Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

In Porn Memoir: A Memoir, Josh Sabarra throws open the proverbial closet - and bedroom - doors, taking listeners on a Hollywood thrill-ride through growing up, coming out, coming of age and finally finding himself at 40. Despite being a high-level entertainment executive, Josh was still a virgin at 31. Uncomfortable in his own skin, haunted by painful childhood memories, he kept laser-focused on building an unparalleled career trajectory at the expense of his personal life.

In the Shadow of the American Dream is a stunning collection of riveting and revealing chapters from Wojnarowicz's extensive personal diaries - 30 volumes' worth of memories and lucid observations, some bitter, some sweet - that the author began writing when he was 17 and continued until his death two decades later. Here is a brilliant chronicle of an artist's emergence - a young man's still achingly fresh memories of his unhappy adolescence and his glorious discovery of self.

This is the memoir of James C. Hormel - a man who grew up feeling different not only because his family owned the Hormel “empire” and lived in a 26 bedroom house in a small Midwest town, but because he was gay at a time when homosexuality was not discussed or accepted. Outwardly he tried to live up to the life his father wanted for him - he was a successful professional, had married a lovely woman, and had children - but as volatile changes in the late 1960s impeded on the American psyche, Hormel realized that he could not hide his true self forever.

American author John Horne Burns (1916 - 1953) led a brief and controversial life, and as a writer, transformed many of his darkest experiences into literature. Burns was born in Massachusetts, graduated from Andover and Harvard, and went on to teach English at the Loomis School, a boarding school for boys in Windsor, Connecticut. During World War II he was stationed in Africa and Italy and worked mainly in military intelligence. His first novel, The Gallery (1947), based on his wartime experiences, was critically acclaimed and one of the first to unflinchingly depict gay life in the military.

When Reynolds Price died in January 2011, he left behind one final piece of writing - two hundred candid, heartrending, and marvelously written manuscript pages about a critical period in his young adulthood. Picking up where his previous memoir, Ardent Spirits, left off, the work documents a brief time from 1961 to 1965, perhaps the most leisurely of Price's life, but also one of enormous challenge and growth. Price gave it the title Midstream. Approaching thirty, Price writes, is to face the notion that, "This is it. I'm now the person I'm likely to be…from here to the end."

As dramatic, graceful and deeply felt as a pas de deux, Shanghai Tango is a deeply personal and inspiring account of growing up in a body that feels alien and of braving pioneering surgery in communist China.

Jonathan ha 31 anni nel 2016, un giorno qualsiasi di gennaio gli viene la febbre e non va più via, una febbretta, costante, spossante, che lo ghiaccia quando esce, lo fa sudare di notte quasi nelle vene avesse acqua invece che sangue. Aspetta un mese, due, cerca di capire, fa analisi, ha pronta grazie alla rete un'infinità di autodiagnosi, pensa di avere una malattia incurabile, mortale, pensa di essere all'ultimo stadio. La sua paranoia continua fino al giorno in cui non arriva il test all'HIV e la realtà si rivela: Jonathan è sieropositivo, non sta morendo, quasi è sollevato.

From the self-proclaimed Queen of the Stunted Late Bloomers and one of the most exciting emerging voices in comedy comes an honestly funny memoir about the awkward, cringeworthy, hilarious, and longest possible journey of coming of age and into her own.

A new reissue of Philip Hoare's singular biography of Stephen Tennant. ‘Witty and amazing … both scholarly and hilarious at the same time’ John Waters, New York Times Philip Hoare’s fascinating profile of Britain’s most legendary and flamboyant aristocratic aesthete. With unparalleled...

Hilarious and bawdy musings on disability, sex, family, and Hollywood, from Emmy-winning writer and creator of the Netflix series Special. For years, Ryan O'Connell wished he was different. Raised in a small Southern California beach town described as "Laguna Beach with meth," his dad had taken...

An immigration journalist and her wife trace their family’s intertwined past to unearth a history of how hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews survived Hitler’s Holocaust at the brutal hands of Stalin—a story that sheds light on the enduring power of hope and love. Daniela Gerson and her...

A thrilling celebration of a forgotten early American renegade, Not Your Founding Father reconsiders just how radical the American experiment could have been. Early in the morning of October 9, 1776—in the small farming community of Cumberland, Rhode Island, in a house surrounded by cherry...

Winner of the Speakies award for the Best Self-Help Audiobook Read by the author, Suzi Ruffell, this audiobook includes exclusive behind-the-scenes conversations between Suzi and special guests, including Romesh Ranganathan, Josh Widdecombe, Tom Allen, Maisie Adams, Rosie Jones, and her mum. 'A...

Winner of the 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers Shortlisted for the 2025 Toronto Book Award From a queer Muslim woman and artist, a generous, heartfelt and insightful memoir about family and finding the path to one's truest self. The youngest of three daughters, and the only...

"Listeners will be drawn in by [author Jennifer Finney] Boylan's wry asides and sharp insight, delivered with warmth, vulnerability, and sincerity by [Narrator Gabra] Zackman." — Library Journal What is the difference between men and women? Jennifer Finney Boylan, bestselling author of She’s...

A fascinating tour of creatures from the surface to the deepest ocean floor: this "miraculous, transcendental book" invites us to envision wilder, grander, and more abundant possibilities for the way we live (Ed Yong, author of An Immense World). A queer, mixed race writer working in a largely...

From one of the world's foremost intersex activists, a candid, provocative, and eye-opening memoir of gender identity, self-acceptance, and love. My name is Hida Viloria. I was raised as a girl but discovered at a young age that my body looked different. Having endured an often turbulent home...

Every autumn, Kenny Porpora would watch his heartbroken mother scribble messages on balloons and release them into the sky above Long Island, one for each family member they'd lost to addiction. As the number of balloons grew, his mother fell deeper into alcoholism, drinking away her sorrows...

In the summer of 1974, a fourteen-year-old girl in Dolton, Illinois, had a dream. A dream to become an actress, like her idols Ron Howard and Vicki Lawrence. But it was a long way from the South Side of Chicago to Hollywood, and it didn’t help that she’d recently dropped out of the school...

Part hidden history, part love letter to creative innovation, this is the true story of an unlikely friendship between a dancer, Loie Fuller, and a scientist, Marie Curie, brought together by an illuminating discovery. At the turn of the century, Paris was a hotbed of creativity. Technology...