Bending Toward the Sun: A Mother and Daughter Memoir

Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began

Art Spiegelman · 135 pages

"Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out o

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum · 496 pages

For fifty years, Anna Schlemmer has refused to talk about her life in Germany during World War II. Her daughter, Trudy, was only three when she and her mother were liberated by an American soldier and went to live with him in Minnesota. Trudy's sole evidence of the past is an old photograph: a family portrait showing Anna, Trudy, and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald. Driven by

Let Me Go: My Mother and the SS

Helga Schneider · 157 pages

"In 1998, Helga Schneider, then in her sixties, was summoned from Italy to the nursing home in Vienna where her ninety-year-old mother was then living. The last time they had seen each other was twenty-seven years earlier, when her mother had asked Schneider to try on her treasured SS uniform, and tried to give her several items of jewellery, the loot of holocaust victims, which Schneider refused.

We Are On Our Own

Miriam Katin · 129 pages

"In this illustrated memoir, Miriam Katin retells the story of her and her Mother's escape on foot from the Nazi invasion of Budapest. With her father off fighting for the Hungarian army and the German troops quickly approaching, Katin and her mother are forced to flee the countryside after faking their deaths. Leaving behind all of their belongings and loved ones, and unable to tell anyone of the

Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered

Ruth Kluger · 216 pages

Swept up as a child in the events of Nazi-era Europe, Kluger saw her family's comfortable Vienna existence destroyed. Despite her shattered childhood, Kluger eventually reclaimed her life. A coming-of-age story that delves into the unsentimental observations of childhood, "Still Alive" rejects easy assumptions about history as Kluger relates how she and her family survived the Holocaust.

comeback - a mother and daughter's journey through hell and back

Claire Fontaine, Mia Fontaine · 320 pages

In powerful parallel stories, mother and daughter give mesmerizing first-person accounts of the nightmare that shattered their family and the amazing journey they took to find their way back to each other. Claire Fontaine's relentless cross-country search for her missing child and ultimate decision to force her into treatment in Eastern Europe is a gripping tale of dead ends, painful revelations,

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages

Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.

The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss

Edmund de Waal · 368 pages

Traces the parallel stories of nineteenth-century art patron Charles Ephrussi and his unique collection of 360 miniature netsuke Japanese ivory carvings, documenting Ephrussi's relationship with Marcel Proust and the impact of the Holocaust on his cosmopolitan family.

I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This

Nadja Spiegelman · 384 pages

"A memoir of mothers and daughters -- and mothers as daughters -- traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Mauscreator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers -- French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly -- exerted a force over reality that was both

Growing Up

Russell Baker, Gilbert Riswold · 348 pages

Pulitzer prize-winning writer Russell Baker shares his memories of growing up between the two world wars, telling of his life in Virginia, New Jersey, and Baltimore, and discussing his loving mother and family, teachers, schoolmates, and how they all survived the Depression years.

A House Full of Daughters: A Memoir of Seven Generations

Juliet Nicolson · 336 pages

"A family memoir that traces the myths, legends, and secrets of seven generations of remarkable women. All families have their myths and legends. For many years Juliet Nicolson accepted hers--the dangerous beauty of her flamenco dancing great-great-grandmother Pepita, the flirty manipulation of her great-grandmother Victoria, the infamous eccentricity of her grandmother Vita Sackville-West, her mo

The Best We Could Do

Thi Bui · 335 pages

The author describes her experiences as a young Vietnamese immigrant, highlighting her family's move from their war-torn home to the United States in graphic novel format.

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China

Jung Chang · 544 pages

"Jung Chang vividly evokes China's sights, sounds, and smells to create what must be one of the grimmest, yet most perceptive accounts of growing up middle-class in the maelstrom that has swept China since the 1920s." - Back cover.

I'm Glad My Mom Died

Jennette McCurdy · 320 pages

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life. Jennette McCurdy was six years old when she had her first acting audition. Her mother’s dream was for her only daughter to become a

The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

Madeleine L'Engle · 245 pages

The author describes the senility and death of her ninety-year-old mother and her own concomitant emotions and frustrations.

The Bridge Ladies

Betsy Lerner · 309 pages

"A fifty-year-old Bridge game provides an unexpected way to cross the generational divide between a daughter and her mother. Betsy Lerner takes us on a powerfully personal literary journey, where we learn a little about Bridge and a lot about life. After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother's "don't ask, don't tell" generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Cheryl Strayed · 315 pages

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again. At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she'd lost everything when her mother died young of cancer. Her family scattered in their grief, her marriage was soon destroyed, and slowly her life spun out of control. Four years after her mot

Mother Daughter Me

Katie Hafner · 286 pages

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's memoir of the year she and her mother Helen spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Katie urged Helen, set in her ways at 77, to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie's teenage daughter. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and h

Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Dorothy Allison · 94 pages

The National Book Award finalist for Bastard Out of Carolina illuminates the rural poverty of the South in a story love and loss, beauty and terror, and the intricate web of family love and hatred that spins itself through all our lives.

Prozac Nation

Elizabeth Wurtzel · 336 pages

Full of promise is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in every way. By twelve she was cutting her legs in the girls' bathroom and listening to scratchy recordings of the Velvet Underground. College was marked by a series of breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations before she was finally given P

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · 281 pages

She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm

A Fifty-Year Silence: Love, War, and a Ruined House in France

Miranda Richmond Mouillot · 288 pages

The Kitchen God's Wife

Amy Tan · 532 pages

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past--including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s,