50 Contemporary Books Every Woman's Gotta Read: Biography/Memoir

Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person

by Shonda Rhimes
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2016 Summer Reading Guide

This inspirational memoir's epigraph bears quotes from Maya Angelou and Christina from Grey's Anatomy, which gives you a good idea of what you'll find inside. Rhimes is the queen of Thursday night tv, creating and producing smash hits like Grey's and Scandal. This time she's telling her own story of how her sister issued her a six-word wake-up call—You never say yes to anything—and the year of YES that followed. I saw parts of myself all over this and absolutely loved the last chapter when the author discovers what her big year was really about. Heads up for audio lovers: Rhimes reads her own work for the audio version. Published November 10 2015.

The Year of Magical Thinking

From the publisher: "From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion. Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child."

Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

Readers keep telling me to read this because of how I loved Jesse Klein's You'll Grow Out of It. From the publisher: "With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss, and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps."

The Dance of the Dissident Daughter

Publishers Weekly calls this Sue Monk Kidd's "journey to capture her feminine soul and live authentically . . . makes a fascinating, well-researched and well-written story."

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood

From the publisher: "A worthy heir to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham, Alexandra Fuller writes poignantly about a girl becoming a woman and a writer against a backdrop of unrest, not just in her country but in her home. From 1972 to 1990, Alexandra Fuller—known to friends and family as Bobo—grew up on several farms in southern and central Africa. Though it is a diary of an unruly life in an often inhospitable place, it is suffused with Fuller’s endearing ability to find laughter, even when there is little to celebrate. It is the story of one woman’s unbreakable bond with a continent and the people who inhabit it, a portrait lovingly realized and deeply felt." O: The Oprah Magazine says this one is full of "humor and compassion." Newsweek says "this is not a book you read just once, but a tale of terrible beauty to get lost in over and over."

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman’s Life

Booklist calls this "pithy." NPR says, "What Nora Ephron does for body image and Anne Lamott for spiritual neuroses, Quindlen achieves on the home front."

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body

"'The book’s short, sharp chapters come alive in vivid personal anecdotes.' (Entertainment Weekly) From the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist: a searingly honest memoir of food, weight, self-image, and learning how to feed your hunger while taking care of yourself. In her phenomenally popular essays and long-running Tumblr blog, Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and body, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. Roxane explores what it means to learn to take care of yourself: how to feed your hungers for delicious and satisfying food, a smaller and safer body, and a body that can love and be loved—in a time when the bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes."

Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman’s Awakening

From the publisher: "A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women's right to drive. Manal al-Sharif grew up in Mecca the second daughter of a taxi driver, born the year fundamentalism took hold. In her adolescence, she was a religious radical, melting her brother's boy band cassettes in the oven because music was haram: forbidden by Islamic law. But what a difference an education can make. Daring to Drive is the fiercely intimate memoir of an accidental activist, a powerfully vivid story of a young Muslim woman who stood up to a kingdom of men—and won. Her memoir is a remarkable celebration of resilience in the face of tyranny, the extraordinary power of education and female solidarity, and the difficulties, absurdities, and joys of making your voice heard."

My Life on the Road

From the publisher: "Gloria Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader—tells a story she has never told before, a candid account of her life as a traveler, a listener, and a catalyst for change. 'When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel. Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.' Gloria realized that growing up didn’t have to mean settling down. And so began a lifetime of travel, of activism and leadership, of listening to people whose voices and ideas would inspire change and revolution."

The Glass Castle

Walls, a former New York gossip columnist, reveals the hardscrabble past she carefully hid for years in this family memoir, which centers on her charasmatic but highly dysfunctional parents: a father with "a little bit of a drinking situation" and a mother who was an "excitement addict," who moved their family all over the country, seeking the next big adventure. Walls spins a good story out of her bad memories.

Evidence Not Seen

From the publisher: "Newlywed American missionary Darlene Deibler Rose survived four years in a notorious Japanese prison camp set deep in the jungles of New Guinea. Thinking she was never to see her husband again, Darlene Rose was forced to sign a false confession and face the executioner's sword, only to be miraculously spared."

Between the World and Me

This is an incredible book, and a timely one. From Entertainment Weekly: "A work that’s both titanic and timely . . . the latest essential reading in America’s social canon." I listened to the fantastic audio edition myself.

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Series: 50 Contemporary Books Every Woman's Gotta Read: Biography/Memoir