Showing results for "a-life-of-her-own" in Biographies & Memoirs

Sue Greenwood’s instinct was to follow her nose and say ‘YES!’ to everything, shortly followed by, “Oh S*%t! How am I going to get myself out of this one!” Raised in war-torn London in the early '40s in a spiritually rich but penniless bohemian Quaker family, Sue navigated through marriage and motherhood in the '60s before setting off alone to work in Singapore, aged 42. You might call it a fight for survival: she calls it one-helluva serendipitous adventure.

No one looked like her. No one walked like her. No one talked like her. Sexy, yet vulnerable, and unexpectedly talented, Marilyn Monroe was no ordinary screen goddess. But few really knew her. On June 1, 1962—Marilyn's 36th birthday—famed photographer and reporter George Barris visited Marilyn on the set of what would be her final, unfinished, film. For the next six weeks, Barris photographed and interviewed the actress. "Don't believe anything you read about me except this...." she told Barris.

In this moving memoir, Shirley Smith, wife of NBA Champion and All-Star J. R. Smith, tells the story of giving birth to one of the youngest premature babies to survive - using her experience to heighten awareness of the crisis of Black maternal and infant health and pay tribute to Black women’s resilience.

To recovering '80s kid Amy Liz Harrison, getting sober and giving birth were shockingly similar. And she's uniquely qualified to know since she's been sober for over a decade and has given birth to eight children (nope, this sentence has no typos). Depression, isolation, boredom and a devastating crisis of faith led to extra glasses (or bottles) of wine at the end of the day. Which eventually led to being led away from her kids in handcuffs. Ten years of sobriety and four more babies later, Harrison realized that giving birth and getting sober were kinda sorta the same.

In A Daughter of Isis, Nawal El Saadawi, author of Woman at Point Zero and one of the Arab world’s greatest writers, tells the story of the formative years which shaped an iconic voice in global feminism. In poignant and moving prose we learn about her relationships with her family, her traumatic experience of female genital mutilation at seven years old and escaping suitors at ten and her journey from the rural Egyptian village of her birth to metropolitan Cairo to study medicine.