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Biography and Memoir January 2026 |
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An earlier version of this letter went out in error and not all titles were available from Middlesex County Library. We apologize for this inconvenience. Recent Releases |
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Ain't Nobody's Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton
by Martha Ackmann
From her impoverished childhood in the Smoky Mountains to international stardom as a singer, songwriter, actress, businesswoman, and philanthropist, Dolly Parton has exceeded everyone's expectations--except her own. ... Ain't Nobody's Fool is a deep dive into the social, historical, and personal forces that made Dolly Parton one of the most beloved and unifying figures in public life and includes interviews with friends, family members, school mates, Nashville neighbors, members of her band, studio musicians, producers, and many others. It also features never before seen photographs and unearthed documents shedding light on her family's hardscrabble life.
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| Simply More: A Book for Anyone Who Has Been Told They're Too Much by Cynthia ErivoTheater, music, and film star Cynthia Erivo reflects on how far she has come while encouraging her readers to consider their own unrealized potential. Confident from an early age that she had a lot to offer the world, Erivo nevertheless had her share of detractors and setbacks, and she inspires readers to persist in their dreams, seek balance, and keep moving forward. For another stirring memoir of succeeding through struggle, try Leslie F*cking Jones by Leslie Jones. |
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Life After Ambition: A Good Enough Memoir
by Amil Niazi
Building off her wildly popular viral essays Losing My Ambition and The Mindfuck of Mid-Life, Amil Niazi explores what life looks like post-ambition. With sly humor and a deep literary sensibility, she interrogates her own evolving ambitions, and how it intersects with adulthood, motherhood, age, identity, class, and race, and how it has shaped her and a generation of Millennials. And--most importantly--now that she is done with ambition: what happens next? An achingly relatable, intensely funny punch to the gut which reveals that, though we hide them from one another, we all have the same painful bruises.
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Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage
by Belle Burden
It was a great love story, one for the ages. The speed of our beginning and the speed of our ending felt like matching bookends. They both came out of nowhere. He wanted it, he wanted me. And then he didn't. In March 2020, Belle Burden was safe and secure with her family at their house on Martha's Vineyard, navigating the early days of the pandemic together--building fires in the late afternoons, drinking whisky sours, making roast chicken. Then, with no warning or explanation, her husband of twenty years announced that he was leaving her. Overnight, her caring, steady partner became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.
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| Bread of Angels by Patti SmithPoet, musician, author, and all-around artist Patti Smith impresses with a life-spanning memoir. Smith’s writing is always lyrical, dreamlike, and filled with literary references, but here she uses it to reveal snippets of her restless, sickly childhood and intimate fragments of her marriage to the late Fred “Sonic” Smith. Somewhat of a return to form from her recent work, Bread of Angels is highly recommended for fans of Smith’s National Book Award-winning autobiography Just Kids. |
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Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival
by Trina Moyles
A dazzling memoir about one woman's coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss. When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as the bear guy, brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina's lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus--the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, Brendan, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings' hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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