Showing results by publisher "She Writes Press" in Biographies & Memoirs

Part culinary memoir and part travelogue, Carole Bumpus gathered this compilation of intimate interviews, conversations, stories, and traditional family recipes (cuisine pauvre) in the kitchens of French families as she traveled throughout the countryside. Travel with her through Champagne caves/wineries and historic cathedrals, local farmers’ markets, ancient potters’ guilds, and restaurant kitchens with wood-fire ovens.

When Terry Repak and her husband moved to West Africa with two small children at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, she seized the opportunity to connect with people of other cultures and bear witness to the ravages of the disease. Circling Home chronicles the adventures and challenges of raising children overseas and trying to find home in countries as diverse as Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Switzerland. Her memoir spotlights the complexity, struggles, and profound lessons at the heart of the expat journey.

As a lonely girl coming of age in the 1970s, Liz has every reason to believe her eighth-grade teacher is in love with her. Because the sex isn’t physically violent and is wrapped in a message of love, she learns to exchange sex for attention. But years later, as an adult, emotional closeness eludes Liz. Even after marrying a sensitive, caring man, she is walled off. Struggling through confusing years, she believes something is deeply wrong with her.

Perfect for listeners moved by Between Two Kingdoms, this life-affirming memoir of a young woman's sudden autoimmune kidney failure reveals a resilient journey of chronic illness, unfailing love, and moving forward with joy.

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors.

Covering seven decades of living, traveling, and growing, Does My Voice Matter? follows James’ journey of self-discovery and authenticity as she gradually recognizes that she has a voice—and learns how to use it. She uses her own life experiences as a backdrop for her exploration of how the voice is used as a tool of engagement.

In this unflinching and riveting coming-of-age memoir, Patricia Grayhall battles sexism in a male-dominated profession. She plunges into a life that is never boring—and certainly never without passion. Tossed around in the rough seas of medical training, chronically exhausted and emotionally drained, Patricia chafes at the toxic masculinity of the culture of medicine facing many of the same issues women face in male-dominated fields today.

Leaving home was not easy for Irene Sardanis. Born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s, she was the youngest child of an unhappy mother and a father who drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women—and then, when Irene was 11, abandoned the family altogether. Irene's older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, held hostage to her mother's rage and despair. When she finally escaped her mother as a young adult, she married a Greek man who controlled and dominated her just like her mother always had. But Irene wasn't ready to let her story end there.

Years later, Willa Goodfellow revisits this account of her antidepressant-induced hypomania that hijacked a Costa Rican vacation and tells the rest of the story: the wrong medications, an overlooked diagnosis of bipolar 2, and finally a path to recovery. Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge is a book within a book, part memoir of misdiagnosis and part self-help guide about the bipolar spectrum. This edgy and comedic collection of essays offers information about a mood disorder frequently mistaken for major depression as well as resources for recovery. Plus, Costa Rica.

The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection - but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was 47 years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: Her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her world shifted on its axis.

When her brother dies of AIDS and her husband dies of cancer in the same year, Rosemary is left on her own with two young daughters and antsy addiction demons dancing in her head. This is the nucleus of The Art of Losing It: a young mother jerking from emergency to emergency as the men in her life drop dead around her; a high-functioning radio show host waging war with her addictions while trying to raise her two little girls who just lost their daddy.

I’m So Glad You’re Here is the story of a family disrupted by ramifications of a father’s mental illness. Poignant and powerful, I’m So Glad You’re Here is author Pamela Gay’s exploration of the idea that while the wounds we carry from growing up in fractured families stay with us, they do not have to control us - a reflective journey that will inspire listeners to think about their own relational lives.

Leaving a successful career in the US, a father makes a fateful decision to settle his wife and two young daughters on an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings and declares they are the luckiest people alive. In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes, and in the grip of a brutal dictator.

Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in the campus town to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not.

Born into a Hassidic Jewish family in Poland in 1924, Mendek grew up surrounded by extreme anti-Semitism. Armed with an ingenious mind, he survived three horrific years in Nazi slave-labor concentration camps while virtually his entire family was murdered in Auschwitz. After arriving in America in 1946 — despite having no money or professional skills — his inventions helped revolutionize both the jewelry and packaged-salad industries. Remarkably, Mendek also applied his ingenuity to his own psyche, developing innovative ways to heal his heart and end his emotional suffering.

Jo’s mother, Babe, liked to drink, dance, and stay up very late. When the husband she adored went on sales calls, she waited for him in the parking lot, embroidering pillowcases. Jo grew up thinking that the last thing she wanted was to be like her mother. Then it dawned on her that her own happiness was derived in large part from lessons Babe had taught her.

Kavita Basi had a wonderful life - a job she enjoyed, a wonderful family, and seemingly perfect health. Then an unexpected event took place and turned her entire world upside down. In Room 23, Kavita chronicles her time suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage - bleeding in the area of the skull surrounding the brain. With this diagnosis, Kavita went from being healthy and happy to battling a condition with a 50 percent mortality rate.

As a college administrator, Gwen Plano lived her professional life in a highly visible and accountable space - but as wife and mother, after hours and behind closed doors, she experienced the terror of domestic violence. It was her secret; it was her shame. But when her husband turned his brutality on her son, she could no longer stay quiet.

Having spent ten summers on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation near Glacier National Park, part of her doctoral fieldwork for a PhD in Native American Art History, forty-two-year-old Lynne Spriggs thinks of Montana as her healing place. When she moves to “Big Sky Country” from the East Coast in a quest to reset her life, she has high hopes for what awaits her. Great Falls, a farming and military town in central Montana, is not what Lynne imagined when she decided to leave city life behind.

In 1960, six years before Marty Ross-Dolen was born, her maternal grandparents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets over New York City. They were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement for their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. Their daughter—Marty’s mother—was fourteen years old at the time. This genre-bending memoir tells Marty’s story of being raised by a mother in protracted mourning.