Women In Their Own Words

This list highlights memoirs & autobiographies of women throughout history.
Updated September 19, 2022
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Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
Paper Book
One of the most iconic, beloved, and bestselling books of our time. This beautifully written, heartfelt memoir touched a nerve among both readers and reviewers. Elizabeth Gilbert tells how she made the difficult choice to leave behind all the trappings of modern American success...
The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Jeannette Walls
Paper Book
In the tradition of Mary Karr's The Liars' Club and Rick Bragg's All Over But the Shouting, Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric, and severely misguided family.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Paper Book
Maya Angelou's debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS's American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself....
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi
Paper Book
We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every...
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Marjane Satrapi
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. "A wholly original achievement.... Satrapi evokes herself and her schoolmates coming of age in a...
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed
Paper Book
NATIONAL BEST SELLER * Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection. * A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe--and built her back up again.   At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought...
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver
Paper Book
At long last, the bestselling author of Small Miracles and The Poisonwood Bible returns with the wise and compelling true story of her family's adventure to reclaim the food they eat America has long been a nation of farmers. But within the past several decades, our food supply has become...
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Alison Bechdel
Paper Book
A fresh and brilliantly told memoir from a cult favorite comic artist, marked by gothic twists, a family funeral home, sexual angst, and great books. This breakout book by Alison Bechdel is a darkly funny family tale, pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic...
Girl, Interrupted
Susanna Kaysen
Paper Book
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and...
Becoming
Michelle Obama
Paper Book
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States   #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * WATCH THE EMMY-NOMINATED NETFLIX ORIGINAL DOCUMENTARY * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * NAACP IMAGE AWARD WINNER * ONE OF...
I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai
Paper Book
A MEMOIR BY THE YOUNGEST RECIPIENT OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE As seen on Netflix with David Letterman "I come from a country that was created at midnight. When I almost died it was just after midday." When the Taliban took control of the Swat...
Just Kids
Patti Smith
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD It was the summer Coltrane died, the summer of love and riots, and the summer when a chance encounter in Brooklyn led two young people on a path of art, devotion, and initiation. Patti Smith would evolve as a poet and performer,...
Orange Is the New Black: My Year in a Women's Prison
Piper Kerman
Paper Book
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   With a career, a boyfriend, and a loving family, Piper Kerman barely resembles the reckless young woman who delivered a suitcase of drug money ten years before. But that past has caught up with her. Convicted...
Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body
Roxane Gay
Paper Book
The New York Times Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Lambda Literary Award winner From Roxane Gay, the New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist, a memoir in weight about eating healthier, finding a tolerable form of exercise, and exploring what...
Men We Reaped
Jesmyn Ward
Paper Book
Named one of the Best Books of the Century by New York Magazine The two-time National Book Award winner and author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a Black man in the...
The Truths We Hold: An American Journey
Kamala Harris
Paper Book
The #1 New York Times bestseller From Vice President Kamala Harris, one of America's most inspiring political leaders, comes a book about the core truths that unite us and how best to act upon them.  "A life story that genuinely...
The Cancer Journals
Audre Lorde
Paper Book
Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. A Penguin Classic First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals...
More Myself: A Journey
Alicia Keys
Paper Book
An intimate, revealing look at one artist's journey from self-censorship to full expression As one of the most celebrated musicians in the world, Alicia Keys has enraptured the globe with her heartfelt lyrics, extraordinary vocal range, and soul-stirring piano compositions....

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