She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me

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 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.

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.

Who Do You Think You Are?: A Memoir

Alyse Myers · 256 pages

This personal portrait of a mother and daughter explores the profound and poignant revelations that so often can come to light only after a parent has died.

Nothing Holds Back the Night

Delphine de Vigan · 346 pages

Only a teenager when Delphine was born, Lucile raised two daughters largely alone. She was a former child model from a Bohemian family, younger and more glamorous than the other mothers: always in lipstick, wayward and wonderful. But as Delphine grew up, Lucile's occasional sadness gave way to overwhelming despair and delusion. She became convinced she was telepathic and in control of the Paris me

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

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel · 236 pages

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

Identical

Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a

Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton

Linda Gray Sexton · 323 pages

Mother, are you listening? This is what I have seen and heard and learned. I am the forty-year old Linda and I am ready to speak back. It has taken twenty years for Linda Gray Sexton to address these words to her mother, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Anne Sexton, who committed suicide on October 4, 1974. Anne Sexton's chronic mental illness was the anguished center of her family's life. While t

Winter Garden

Kristin Hannah · 448 pages

Can a woman ever really know herself if she doesn’t know her mother? From the author of the smash-hit bestseller Firefly Lane and True Colors comes a powerful, heartbreaking novel that illuminates the intricate mother-daughter bond and explores the enduring links between the present and the past. Meredith and Nina Whitson are as different as sisters can be. One stayed at home to raise her chil

Ugly

Constance Briscoe · 320 pages

Constance's mother systematically abused her daughter, both physically and emotionally, throughout her childhood. Regularly beaten and starved, the girl was so desperate she took herself off to Social Services and tried to get taken into care. When that failed, she swallowed bleach 'because it kills all known germs and my mother always told me I was a germ'. When Constance was thirteen, her mother

A Wolf at the Table

Augusten Burroughs · 242 pages

PREQUEL TO THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER RUNNING WITH SCISSORSFrom the author: 'My father doesn't feature much in Running with Scissors. And one of the reasons for this is because he didn't feature much in my life. But there's another reason, too: Our relationship was so complicated, so dark, so confusing and so big, that to tell the story would require a book. So finally, upon the death of my fath

Her Last Death

Susanna Sonnenberg · 288 pages

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich · 344 pages

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley's face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes--the moment she hears him speak of his crimes--she is overcome with the

If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood

Gregg Olsen · 405 pages

Pushing the Limits

Katie McGarry · 409 pages

Rendered a subject of gossip after a traumatic night that left her with terrible scars on her arms, Echo is dumped by her boyfriend and bonds with bad-boy Noah, whose tough attitude hides an understanding nature and difficult secrets.

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

What My Bones Know

Stephanie Foo · 352 pages

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A searing memoir of reckoning and healing by acclaimed journalist Stephanie Foo, investigating the little-understood science behind complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life“Achingly exquisite . . . providing real hope for those who long to heal.”—Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to SomeoneONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The

Pieces of My Mother: A Memoir

Melissa Cistaro · 314 pages

"Why would a mother ever abandon her child? And is an abandoned child destined to grow up and make the same mistake? These were some of Melissa Cistaro's questions after her mother drove off without explanation one summer. Decades later Melissa finds herself at her dying mother's bedside with 6 days to find answers, fearful that she could do the same to her own little girl. Then she discovers a ca

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Rebecca Wells · 383 pages

The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

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.

Coming Clean

Kimberly Rae Miller · 272 pages