Showing titles in Women

Born in Buffalo, New York, Marilyn Ann Scales Underwood dreamed of becoming a fashion designer. Moving to New York City to study at the Traphagen School of Fashion, she became an assistant designer and eventually returned to her hometown where she began her career as the first Black female executive at Barmon Brothers Company. Independent and content with being single, she wasn’t interested in marriage until she met Lieutenant Frank Underwood.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was nine months pregnant and due to give birth the night she attended her high school formal. With her baby tucked in her arms, she completed year 12 from her hospital bed. Early in their relationship, she took her future husband, Colin, to the Alice Springs morgue to identify the body of a family member who'd been killed. Nothing about the life of this passionate and steely Warlpiri woman could ever be described as ordinary.

Saraya-Jade Bevis, formerly WWE’s Paige, is one of the biggest names in the wrestling world. She is the youngest two-time WWE Divas Champion and was inaugural NXT’s Women Champion. She ranked first in Pro Wrestling Illustrated’s Female 50 and was named Diva of the Year by Rolling Stone in 2014. She was also the subject of the critically and commercially successful 2019 film Fighting with My Family, produced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and starring Florence Pugh. But before ascending to wrestling superstardom, she was just Saraya. Hell in Boots is Saraya’s real, uncensored, story.

Drawing from the author's original, uncensored journals, Fire follows Anaïs Nin's journey as she attempts to liberate herself sexually, artistically, and emotionally. While referring to her relationships with psychoanalyst Otto Rank and author Henry Miller, as well as a new lover, the Peruvian Gonzalo More, she also reveals that her most passionate and enduring affair is with writing itself.

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited audiences into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. With their frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of everyday happenings provide an intimate insight into the life of one of Australia’s greatest writers.

As her mother, Mira, nears the end of her life, journalist Rachelle Unreich wants to find out more about how Mira survived four concentration camps, including Auschwitz. There was a mystery to her survival, it seemed - which perhaps had something to do with the strange things that always happened around her. Incredibly, when she gave testimony about the Holocaust decades later, Mira said that it was during this time that she learned about 'the goodness of people'.

Bones is the tragicomic, roller coaster story of Robyn Shumer’s lifelong battle with—and triumph over—a crippling eating disorder. It’s an honest, first-person account that takes the listener inside the emotional, mental, physical, and social world of an anorexic from childhood to adulthood, through four decades of a changing society whose message to girls and women remained stubbornly the same: “thinner is the winner.”

Elizabeth Packard was an ordinary Victorian housewife. That was, until the first Woman’s Rights Convention was held in 1848, inspiring Elizabeth and many other women to dream of greater freedoms. She began voicing her opinions on politics and religion – opinions that her husband did not share. Incensed and deeply threatened by her growing independence, he had her declared ‘slightly insane’ and committed to an asylum.

For fans of The Crown—which surgically removed the Queen Mother’s sense of humour, and Craig Brown’s bestseller Ma’am Darling which hilariously captured Princess Margaret and the rest of the royal roost—this biography is part-joke book, part-skimming stone biography, and part-travel guide to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. In a journey of 101 vignettes—one for every year of her life—Gareth Russell captures the incredibly dry, incredibly popular personality of the Queen Mother, whose public life neatly spanned the entire twentieth century.

By age seven, Rebecca Quin, now known in the ring as Becky Lynch, was already defying what the world expected of her. Raised in Dublin, Ireland in a devoutly Catholic family, Rebecca constantly invented new ways to make her mother worry - roughhousing with the neighbourhood kids, getting older and hosting secret parties while her parents were away, enrolling in a warehouse wrestling school, nearly breaking her neck and almost kneecapping a WWE star before her own wrestling career even began - and she was always in search of a thrilling escape from the ordinary.

Throughout Zarna’s whole childhood in India, everyone called her “so American” just for reading the newspaper, having deep thoughts, and talking back to anyone over the age of thirty. When Zarna’s dad tried to marry her off at age fourteen, Zarna fled—first to the streets of Mumbai and ultimately to the glittering paradise of Akron, Ohio, where she got to become American for real.

Growing up, Miranda often looked for faces like hers on our screens. There weren't many. And too often there was a negative narrative around Indigenous lives, and Aboriginal women especially. Now an award-winning actor, she decided to change things herself. Combining her love of romantic comedies with her love of Darwin, the Tiwi Islands and the Top End, Miranda wrote, produced and starred in the box office hit Top End Wedding. But who the hell co-writes, produces and acts in a film about a wedding in the same year they're having their own? Miranda Tapsell does!

The panic years can hit at any time but they are most commonly triggered somewhere between the ages of twenty-five and forty. During this time, every decision a woman makes - from postcode to partner, friends to family, work to weekends - will be impacted by the urgency of the one decision with a deadline, the one decision that is impossible to take back: whether or not to have a baby. But how to stay sane in such a maddening time? How to understand who you are and what you might want from life? How to know if you're making the right decisions?

Cleopatra’s palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ.

At sixteen years old, Lily Arthur was caught between the women's liberation movement of the ‘swinging sixties and the draconian ideology that young women should be punished for deviating from society's 'moral codes'. For the 'crime' of being pregnant, Lily was forcibly taken from the man she planned to marry and incarcerated in the notorious Holy Cross Home for ‘wayward' girls in Wooloowin, Brisbane as a ‘prisoner' of the state. Lily spent her entire pregnancy performing unpaid labour its infamous Magdalene Laundry.

Award-winning songwriter Linda Thompson breaks her silence, sharing the extraordinary story of her life, career, and epic romances with two of the most celebrated yet enigmatic modern American superstars - Elvis Presley and Bruce Jenner.

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met - a man who lounges in boxer shorts, who loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972". His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide.

England. 2001. Ruth Crilly has embarked on a law degree and is destined for a life of normality and stability. That is, of course, until she sticks a polaroid of herself in a box somewhere in Birmingham and is scouted by one of the biggest agencies in the world. Flung between Redditch and Milan, telesales and Vogue, wizard cloaks and red shearling coats, follow Ruth through a rip-roaring, hilarious decade of not-quite-making-it as a supermodel. Fuelled by little more than cigarettes and a fear of being measured she criss-crosses the world in pursuit of fame and fortune.

If you feel that sense that there is something missing from your life, some gap between who you are on the inside and who you are on the outside - then this is the book for you. This is, as the title says, not actually a book about Benedict Cumberbatch. In fact, it's a book about women and what we love, about what happens to women's passions after we leave adolescence and how the space for joy in our lives is squeezed ever smaller as we age, and why.

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work. With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.