Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

In his powerful debut memoir, beloved comedian Murray Hill (Somebody Somewhere) opens up for the first time about how a painful past led to an unwavering commitment to spread joy—one rimshot at a time. For more than three decades, Murray Hill has been a staple of New York City’s downtown...

He wrote one of the biggest hits of our age in ‘about an hour’ in his childhood bedroom. He would go on to collaborate with some of the greatest musicians of all time, from Aretha Franklin to Stevie Wonder. He was a pop star who bleached his hair blonde, wore tiny shorts and, at the same...

When indie musician Mike Maimone meets legendary publicist Howard Bragman, neither expects a once-in-a-lifetime love story to unfold. Despite their perceived differences, they quickly build a world together based on music, humor, hard-won wisdom, and the unexpected tenderness that comes from finding your forever person just when you'd given up looking. But when Howard is diagnosed with cancer on the eve of Mike's proposal, the life they had been envisioning together changes overnight.

A Life in Too Many Margins is a literary episodic tale featuring David, an autistic, chronically ill, and deeply exhausted queer individual. He's survived a few too many doctors with God complexes and an education system that couldn't accommodate a paper cut, let alone a brain like his. Now he's trying to keep it together long enough to get out and figure out what a life outside of survival mode even looks like.

They may be the author of the #1 most banned book in America, but George M. Johnson isn't finished telling their story yet. Written with unflinching emotion and unapologetic boldness, And If I Die Before I Wake is nothing short of a testimony -- one the world desperately needs to hear. George M...

Through her own – often bloody-minded – determination and the medical skill of others, April Ashley became the woman she had always believed herself to be. And for half a dozen decades she soared around, over and above momentous and turbulent times, difficult, and changing times when, finally, who you wanted to be and who you could be became the cultural topic of the day. She overcame opprobrium and penury and became renowned and celebrated for one specific achievement: being April Ashley.

I Think I Like Girls shares everything that Rosie wishes she had known when she started dating women, offering answers to the questions that cross everyone's mind. From the first moment of coming out to finding community and navigating relationships, Rosie will offer her own stories and bring in those of other women, with warmth, humour and a happy helping of chaotic dates.

From choirboy to drag act, grandson to mentor, poet to lover, Dean Atta has played many roles in his life. In this formally inventive, candid and courageous book, he explores what he has carried in his body: wins and losses, shame and pride, pain and joy. Dean also investigates how radical self-acceptance and a willingness to abide with discomfort open up the possibility of a life lived beyond definition: a person unlimited.

Michigan. To tens of thousands of womyn from around the globe, the word meant not a state in the upper Midwest of the U.S., but a state of mind, a state of freedom. A culture, a community, a revolution. The Land. From 1976 to 2015, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival was home ground for the lesbian feminist movement. There we strove to embody the principles of matriarchal feminism and bring that wisdom to life in every aspect of the town we created, and the values that guided our lives together.

During her sophomore year at Middlebury College, Emily meets Max—“you” as she intimately refers to him in the book. Not exactly a tomboy, but not quite a girly girl either, Emily is intent on finding a masculine boyfriend to assuage a deeply rooted fear that she may not be quite feminine enough. Max—a boisterous class clown beloved by his many straight guy friends—has recently come out as gay and is embracing his newly claimed identity. Initially, Max and Emily dislike each other, but end up growing close after a make-out dare on Halloween.

After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair - but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain. A Certain Loneliness is a meditative and engaging memoir-in-essays that explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and female desire with frankness and humor.

Alan Turing had a radical and ingenious mind. He is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, and his theories on this matter range from purely mechanical to almost spiritual. During World War II, his decryption of the Nazis’ Enigma codes proved vital for the Allied victory over the Axis powers. Turing’s fingerprints are everywhere, and yet his own country for quite some time failed to acknowledge it.

Discovering George Michael's Faith confirmed for David Crabb what every bully already knew: He was gay. What saved him from high school was finding a group of outlandish friends who reveled in being outsiders. David found himself enmeshed with misfits: wearing black, cutting class, staying out all night, drinking, tripping, chain-smoking, idolizing the Pet Shop Boys - and learning lessons about life and love along the way.

A moving and surprisingly funny memoir about finding the right balance between anger and compassion “Why aren’t you angry?” people often asked Martin Moran after he told his story of how he came to forgive the man who sexually abused him as a boy. At first, the question pissed him off...

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.

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."

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.

In Flipping the Script, AJ Gibson shows how his life has been a series of personal roadblocks and rock-bottom moments. The true stories in Flipping the Script will make you laugh, encourage you to keep fighting for happiness, and inspire you to turn your own rock-bottom moments into your proudest accomplishments!   

Brought to you by Penguin. How can we create a better world for LGBTQ+ people? 35 extraordinary voices share their stories and visions for the future. We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we...