Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Meet the Law family - eccentric, endearing and hard to resist. Your guide: Benjamin, the third of five children and a born humorist. Join him as he tries to answer some puzzling questions: Why won't his Chinese dad wear made-in-China underpants? Why was most of his extended family deported in the 1980s? Will his childhood dreams of Home and Away stardom come to nothing? What are his chances of finding love? Hilarious and moving, The Family Law is a linked series of tales from a wonderful Australian talent.

TMI is the story of how Mario Lavandeira became Perez Hilton, a celebrity blogger with millions of readers around the globe who was sometimes called the Most Hated Man in Hollywood.

"Pride & Prejudice: Healing Division in the Modern Family" is a heartfelt exploration into the intricate balance between celebrating one's identity ("pride") and confronting ingrained biases ("prejudice"). Dr. Matt R. Salmon shares his experience growing up queer in a family and religion that condemned it. Drawing upon professional expertise and unique life experiences, this book offers a fresh perspective on the challenges and opportunities that arise in families with LGBTQ+ members.

Today’s gay youth have dozens of queer peer heroes, both fictional and real, but former gay teenager Grace Perry did not have that luxury. Instead, she had to search for queerness in the (largely straight) teen cultural phenomena the aughts had to offer: in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace, Gossip Girl, Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl”, country-era Taylor Swift, and Seth Cohen jumping on a coffee cart. And, for better or worse, these touch points shaped her adult identity. She came out on the other side like many millennials did: in her words, gay as hell.

Edward Enninful has lived an extraordinary life. Here, for the first time, he shares the remarkable, inspiring story of his journey from a childhood bedroom in Ghana overlooking firing squads, to 1990s London—becoming the youngest-ever fashion director of i-D magazine at just eighteen years old. Now the first Black editor-in-chief of British Vogue, he has created game-changing images of everyone from Beyoncé to Meghan Markle, Kate Moss to Oprah Winfrey, Adele to Rihanna, and many more stars he now counts as friends.

Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was and what I needed to do. Since then, I've been on testosterone for more than a decade - I know, I can't believe it either - I've also had top and bottom surgery and legally changed my sex, so I know a few things about the transitioning process and being trans!

In March 2019, the Viking Sky cruise ship was struck by a bomb cyclone in the North Atlantic. Rocked by 50-foot swells and 40-knot gales, the ship lost power and began to drift straight toward the notoriously dangerous Hustadvika coast in Norway. This is the suspenseful, harrowing, funny, touching story by one passenger who contemplated death aboard that ship.

Ivan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of 10 previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada's Yukon, and how they learned to embrace their tomboy past while carving out a space for those of us who don't fit neatly into boxes or identities or labels.

From a young age, Andy Cohen knew two things: He was gay, and he loved television. Now presiding over Bravo's reality-TV empire, he started out as an overly talkative pop-culture obsessive, devoted to Charlie's Angels and All My Children - and to his mother, who received daily letters from him while he was at summer camp, usually reminding her to tape the soaps. In retrospect, it's hard to believe that everyone didn't know that Andy was gay; still, he remained in the closet until college. Finally out, he embarked on making a career out of his passion for television.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Lucas Hedges, Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, and written and directed by Joel Edgerton. The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small-town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to 'cure' him of homosexuality or risk losing family, friends and the god he had prayed to every day of his life....

A few years ago I was asked if I'd like to make a documentary on the Mekong River, travelling from the vast delta in Vietnam to the remote and snowy peaks of Tibet. Up until that point, the farthest east I'd been was Torremolinos, in the Costa Del Sol.... 

In his debut memoir, Won’t Be Silent, Abe Gurko invites you to join him in celebrating a life that he calls “finally worth living.” It’s an honest, rollicking ride filled with joyous and life-affirming as well as challenging, daunting, and heartbreaking situations that he navigates with aplomb, though not always.

Patrick Hinds has failed. A lot. In fact, he’s kind of an expert at it—which is why he’s uniquely qualified to say that failure is a good thing.

Some years ago, Oliver Darkshire stepped into the hushed interior of Henry Sotheran Ltd on Sackville Street (est. 1761) to interview for their bookselling apprenticeship, a decision which has bedevilled him ever since. He'd intended to stay for a year before launching into some less dusty, better remunerated career. Unfortunately for him, the alluring smell of old books and the temptation of a management-approved afternoon nap proved irresistible. Soon he was balancing stacks of first editions, fending off nonagenarian widows with and trying not to upset the store's resident ghost.

Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.

Before becoming the actor, producer, advocate, and model that people know today, Nyle DiMarco was half of a pair of Deaf twins born to a multi-generational Deaf family in Queens, New York. At the hospital one day after he was born, Nyle “failed” his first test—a hearing test—to the joy and excitement of his parents.

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Queer Heroes of Myth & Legend brings to life characters who are romantic, brave, mysterious, and always fantastical. It is a magnificent celebration of queerness through the ages in all its legendary glory.

Siri Lindley wanted to be a world champion triathlete . . . even though she didn't know how to swim. She wanted to love and be loved . . . even though her father shunned her because she was gay. She wanted to savor every day and enjoy the life she'd made with her wife, her career, and her passion for horses . . . even though in November 2019 she was diagnosed with a rare—and usually fatal—form of acute myeloid leukemia. Every time Siri has faced what seemed impossible, she found a way to not only survive the situation, but to thrive within it.

Lucy Sante has often felt like an outsider. Born in Belgium to conservative Catholic working-class parents, she was transplanted to the United States without ever entirely settling here. But a feeling of home finally arrived when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s amidst her fellow bohemians. Through those electric years, some of her friends would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and others would become jarringly famous. Lucy flirted with both fates, on her way to building a glittering career as a writer. But she could never shake that feeling.

Harvey Fierstein’s legendary career has transported him from community theater in Brooklyn, to the lights of Broadway, to the absurd excesses of Hollywood and back. He’s received accolades and awards for acting in and/or writing an incredible string of hit plays, films, and TV shows.