Family Memoir

Emmy Award–winning writer Sara Schaefer’s hilariously honest memoir follows her “on this wild river descent into the Grand Canyon and her own secret family history. This is a Class 1000 Rapids of a memoir and I urge you to take the ride” (John Hodgman, author of Vacationland). Perfect...

An astonishing and at times outright comic memoir that marks the brilliant debut of a writer raised in a creative, bohemian household characterized by extreme privilege tinged with neglect. Born into one of the most celebrated Anglo-Irish families, the Guinnesses, Ivana Lowell tells a stunning...

A New Yorker Best Book of 2021 A “touching, heartbreaking, and exceptional” (Town & Country) coming-of-age memoir by the daughter of artistic, bohemian parents—set against a backdrop of 1950s New York, Cape Cod, and Mexico. Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times; following...

*A New Yorker and Vogue Best Book of 2023* “Compelling... [McPhee] positions herself neither as victim nor saint but as someone who, she says, only wants to be good.” —The Washington Post A moving memoir from an award-winning novelist—a riveting account of her complicated, bohemian...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love,” Hunter Biden writes in this deeply moving and “unflinchingly honest” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir of addiction, loss, and survival. When he was two years old, Hunter Biden...

Grief, mental illness, and the bonds of family are movingly explored in this extraordinary memoir “suffused with emotional depth and intellectual inquiry” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises) as a writer delves into the tragedy of his mother’s violent death at the hands of...

A Washington Post Noteworthy Book (of July and August); a Book Riot Best Nonfiction Book of Summer; WBUR (Boston Public Radio) Twelve Books to Read This Summer “Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others.” —Jeannette Walls, #1...

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER | NPR “BOOKS WE LOVE” 2024 | PEOPLE’S “BEST CELEBRITY MEMOIRS” 2024 | TOWN & COUNTRY’S “BEST NEW ROYAL BOOKS” 2024 | THE TIMES (LONDON) “10 BEST BIOGRAPHIES AND MEMOIRS” 2024 | WINNIPEG FREE PRESS’S “BEST BOOKS” 2024 NOW WITH A NEW AFTERWORD...

This program is read by the author. Who Could Ever Love You is an intimate, heartbreaking memoir of a father, a mother, and a family’s exile. Mary L. Trump grew up in a family divided by its patriarch’s relentless drive for money and power. The daughter of Freddy Trump, the highly...

In this coming-of-age memoir, set in Chicago's western suburbs between the 1960s and '80s, adopted twins Julie and Jenny provide their parents with an instant family. Their sisterly bond holds tight as the two strive for identity, individuality, and belonging. But as Julie's parents continue adding children to the family, some painful and tragic experiences test family values, parental relationships, and sibling bonds.

In Force of Beauty, Mikki Taylor, editor-at-large of Essence magazine and longtime activist, introduces us to her gifted grandmother, Bessie, her glamorous mother, Modina, and how Modina’s friendship with the legendary Sarah Vaughan shaped Mikki’s childhood. Taylor’s mini-memoir is a tribute to Newark in the '50s and '60s, of cool jazz clubs and close-knit neighborhoods, a handsome house on Avon Avenue, and one family’s tale of perseverance and ingenuity in a city they all loved.

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

This memoir is soaked in the sunshine of Corfu, where Gerald Durrell lived as a boy, surrounded by his eccentric family - as well as puppies, toads, scorpions, geckoes, ladybugs, glowworms, octopuses, bats, and butterflies.

Until Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened her studio on Eight Street in Manhattan in 1914 - which evolved into the Whitney Museum almost two decades later - there were few art museums in the United States, let alone galleries for contemporary artists to exhibit their work. When the mansions of the wealthy cried out for art they sought it from Europe, then the art capital of the world. It was in her tiny sculptor’s studio in Greenwich Village that Whitney began holding exhibitions of contemporary American Artists. This remarkable effort by a scion of America’s wealthiest family helped to change the way art was cultivated in America.

From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who “has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades” (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago and a daughter’s journey to...

Winner of the 2019 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction A beautiful and haunting memoir of kinship and culture rediscovered. Jenny Heijun Wills was born in Korea and adopted as an infant into a white family in small-town Canada. In her late twenties, she reconnected with her first...

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book Best Book of the Year for The Washington Post* The New Yorker * Time * The Atlantic * Los Angeles Times * NPR * Harper’s Bazaar * Vulture * Town & Country * San Francisco Chronicle * Christian Science Monitor * Mother...

On January 14, 2018, a 17-year-old girl climbed out of the window of her Perris, California home and dialed 911 with shaking fingers. Struggling to stay calm, she told the operator that she and her 12 siblings - ranging in age from two to 29 - were being abused by their parents. When the dispatcher asked for her address, the girl hesitated. "I've never been out," she stammered.

On May 5, 1981, three rebellious members of New York's Bonanno crime family were gunned down in a Brooklyn social club. One of the gunmen was Vito Rizzuto, a man who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family, now revised and updated, reveals the hidden history of the rise of the Rizzuto clan, the alliances it forged around the world, and the bloody events that led to charges against Vito Rizzuto in the United States and Italy for racketeering and corruption.