Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

What if your first love was a forbidden one? At 23, Felice Cohen was--like other recent college grads--hesitant about entering the real world with the added stress of coming out in the early '90s. Focused on how to land a full-time position as a writer, falling in love was the last thing on her mind. But fall in love she did. With her boss, a woman 34 years older.

Hargrove’s memoir picks up where Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy left off, exploring generational trauma and pulling back the curtain on family court and poverty in America. Moving and inspiring, Mama is an ode to motherhood and identity, to never giving up, and to finding strength in family and community.

In her memoir, Dr Phelps candidly explores her struggles and achievements, in medicine, media and politics – from her advocacy around Medevac and COVID-19 management, to the fallout of her public ‘outing’ in the Australian media and her inspirational role in the Teal movement of the 2022 elections. She also reflects on the ideas and passions that have motivated and sustained her during these times, including her philosophies of leadership and equality, and her love of nature.

In this raw yet enchanting collection of poems and essays, Tyler Gaca dreamily navigates themes of magic and queerness, offering readers an intimate look inside his mind and his worlds, real and imagined. The writings in Gentle Chaos reflect on growing up queer and in love with magic, discovering yourself and your place in the world, and daring to seek out love and hope. The result is a whimsical, vulnerable, and transporting journey into the gentle chaos within us all.

Britney Daniels is a Black, masculine-presenting, tattooed lesbian from a working-class background. For the last five years, she has been working as an emergency-room nurse. She began Journal of a Black Queer Nurse as a personal diary, a tool to heal from the day-to-day traumas of seeing too much and caring too much. Hilarious, gut-wrenching, and infuriating by turns, these stories are told from the perspective of a deeply empathetic, no-nonsense young nurse, who highlights the way race, inequality, and a profit-driven healthcare system make the hospital a place where systemic racism is lived.

Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next.

Owning It, produced especially for Pride Month in collaboration with the historic live event and podcast Don’t Tell My Mother!, brings Audible Members a collection of uplifting, raw, and hilarious stories from queer actors, comedians, and personalities. Cohosted by beloved actress and activist Alexandra Billings and storytelling maven Nikki Levy, Owning It is a joyous celebration of LGBTQIA+ stories and icons.   

Part manifesto, part memoir, This Wound Is a World is an invitation to “cut a hole in the sky / to world inside”. Belcourt issues a call to turn to love and sex to understand how Indigenous peoples shoulder their sadness and pain without giving up on the future. His poems upset genre and play with form, scavenging for a decolonial kind of heaven where “everyone is at least a little gay”.

The Book of Queer Prophets contains modern-day epistles from some of our most important thinkers, writers and activists: Jeanette Winterson tackles religious dogma, Amrou Al-Kadhi writes about trying to make it as a Muslim drag queen in London, John Bell writes about his decision to come out later in life, Tamsin Omond remembers getting married in the middle of a protest and Kate Bottley explains her journey to becoming an LGBT ally.

Growing up in a Philadelphia suburb in the 1970s was an easy life. Well, easy as long as you didn't have dyslexia or ADD, or were a Jew. And once you added gay into the mix, life became more difficult. So Todd Glass decided to hide the gay part, no matter how comic, tragic, or comically tragic the results. Now, Todd has written an open, honest, and hilarious memoir in an effort to help everyone - young and old, gay and straight - breathe a little more freely.

After a chance meeting aboard the ocean liner Paris in 1924, Harvard University scholar and activist F. O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney fell in love and remained inseparable until Cheney's death in 1945. During the intervening years, the men traveled throughout Europe and the United States, achieving great professional success while contending with serious personal challenges, including addiction, chronic disease, and severe depression.

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.

Denham (Denny) Fouts, the 20th century's most famous male prostitute, was a socialite and literary muse whose extraordinary life started off humbly in Jacksonville, Florida. But in short order he befriended (and bedded) the rich and celebrated and in the process conquered the world.

What’s a sweets-loving young boy growing up gay in North Carolina in the '80s supposed to think when he’s diagnosed with type-1 diabetes? That God is punishing him, naturally. This was, after all, when gay-hating Jesse Helms was his senator, AIDS was still the boogeyman, and no one was saying, "It gets better." And if stealing a copy of a gay porno magazine from the newsagent was a sin, then surely what the men inside were doing to one another was much worse. Sweet Tooth is Tim Anderson’s uproarious memoir of life after his hormones and blood sugar both went berserk.

If you doubt and you’re angry, if you’re confused and hurting, if Sundays feel weird and you want something more, this book is for you. As millions exit the church due to its politics and treatment of LGBTQ people, Brandon Flanery brings us Stumbling: A Sassy Memoir about Coming Out of Evangelicalism, an LGBTQ memoir that gives us a glimpse into why he and others are leaving and to show us the hope he’s found on the other side.

One Bead at a Time is the oral memoir of Beverly Little Thunder, a two-spirit Lakota Elder from Standing Rock, who has lived most of her life in service to Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in vast areas of both the United States and Canada.

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.

Mab Segrest explores her singular experience as a white lesbian organizing against a virulent Far Right movement in North Carolina in this best-selling political memoir.

Richard Coles narrates this witty account of life as a parish priest and Radio 4 broadcaster. After a life of sex and drugs and the Communards - brilliantly recounted in the highly acclaimed first volume of his memoirs Fathomless Riches - the Reverend Richard Coles went on to devote his life to God and Christianity. He is also a much-loved broadcaster, presenting Saturday Live on Radio 4 and giving us regular reason to Pause for Thought on Radio 2.

In this funny and poignant memoir and cultural history, the television personality, columnist, and author of Drag pays homage to Lou Reed’s groundbreaking album Transformer on its fiftieth anniversary and recalls its influence on his coming of age and coming out through glam rock.