Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Before she became the first transgender person to speak at a national political convention in 2016 at the age of twenty-six, Sarah McBride struggled with the decision to come out—not just to her family but to the students of American University, where she was serving as student body president. She’d known she was a girl from her earliest memories, but it wasn’t until the Facebook post announcing her truth went viral that she realized just how much impact her story could have on the country.

This combination of serious artistic engagement with warmth and clarity of prose revels in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity, and community.

Alice Litman died by suicide in May 2022, aged just twenty years old, having already waited almost three years for her first appointment at a gender identity clinic. In stunningly beautiful prose, Caroline Litman captures the realities of an often-messy journey navigating both her daughter’s transition and the days, weeks and months after Alice’s death.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

"Was, um Himmels willen, hat mich bloß ins gleißende Scheinwerferlicht getrieben, mitten unter die Showwölfe? Eigentlich bin ich doch mehr der gemütliche, tapsige Typ und überhaupt keine Rampensau. Warum wollte ich also bereits im zarten Kindesalter mit aller Macht "berühmt werden"? Und wieso hat das dann tatsächlich geklappt? Nun, vielleicht einfach deshalb, weil ich es meiner Oma als sechsjähriger Knirps genau so versprechen musste.

Kodo Nishimura rose to fame following his appearance in Queer Eye: We're in Japan. Now this celebrity makeup artist and ordained Buddhist monk shares his unique and practical guide to positivity and self-acceptance. Listeners will learn from the author's path to self-love and resilience and modern take on Buddhist teachings.

Caroline "Tula" Cossey was born with male genitalia but went on to become a beautiful woman with a successful modeling career. My Story is Tula's candid thought-provoking, enlightening, humorous, heart wrenching, and motivational account of her struggles: her troubled childhood being bullied and taunted in East Anglia, her dreams of becoming a woman, the operations that liberated her sexually, and the journey from showgirl to James Bond girl to top international model.

True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming-of-age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously.

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.

As TikTok and social media stars, every day Matthew and Ryan invite millions of people into their lives as a gay couple. They share their inspirational journeys–how they each found themselves and then each other. From Tinder and the moment they met across a crowded dancefloor with Matthew dressed as an ice lolly to the joyful life they’ve created together.

Part provocateur, part seducer, this young gay man’s account of life offers one of the freshest takes on Australia and the world today. Honouring poets of the past–Jean Genet, Veronica Franco, Euripedes, Hunter S. Thompson, Oscar Wilde–and joining in their task of finding meaning in existence and the modern world, Tolcher has produced a brazenly honest debut without precedent.

In 2012, Rhyannon Styles began her gender transition and attended her first 12-step meeting - beginning two journeys that changed the course of her life. Using her personal narrative as a springboard for exploring addiction, recovery and LGBTQ+ mental health, Rhyannon writes with searing honesty about the complexity of her experiences. The audiobook spans a range of addictions including alcohol, food, sex and relationships, the internet and narcotics, and highlights the ways in which addiction and the transition process can overlap.

What’s it like to parent a child in transition? Inspired by the acclaimed podcast How to Be a Girl, this is a highly personal and beautifully narrated memoir by Marlo Mack recounting the journey she’s been on since her three-year-old declared he should have been born a girl. And Mack agrees to the child’s request to be a girl.

In this pyrotechnic memoir-in-essays, Mak ranges widely over our landscape of paranoia, crisis, and frenetic, clickable consumption. He grants listeners an inside pass to the spaces where culture was made and unmade over the past decade, from the antiseptic glare of white-walled galleries to the darkest corners of Berlin techno clubs. As the gay son of an evangelical minister, Mak fled to those spaces, hoping to join a global, influential elite. But when calamity struck, it forced Mak to confront the costs of mistaking status for belonging.

Long based in Chicago, Iliana and her new wife, Anna, decided to create a culinary destination, the Milkweed Inn, located in Michigan’s remote Upper Peninsula, where much of the food served to their guests would be foraged by Regan herself in the surrounding forest and nearby river. Part fresh challenge, part escape, Regan’s move to the forest was also a return to her rural roots, in an effort to deepen the intimate connection to nature and the land that she had long expressed as a chef, but experienced most intensely growing up.

Are you feeling confused or uninformed about your gender identity? Look no further! If you're questioning your gender identity, you're not alone. Many people have struggled with understanding their gender and finding a place where they belong. This book provides a safe, inclusive, and informative space to explore and understand your gender identity.

Brian Burke is one of the biggest hockey personalities - no, personalities full-stop - in the hockey media landscape. His brashness makes him a magnet for attention, and he does nothing to shy away from it. Most famous for advocating "pugnacity, truculence, testosterone, and belligerence" during his tenure at the helm of the Maple Leafs, Burke has lived and breathed hockey his whole life.

June 28, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library's archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

Chicago is a world-class city, but it is also a city in crisis. Crime is up, schools have repeatedly shut down due to conflict between City Hall and the powerful teachers' union, and COVID-19 only deepened the entrenched poverty, institutional racism, and endless tug of war between the city's haves and have nots. For four years, the person at the center of this storm was Lori Lightfoot.

Jazz could not contain Fred Hersch. Hersch's prodigious talent as a sideman - a pianist who played with the giants of the 20th century in the autumn of their careers, including Art Farmer and Joe Henderson - blossomed further in the '80s and beyond into a compositional genius that defied the boundaries of bop, sweeping in elements of pop, classical, and folk to create a wholly new music.

“Becoming Me” is a collection of personal accounts of individuals who identify as transgender or non-binary, sharing their unique experiences of coming out to family, friends, and the wider community. This book aims to educate and inspire listeners about the diverse experiences of transgender people and to provide a supportive resource for those who may be struggling with their own gender identity.

I Am Enough, A Gay Guy's Truths is the memoir of the author, James A. Fink; a father of four. At the age of 15, young James suddenly found himself a father-to-be with a woman 13 years his senior. After a years-long journey of self-discovery, James came out as a gay man in 2011.

For decades, our cultural discourse around trans and gender-diverse people has been viewed through a medical lens, through diagnoses and symptoms set down in books by cisgender doctors, or through a political lens, through dangerous caricatures. But those who claim non-binary gender identity deserve their own discourse. In Transit looks forward to a world where being who we are, whatever that looks like, isn't met with tension and long-winded explanations, but rather with acceptance and love. Being non-binary is about finding home in the in-between places.

When the AIDS epidemic hit in the early 1980s, Strub was living in New York and soon found himself attending "more funerals than birthday parties". Scared and angry, he turned to radical activism to combat discrimination and demand research. Strub takes you through his own diagnosis and inside ACT UP, the organization that transformed a stigmatized cause into one of the defining political movements of our time.

Ewan Forbes was born Elizabeth to a wealthy landowning family in 1912. As young as six, it was clear that the gender assigned to him at birth was incorrect. With the financial means of seeing specialist doctors in Europe and procuring synthetic hormones, Ewan was able to live as a boy, and then as a man, even correcting the gender on his birth certificate in order to marry. Then, in 1965, Ewan found himself in line to inherit the family baronetcy.

In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment. In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection - with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery.

The transgender memoir you won't stop hearing about. Rhyannon Styles will do for transgender what Matt Haig did for mental health. Elle columnist Rhyannon Styles tells her unforgettable life story in The New Girl, charting her incredible journey from male to female. A powerful book about being true to ourselves, for anyone who's ever felt a little lost. Imagine feeling lost in your own body. Imagine spending years living a lie, denying what makes you you. This was Ryan's reality. He had to choose: die as a man or live as a woman.

With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes listeners through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother’s silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.

In the 1950s, a young Ngāhuia is fostered by a family who believe in hard work and community. Although close to her kuia, she craves more: she wants higher education and refined living. But whānau dismiss her dreams. To them, she is just a show-off, always getting into trouble, talking back and running away. In this fiery memoir about identity and belonging, Ngāhuia te Awekōtuku describes what was possible for a restless working-class girl from the pā.

Charles M. Blow’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to “love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his “do-right” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy.

At age 36, while serving on a jury, author Molly Wizenberg found herself drawn to a female attorney she hardly knew. Married to a man for nearly a decade and mother to a toddler, Wizenberg tried to return to her life as she knew it, but something inside her had changed irredeemably. Instead, she would discover that the trajectory of our lives is rarely as smooth or as logical as we'd like to believe.