A personal story of female genital mutilation. Mire reveals what it means to grow up in a traditional Somali family, where girls' and women's basic human rights are violated on a daily basis. She describes FGM is the ultimate child abuse, a ritual of mutilation handed down from mother to daughter and protected by the word "culture."
As a middle child in a large military family, Christine just wants to dance. Her parents support her dreams, even if they seem beyond their comprehension. At 20, determined and talented, Christine heads across the country from Santa Fe to New York City and, in a made for-Hollywood story, is chosen for the London cast of A Chorus Line. While unwilling to fully cut ties with the traditional life her parents envision for her, she finds a new family with the dancers and more fluid, open characters that fill the theater world in London, and later New York, in the ‘70s & ‘80s. Christine learns that one member of her family is equally at home in her new world: Laughlin, her older brother—divorced, a father, ex-military and a corporate lawyer—also makes his way to New York City, where he meets, and begins to build a life, with rising fashion star Perry Ellis. The two men enjoy a partnership and a financial success that Christine both admires. and envies. She spends much of her free time in their Upper West Side brownstone and Water Island retreat. Soon everyone is talking about a mysterious new disease. As deaths of dancers, theater folk, and eventually friends start to mount, Christine realizes she’s in the middle of an epidemic that neither her traditional family nor the public at large is ready to reckon with. As the AIDS crisis cuts closer and closer, eventually impacting those she loves most, Christine does what she has always done: she strikes her own path. This memoir is an emotional, honest examination of what it takes to succeed in the competitive world of New York theater, how hard-won dreams can be quickly lost, what it means to redefine family, and the devasting toll AIDS exacted on a generation of artists.
"Country Girl is Edna O'Brien's exquisite account of her dashing, barrier-busting, up-and-down life."-National Public Radio When Edna O'Brien's first novel, The Country Girls, was published in 1960, it so scandalized the O'Briens' local parish that the book was burned by its priest. O'Brien was undeterred and has since created a body of work that bears comparison with the best writing of the twentieth century. Country Girl brings us face-to-face with a life of high drama and contemplation. Starting with O'Brien's birth in a grand but deteriorating house in Ireland, her story moves through convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, the wild parties of the '60s in London, and encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans. There is love and unrequited love, and the glamour of trips to America as a celebrated writer and the guest of Jackie Onassis and Hillary Clinton. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have imprinted upon and enhanced one lifetime.
For many years, heartache prevented Nahid Rachlin from turning her sharp novelist's eye inward: to tell the story of how her own life diverged from that of her closest confidante and beloved sister, Pari. Growing up in Iran, both refused to accept traditional Muslim mores, and dreamed of careers in literature and on the stage. Their lives changed abruptly when Pari was coerced by their father into marrying a wealthy and cruel suitor. Nahid narrowly avoided a similar fate, and instead negotiated with him to pursue her studies in America. When Nahid received the unsettling and mysterious news that Pari had died after falling down a flight of stairs, she traveled back to Iran--now under the Islamic regime--to find out what happened to her truest friend, confront her past, and evaluate what the future holds for the heartbroken in a tale of crushing sorrow, sisterhood, and ultimately, hope.
A highly original conceptual study of the opposing faces of universalism, its stimulation for Jewish emancipation and the struggle for its rescue from repressive, antisemitic associations.
My mother was a prostitute. My grandmother and great-grandmother were prostitutes. Maybe I should have given the family business a chance. To Westerners, being Romani means being wild, romantic and free. To Eliska Tanzer, it means being rented out to dance for older men. It means living without running water. It means not being allowed a job or an education. It means being stuffed into a bare room with all your aunts and cousins, fighting over the thin, stained blanket the way you fight over the last piece of half-mouldy bread. It means joining the family prostitution ring when you’re still a child. But Eliska is given a way out after her mother scrapes together the money to smuggle her out of the country to a new life. Arriving in England in a washing-machine box, she thinks she has made it. But as a young girl alone in a new country, Eliska soon sees her dream turn into a nightmare when she is forced to live and work under unbearable abuse as she tries to forge her way alone. Drawing on the struggles of her Romani ancestors, Eliska is inspired with the strength to carry on. She eventually starts a successful business and becomes an accomplished writer and dancer. The Girl from Nowhere is a triumphant story of family, persistence and the meaning of freedom.
The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story in her "resplendent memoir," complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution (Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of The Good Left Undone). Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She’d lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry’s death, she decided to make one small change in her life—she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell. She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist, who emailed her to commiserate. Recently widowed himself, he reminded her that they had shared a few dates fifty-four years before, set up by Nora. Delia did not remember him, but after several weeks of exchanging emails and sixties folk songs, he flew east to see her. They were crazy, utterly, in love. But this was not a rom-com: four months later she was diagnosed with AML, a fierce leukemia. In Left on Tenth, Delia Ephron enchants as she seesaws us between tears and laughter, navigating the suicidal lows of enduring cutting-edge treatment and the giddy highs of a second chance at love. With Peter and her close girlfriends by her side, with startling clarity, warmth, and honesty about facing death, Ephron invites us to join her team of warriors and become believers ourselves. A "Most Anticipated Book of 2022" by TIME, Bustle, Parade, Publishers Weekly, Boston.com A "Best Memoir of 2022" by Marie Claire A "Best Memoir of April" by Vanity Fair
"The three girls formed an indelible bond: roaming their community in search of hidden treasures for their 'Thing Finder box,' and hiding under the dining room table, eavesdropping as three generations of relatives gossiped and played the numbers. The girls spent countless afternoons together, ice skating in the nearby Lake Meadows apartment complex, swimming in the pool at the Ida B. Wells housing project, and daydreaming of their futures: Dawn a writer, Debra a doctor, Kim a teacher. Then they came to a precipice, a fraught rite of passage for all girls when the dangers and the harsh realities of the world burst the innocent bubble of childhood, when the choices they made could--and would--have devastating consequences. There was a razor thin margin of error--especially for brown girls"
After her 2001 suicide attempt, broadcast live on a Webcam, Pershall realized the need to heal her mind and body. She found a revolutionary cure, met a tattoo artist, and discovered the healing power of body modification.
The star of the hit show "Empire" recalls her beloved screen characters while tracing the story of her life and career, discussing her father's Vietnam service, her rise from the violence of the streets of Washington D.C., and her experiences as a singlemother.