Diaries & Memoirs

A heartfelt and hilarious collection of essays from the comedian and entertainer known for voicing Olaf in the phenomenon Disney franchise of Frozen, and for his award-winning turn as Elder Cunningham in the Broadway smash hit The Book of Mormon.

“The Motherload is for all the women who wish someone had told them the truth about motherhood. Honest, unapologetic, and brutally funny…it’s about developing the strength to care for yourself and, thereby, learning to care for another.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter An intimately honest memoir about motherhood that dares to ask, what happens when “what to expect when you’re expecting” turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity.“The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Welcome to Sarah Hoover’s unflinching take on motherhood and its expectations in which the beatific narrative women have been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal discovery—turns out to be not quite true. In The Motherload, Hoover provides a candid, funny, and sobering look at the journey women undertake as expectant mothers and wives from the early days of pregnancy through labor and beyond. Like most of us, Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a certain life for herself—career, love, marriage, children—and when Hoover moved from Indiana to New York City to study art history, the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got her degree, landed a job in a gallery, made friends, and went on some exceptionally bad dates. She also met interesting artists, one of whom became her future husband (a whirlwind romance, theirs, exciting even with its imperfections). But when Hoover got pregnant, the life she imagined began to unravel. She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually, when her son was born, there was no… joy. Instead, she felt “disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.” Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built falling apart? It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her experience. At its core, The Motherload is about learning to forgive yourself for not being what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality, no matter your circumstance, and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. It is a moving, exciting, roller coaster ride, and a propulsive addition to the canon of women’s literature.

Billion-Dollar Visionary to Heartbroken Survivor: Loren Ridinger’s Untold Story of Love, Loss, and Finding Strength to Thrive Again

A Zero Hero's Guide to Self-Acceptance and Personal Empowerment. In this inspirational cross between self-help and memoir, Chad Michael Hardy chronicles his journey from a strict Mormon upbringing to self-acceptance and true authenticity.

A warm, sharply written memoir about embracing one's truest self in a world that demands gender fit in neat boxes.

The story of bringing up a wonderful boy called Mac. Tragically, Mac was killed in a motorbike accident just a few months after his sixteenth birthday. This is a celebration of his life, and the enduring love he inspired.

The hilarious, gutsy account of misadventures in the kitchen and in the bedroom by anonymous chef Slutty Cheff.

While there was terrorist-related activity happening somewhere in Northern Ireland daily, Belfast bore the brunt of it, and the two-mile stretch of road between Willie's home and the school had more than its share. He travelled that corridor of death to and from school every day. In school, he was prepared to put his life on the line protecting the rights of disaffected young people. He tried to keep the older boys out of the arms of the IRA, who would recruit them into the Fianna (Junior IRA), and out of reach of the security forces who would arrest them for petty crimes and then release them on condition that they became informers. He was ready to protect them against all comers. He walked the middle ground, neither on one side nor the other. The police and the soldiers were professionals. They could look after themselves. He did not support the IRA, nor take orders from them, nor allow himself to be used by them. He saw his role as protecting the young people in his care. He was walking on quicksand, knowing that if he put a foot wrong, he could vanish without a trace.

A unique collection of unpublished letters from the climbing legend George Mallory to his family, revealing his innermost thoughts about people, places and mountains.

For fans of survival memoirs comes a story of surviving the unthinkable and emerging with a powerful story in resilience.

Perfect for any Oasis fanOut of all the bitter feuds in music history, one of the fiercest is between two brothers in the same band: Liam and Noel Gallagher. Now, Bruno Vincent has gained exclusive access to their secret diaries. From the age of two, when they're screaming over each other's nursery rhymes to fifty two, when Liam wants to throw a telly out the window but it's fixed to the wall, the windows are unbreakable PVC with safety latches and he's got a bad back.

'I've still got the diaries somewhere, scruffy from stuffing them in my handbag and covered with something just short of scribble. Five or six diaries. What was happening was earth-changing. I felt compelled to record it as faithfully as I could...'Linda ApplebyDuring the 1990s, Linda Appleby, a brilliant university academic, kept a journal that combined a sharp sense of what was happening in - and in some ways, to - the world with an unintentional timeline of her own mental breakdown, which culminated in a stay at Cambridge's Fulbourn Hospital in the early 2000s. Current events from the period - the long war in the former Yugoslavia, the hostages in Lebanon, the Good Friday Agreement, the rise of Tony Blair - are intertwined with Linda's professional, domestic and romantic concerns. The result is an honest and unapologetic record of a keen mind gradually broken by a combination of external and internal pressures.Through it all, Linda's care for her children, her strong religious faith - which, though Christian, extends to a more than passing interest in both Muslim and Hindu beliefs - and academic grounding in philosophy somehow saved her from total disaster, and the book ends with a few entries in the mid-2000s, when Linda, having left Fulbourn, had been able to make a new life for herself in Cambridge. A few of the poems she was writing at the time are included in the book.

From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.

Sports journalist and ultra-athlete Vassos Alexander takes the plunge and explores the delights and rewards of wild and open water swimming.