Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

One winter's night in 1976, over 20 million people in Britain watched John Curry skate to Olympic glory on an ice rink in Austria. Many millions more watched around the world. Overnight he became one of the most famous men on the planet. He was awarded the OBE. He was chosen as BBC Sports Personality of the Year. Curry had changed ice skating from marginal sport to high art. And yet the man was - and would always remain - an absolute mystery to a world that had been dazzled by his gift.

Brought to you by Penguin #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'The emergence of our true selves is all of our life's work. Pageboy helps chart the course.' Jamie Lee Curtis 'Searing, deeply moving, and incredibly poignant... This isn't simply a book on what it means to be trans...

Longlisted for Autobiography of the Year, Sports Book Awards 2022 The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller A deeply personal and inspiring memoir from one of the most celebrated and influential names in British sport. Tom Daley captured the hearts of the nation with his unforgettable medal-winning...

An element of drama has always attended Rupert Everett, even before he swept to fame with his outstanding performance in Another Country. He has spent his life surrounded by extraordinary people, and witnessed extraordinary events. He was in Moscow during the fall of communism, in Berlin the night the wall came down, and in downtown Manhattan on September 11th.

Written with White’s signature honesty, irreverence, and wit, The Loves of My Life is the culmination of a legend's life and work, a delightful and moving tour of over seventy years of being unabashedly gay and in love with love in all its forms.

Brought to you by Penguin. ‘We ache for love, but love eludes us. Out of this crisis comes so much of what it means to be human’ Shon Faye grew up quietly obsessed with the feeling that love was not for her. Not just romantic love: the secret fear of her own unworthiness penetrated every...

A definitive history and celebration of the groundbreaking show RuPaul's Drag Race in its first decade, from a Burbank basement set all the way to the Emmy's, and every weave in-between, as told by its stars, producers and fans. Told over the first ten years, And Don't F&%k It Up tells a...

Jackie McCarthy O'Brien has led a truly remarkable life, from being born in 1961 to an Irish mother and Jamaican father (whom she never met) in Birmingham to growing up in Limerick. She was put in an industrial school as a baby by a priest for being an "illegitimate" black child and not recovered by her mother until she was five. As a teen she excelled at sport and played for Ireland in soccer, but when she was sexually harassed by a coach she changed to Irish rugby team.

THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From international drag superstar and pop culture icon RuPaul, comes his most revealing to date—a brutally honest and deeply intimate memoir of growing up Black, poor, and queer in a broken home to discovering the power of performance and self-acceptance. A profound...

Figuring explores the complexities of love and the human search for truth and meaning through the interconnected lives of several historical figures across four centuries. Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists - mostly women, mostly queer - whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience and appreciate the universe.

The first definitive biography of revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson—an iconic and trailblazing figure in LGBTQIA+ history—unveiling her life, profound impact, and enduring legacy. “Thank God the revolution has begun, honey.” Legend has it that after Marsha P. Johnson threw the...

The Times Art Book of the Year 2021 FINALIST FOR THE PLUTARCH AWARD 2022 ‘Must surely be the definitive life of Francis Bacon … A biography that no Bacon fan – or indeed foe – can afford to overlook … Mesmerising’ THE TIMES ‘A magnificent triumph … I was captivated by every...

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of East London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different, but in a home where being gay was inconceivable, he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up, life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

Oscar Wilde's life – like his wit – was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famous, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure. His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research, bringing alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siècle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Oscar Wilde to date.

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer's personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin's most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer's creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond.

Brought to you by Penguin. It’s 1996, and Jeremy has met the British boy of his dreams — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights, including immigration. The pair snatch time in forests and deserts, London fashion...

This remarkable memoir is the classic account of the transgender journey. It is all the more extraordinary because it is the life story of a figure who, it seemed, seamlessly and publicly charted a course through the English establishment - James Morris, outstanding journalist, historian and travel writer, famed for a peerless writing style. But all the while he was concealing a very different inner world: from the age of four he felt that, despite his body, he was really a girl.

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER A humorous collection of autobiographical essays from comedian andEmmy Award–winning actor Jeff Hiller, who shares his journey from growing up “profoundly gay” in 1980s Texas to his experiences as an inept social worker and how he clawed, scraped, and brawled to...

This is not your mother's memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch expertly moves the listener through issues of gender, sexuality, violence, and the family from the point of view of a lifelong swimmer turned artist. In writing that explores the nature of memoir itself, her story traces the effect of extreme grief on a young woman's developing sexuality that some define as untraditional because of her attraction to both men and women.

'To outsiders, my mom and I should have been enemies. Our house should have been divided -- North vs South, red vs blue, conservative vs progressive, or however you want to put it. Instead, my mom and I fuelled each other. Her oil lit my lamp, and eventually mine lit hers. The tools I'd learned...