Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine

Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper

Gypsy Rose Lee · 350 pages

The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters we

Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: a Memoir

Melissa Francis · 294 pages

Mommie Dearest

Christina Crawford · 294 pages

Mommie Dearest (1981) Based on the book about Joan Crawford, one of the great Hollywood actresses of our time, written by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford. Joan decides to adopt children of her own to fill a void in her life. Yet, her problems with alcohol, men, and the pressures of show business get in the way of her personal life, turning her into a mentally abusive wreck seen through

Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher · 163 pages

Fisher comes clean (well, sort of) with the crazy truth that is her life, in her first-ever memoir.

Handbook for an Unpredictable Life: How I Survived Sister Renata and My Crazy Mother, and Still Came Out Smiling...

Rosie Perez · 329 pages

The Oscar-nominated actress shares the previously untold story about her disadvantaged childhood and her successes in and out of the Hollywood limelight, tracing her relationship with the schizophrenic mother who relinquished her to a Catholic orphanage, the abuse she suffered in a series of homes and the fierce sense of independence that inspired her career.

Remembering Whitney: A Mother's Story of Life, Loss, and the Night the Music Stopped

Cissy Houston

Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

Cher: The Memoir, Part One

Cher

"After more than seventy years of fighting to live her life on her own terms, Cher finally reveals her true story in intimate detail, in a two-part memoir. Her remarkable career is unique and unparalleled. The only woman to top Billboard charts in seven consecutive decades, she is the winner of an Academy Award, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Cannes Film Festival Award, and an inductee to the Rock and R

Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding

Jessie Sholl · 318 pages

To be the child of a compulsive hoarder is to live in a permanent state of unease. Because if your mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make you?

Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir

Laura M. Flynn

When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their moth

Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter's Memoir

Terry Helwig

"Forced by her mother's instability to care for her five siblings, Helwig crafts a moving story of a mother she loved and struggled to understand"--

Lit

Mary Karr

A Girl from Yamhill

Beverly Cleary · 279 pages

Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.

Chanel Bonfire

Wendy Lawless · 295 pages

"Wendy Lawless' stunning memoir of resilience in the face of an unstable alcoholic and suicidal mother"--

Haywire

Brooke Hayward · 352 pages

The Daughter of successful Hollywood agent and broadway producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan recalls the glamour, wealth, and talent that marked the lives of members of her extraordinary family and reveals the events that led to destroyed marriages, mental breakdown, and suicide.

Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me – A Gripping Memoir of Complicated Family Relationships

Adrienne Brodeur · 272 pages

Coming Clean

Kimberly Rae Miller · 272 pages

With or Without You

Domenica Ruta · 210 pages

The author grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston where in the 17th century women were hanged as witches, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches. And yet she managed, despite the cha

Things I've Been Silent About: Memories

Azar Nafisi · 336 pages

I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close

Never Broken: Songs Are Only Half the Story

Jewel · 386 pages

When Jewel's first album, Pieces of You, topped the charts in 1995, her emotional voice and vulnerable performance were groundbreaking. Drawing comparisons to Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, a singer-songwriter of her kind had not emerged in decades. Now, with more than thirty million albums sold worldwide, Jewel tells the story of her life, and the lessons learned from her experience and her music.

How Not To Be a Boy

Robert Webb · 328 pages

"Rules For Being A Man: Don't Cry Love Sport Play Rough Drink Beer Don't Talk About Feelings But Robert Webb has been wondering for some time now: are those rules actually any use? To anyone? Looking back over his life, from schoolboy crushes (on girls and boys) to discovering the power of making people laugh (in the Cambridge Footlights with David Mitchell), and from losing his beloved mother to

Not My Father's Son

Alan Cumming · 304 pages

**Acclaimed actor Alan Cumming shares the raw and emotional story of his turbulent relationship with his father and the long-buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.** A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is celebrated for his unparalleled diversity and fearlessness as an artist. However, his success conceals a painful childhood marked by the heavy hand of a

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life

Amy Tan · 398 pages

Born into a family who believed in fate, Amy Tan has always looked for alternative ways to make sense of the world. And now, in The Opposite of Fate, her first book of non-fiction she shares her thoughts on how she escaped the expectations and curses of her past, and created her own destiny.

The End of Eve

Ariel Gore · 239 pages

At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And s