Naughty cats, quirky family members, and experiences as a large gay woman in the heartland of America: Cheryl Peck has a potpourri of poignant — and laugh-out-loud hilarious — stories to tell about growing up, love, and loss.
With self-deprecating humor and compassionate insight, she remembers the time she hit her baby sister in the head with a rock, how her father taught her to swim by throwing her into deep water, and the day when...

"Mom, I'm gay." With three little words, gay children can change their parents' lives forever. Yet at the same times it's a chance for those parents to realize nothing, really, has changed at all; same kid, same life, same bond of enduring love. Twenty years ago, during a walk on a Mississippi beach, Ellen DeGeneres spoke those simple, powerful words to her mother. That emotional moment eventually brought mother and daughter closer than ever, but...

"In this spirited account, Billie Jean King details her life's journey to find her true self. She recounts her groundbreaking tennis career--six years as the top-ranked woman in the world, twenty Wimbledon championships, thirty-nine grand-slam titles, and her watershed defeat of Bobby Riggs in the famous "Battle of the Sexes." She poignantly recalls the cultural backdrop of those years and the profound impact on her worldview from the women's movement,...

"A gorgeous, darkly humorous memoir for readers of Cheryl Strayed about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention, as well as a portrait of a generation used to assuming they're entitled to everything--based on this award-winning writer's New Yorker article 'Thanksgiving in Mongolia'"-- "In 2012, at age 38, when she left on a reporting trip to Mongolia, Ariel Levy thought she had figured it out: she was married, pregnant, successful...

In Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, Dorothy Allison takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next. Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women - sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts - and the men who loved them, often abused them, and,...

Actress and playwright Tina Alexis Allen's audacious memoir unravels her privileged suburban Catholic upbringing that was shaped by her formidable father--a man whose strict religious devotion and dedication to his large family hid his true nature and a life defined by deep secrets and dangerous lies. "Two lives, forever bound together by secrets. Tina Alexis Allen, the youngest of thirteen in a devout Catholic family, had what appeared to be a privileged...

"Fourteen years old and growing up in the Middle East, Lamya is an overachiever and a class clown, qualities that help her hide in plain sight when she realizes she has a crush on her teacher--her female teacher. She's also fourteen when she reads a passage in Quran class about Maryam, known as the Virgin Mary in the Christian Bible, that changes everything. Lamya learns that Maryam was untempted by an angelically handsome man, and later, when told...

"While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie--letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters' language--but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers's life:...

"Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn Schulz met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. Lost & Found weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn's father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once. Schulz writes with painful clarity about the vicissitudes of grieving her father, but she also writes...

Trauma can make truth hard to find. Have you ever experienced a terror, grief, or confusion so great that when you try to share it you can only find shattered images floating in darkness? You try over and over, but can't tell the story, to yourself or to anyone else. Look Again presents us with six variations of the same event, seen through the different lenses caused by other life revelations. It explores the fragmenting nature of trauma by tracing...