bestselling author of Motherless Daughters and The Possibility of Everything This provocative, poignant memoir of a daughter whose mother left her behind by choice begs the question: Are we destined to make the same mistakes as our parents? One summer, Melissa Cistaro's mother drove off without explanation Devastated, Melissa and her brothers were left to pick up the pieces, always tormented by the thought: Why did their mother abandon them? Thirty-five years later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. After decades of hiding her painful memories, she has just days to find out what happened that summer and confront the fear she could do the same to her kids. But Melissa never expects to stumble across a cache of letters her mother wrote to her but never sent, which could hold the answers she seeks. Haunting yet ultimately uplifting, Pieces of My Mother chronicles one woman's quest to discover what drives a mother to walk away from the children she loves. Alternating between Melissa's tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother's final days, this captivating memoir reveals how our parents' choices impact our own and how we can survive those to forge our own paths.

Are You My Mother?
Are You My Mother?

Author: Alison Bechdel

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 0547524366

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The New York Times–bestselling graphic memoir about Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, becoming the artist her mother wanted to be. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood…and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers. A New York Times, USA Today, Time, Slate, and Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Year “As complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.”—New York Times Book Review “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Safran Foer “Many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers. Alison Bechdel has written a graphic novel about this; sort of like a comic book by Virginia Woolf. You won't believe it until you read it—and you must!”—Gloria Steinem

High-Risk Homosexual
High-Risk Homosexual

Author: Edgar Gomez

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1593767064

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

*Winner of the American Book Award* *Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography* An Honor Book for the 2023 Stonewall Book Award—Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Book Award This witty memoir traces a touching and often hilarious spiralic path to embracing a gay, Latinx identity against a culture of machismo—from a cockfighting ring in Nicaragua to cities across the U.S.—and the bath houses, night clubs, and drag queens who help redefine pride I’ve always found the definition of machismo to be ironic, considering that pride is a word almost unanimously associated with queer people, the enemy of machistas . . . In a world desperate to erase us, queer Latinx men must find ways to hold on to pride for survival, but excessive male pride is often what we are battling, both in ourselves and in others. A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, High-Risk Homosexual opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez’s uncle’s cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at thirteen years old to become a man. Readers follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor’s office where he was diagnosed a “high-risk homosexual.” With vulnerability, humor, and quick-witted insights into racial, sexual, familial, and professional power dynamics, Gomez shares a hard-won path to taking pride in the parts of himself he was taught to keep hidden. His story is a scintillating, beautiful reminder of the importance of leaving space for joy.

Fun Home
Fun Home

Author: Alison Bechdel

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780618871711

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it's a story exhilaratingly suited to graphic memoir form. Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian home, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with his male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescense, the denouement is swift, graphic -- and redemptive.

Becoming Mother
Becoming Mother

Author: Sharon Tjaden-Glass

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-01

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9780996332804

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Becoming Mother" tells the story of a woman becoming a mother. It is a reflective memoir that spans from pregnancy through the end of the first year postpartum. It follows the author as she resists, denies, copes with, and ultimately embraces her identity as a mother. This isn't a guide or a parenting book. Its goal isn't to convert you to one brand of motherhood or another. Instead, its goal is to show you what becoming a mother can be like. Without sarcasm. Without boasting or martyrdom. Just the plain, messy truth of what it's like for one to become two.

Stray
Stray

Author: Stephanie Danler

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2021-04-27

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1101911875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. After selling her first novel--a dream she'd worked long and hard for--Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she'd left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she's pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn't totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it's possible to change the course of her history. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.

Global Mom
Global Mom

Author: Melissa Dalton-Bradford

Publisher: Workman Publishing

Published: 2013-07-16

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1938301331

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

One mother’s touching memoir of the adventures and hardships she faced while raising a family internationally for over 20 years. After more than twenty years living abroad—sixteen addresses, eight countries, and five different languages—writer Melissa Bradford shares a fantastic journey of motherhood that will inspire any family. Follow this family of six on their passage—extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreakingly poignant—from Bright Lights (of New York City) to the Northern Lights (of Norway) to the City of Light (Paris) to the speed-of-light of the Autobahn (in Munich). Continue deep into the tropics of Southeast Asia (Singapore) and end your voyage in the heights of the Swiss Alps (Geneva). As varied as the topography—the craggy fjords, the meandering Seine, the black forests, the muggy tropics, the soaring Alps—this international tale traverses everything from giving birth in a château in Versailles to living on an island in a fjord. From singing jazz on national Norwegian T.V. to judging an Indonesian beauty contest. From navigating the labyrinth of French bureaucracy and the traffic patterns of Singapore to sitting around a big pine table where the whole family learns languages, cultures, and cuisines—where they learn to love this complex world and, most importantly, each other. Praise for Global Mom “A stunning picture of life.” —The Deseret News “Here is a rich, frank and funny book in which the essentials of family and friendship and community are combined with interesting travelogue and the best kind of spiritual writing. In short, this is a book about love.” —Kate Braestrup, New York Times–bestselling author of Here If You Need Me “A brilliant hero's journey highlighting the challenges and triumphs of motherhood under unique cross-cultural circumstances. With honesty, sensitivity, and humor, Dalton-Bradford is a role model for all parents who will be relocating with children, especially those who will relocate for their spouse’s career.” —Paula Caligiuri, PhD, author of Cultural Agility: Building a Pipeline of Successful Global Professionals

Mother of My Son
Mother of My Son

Author: Rachel Allord

Publisher: Pelican Ventures Book Group

Published: 2013-05-24

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1611162653

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

College student Amber Swansen gives birth alone. In desperation, she abandons the newborn, buries her secret, and attempts to get on with her life. No matter how far she runs, she can't escape the guilt. Years later and still haunted by her past, Amber meets Beth Dilinger. Friendship blossoms between the two women, but Beth's son is a constant, painful reminder to Amber of the child she abandoned. When heartache hits, causing Amber to grapple with the answers to life's deeper questions, Beth stands by her side. Yet just when peace seems to be within Amber's grasp, the truth of her past and the parentage of Beth's son comes to light and threatens to shatter not only their worlds, but the life of the teenager they both love.