Michelle Obama describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private in a deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations.

The noted pop star offers a moving story about freedom, fame, motherhood, survival, faith, and hope.

"Breasts. Uterus. Cervix. Heart. Vagina. The source of life, right? Well, for writer and photographer Deborah Copaken, it turned out to be just the opposite--almost. Between escaping from an abusive marriage, facing down the challenge of single-parenthood, and attempting to find love again, getting her bearings after everything she knew fell to pieces proved more slippery than she ever could have anticipated. From a Fourth of July health scare that...

"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family,...

"Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in [this book], acclaimed author Deborah Levy concludes her ground-breaking trilogy of living autobiographies with an exhilarating, boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it. In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership....

"In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein was just scraping by in DC when a posting on Craigslist landed her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama's stenographers. For five years, Beck was a part of the elite team of men and women who accompanied the president wherever he went, recorder and mic in hand. She got to know everyone from the White House butler to the secret servicemen, advance team, speechwriters, photographers, and press secretaries,...

"In a collection of personal comics that span eight years of her young adult life, author-illustrator Noelle Stevenson charts the highs and lows of being a creative human in the world." -- inside front jacket flap.

This volume for young people is an honest and fascinating account of Michelle Obama's life led by example. She shares her views on how all young people can help themselves as well as help others, no matter their status in life. She asks readers to realize that no one is perfect, and that the process of becoming is what matters, as finding yourself is ever evolving. In telling her story with boldness, she asks young readers: Who are you, and what do...

"Susan Burton is ready to come clean. Happily married with two children, working at her dream job, she has lived a secret life of compulsive eating and starving for twenty-five years. This is a relentlessly honest ... narrative of living with binge-eating disorder"--

Lacy Crawford presents a memoir of the struggle to regain her sense of self after trauma, and the efforts by a powerful New England boarding school to silence her, at any cost. Crawford explores the channels of shame and guilt, witness and silencing, that dictate who can speak and who is heard in American society. This coming-of-age story wrestles with an essential question for our time: what telling of a survivor's story will finally force a remedy?...