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Biography and Memoir August 2026 |
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True Crime: A Memoir by Patricia CornwellPatricia Cornwell is best known for her international bestselling thriller series about forensic pathologist Dr. Kay Scarpetta. Every story comes from somewhere, and Scarpetta's began when Patricia Cornwell embedded herself in a morgue. In this achingly honest memoir, Cornwell excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalized twice, an abusive foster family, and developing a parental relationship with evangelist Billy Graham's wife Ruth. Cornwell depicts a harrowing hospitalization and near-death car accident. She unflinchingly shares overcoming obstacles that later gave her the ambition to become an award-winning police reporter. From there it was research in a medical examiner's office that would turn into a full-time job. She would become a forensic expert and worldwide publishing phenomenon. Cornwell leaves no stone unturned in this deeply candid account of her life, offering inspiring insight into what made her into the international sensation she is today.
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| Fully Baked: A Messy Memoir by Rosebud BakerRosebud Baker grew up as a loudmouth who preferred to be honest than polite, which is another way of saying she was unemployable. She spent her twenties trying to make it as an actor in New York like every other privileged millennial transplant cosplaying Rent, while gigging as a barista and as “the world’s angriest yoga instructor.” She was blackout drunk most of the time, struggling with alcoholism. She even tried to steal a bodega cat. Eventually, she harnessed the qualities she once saw as defects—her dark humor and insistence on saying the awkward thing out loud—into a comedy career. She got sober. And she went from dating NYC’s most emotionally unavailable artists to falling in love, getting married, and becoming a new mom. |
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Homeschooledby Stefan Merrill BlockStefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were 'stifling his creativity.' Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen. Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. [So] when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening-- |
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I'm a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I've Been by Alison LeibyHave you ever frozen when someone asks, “So, tell me about yourself?” If so, take a page from I'm a Lot. Alison Leiby proudly embraces the identities we’re often encouraged to hide: Housewives stan. Discount shopaholic. Former jock. Happily single. Childless by choice and proud cat mom. Through these different roles and identities, Leiby reveals her hard-earned wisdom about what it’s like to be a woman who does it all (except for the things that make her say “uh, no thank you”). When she was nineteen years old, a complication from back surgery left Leiby on her deathbed. After a surprising recovery, you might assume Leiby was ready to seize life by the you-know-whats. But instead of letting this one miraculous experience define her, Leiby’s brush with death made her realize there is nothing more beautiful in this life than just getting to be yourself. And while women are still expected to conform to many patriarchal labels, Leiby ignores the pressure to be palatable and instead champions all the joyful, weird, and complicated selves she brings to the world. In fourteen personal essays full of deadpan jokes, tender moments of candid introspection, and insightful social commentary, Leiby encourages us to ditch the manufactured Instagram persona and embrace the fact that sometimes the puzzle pieces don’t always fit to create a perfect picture, but that doesn’t mean we are incomplete.
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Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life by Mason CurreyFrom family money to jobs to colorful schemes, Mason Currey, author of the acclaimed Daily Rituals, explores both the well-worn and unlikely paths forward for the up-and-coming artist. Making Art and Making a Living is an entertaining and thought-provoking examination of the collision of creative ambitions with real-world necessities, and of the messy, glorious, torturous compromises that gifted individuals have patched together when facing this eternal dilemma of an artistic life.
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Dad, Love, Me: A Memoir by Matthew QuickOn the surface, Matthew Quick seemed to have it all—a loving wife, a thriving career as a novelist, and a beautiful home. He’d traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed and some days, he didn’t want to live. Years earlier, when he first told his father he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: “Idiot!” That voice—angry and belittling—would echo through Quick’s mind for years. He channeled his pain into his debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, crafting a complex father-son dynamic drawn straight from his own life. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Still, the approval Quick longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper Quick sank into anxiety and addiction. In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father’s cognitive decline. A health scare finally forces Quick to get sober, but then, overcome by creative paralysis, writer’s block threatens to end his career. The blank page is unbearable. As his desperation for healing peaks, Quick turns to a Jungian analyst he nicknames “Zeus.” In the safety of analysis, as Quick’s repressed pain and shame surface, he finally cracks. Just as he is putting himself back together, his father is diagnosed with dementia. Suddenly, the clock is ticking. If there is ever going to be reconciliation, it has to happen now. Quick and his wife pack up their lives in coastal North Carolina, drive eight hours, and move into a house just around the corner from Quick’s parents, on an island right outside of Beaufort, South Carolina. There, as his father slips further and further away, Quick races to make a healing connection. Dad, Love, Me is Quick’s raw, vulnerable, and deeply moving account of what it means to forgive a parent who never really knew how to love you. It’s about wounds that never fully heal, and the power of showing up anyway. This beautifully brave and life-affirming memoir is a must read for anyone who has been starved of love but wants to keep loving anyway.
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This Dark Night: Emily Bronte, a Life by Deborah LutzEmily Brontë was only twenty-seven-years old when she started work on one of the most important novels in the English language. In two years, she completed Wuthering Heights in 1847, while the world took almost a hundred years to catch up. It has taken the world even longer to know Brontë--enigmatic, less initially renowned than sister Charlotte of Jane Eyre fame, and with a legacy marred by the loss (and likely destruction) of almost all her personal papers. This Dark Night is a portrait of Emily Brontë, her writing sisters, and the material and cultural world they lived in, tracing Brontë's passions from the incomparable moors outside her home to the storm, strife, and longing that populates her poetry and novel. Deborah Lutz reconstructs the texture of Emily's days as masterful writer and woman tending to a household in Victorian England. She places Brontë in the history of modern thought and emerges with a mythic figure: consummate artist, deeply idiosyncratic person, and creator of a cherished and extraordinarily influential work.
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Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe by Gail CrowtherFar from the spotlights of the Hollywood film sets and the flashbulbs of the press, Marilyn Monroe was a great reader and lover of books. Her association with writers did not stop at reading their words on the page. She was, of course, briefly married to one of America's best-known playwrights, Arthur Miller, and met a number of other writers who moved in his literary world. But she also met authors independently of Miller, many of whom were fans of her films and keen to meet her. Through her deep research, Gail Crowther delves into Marilyn's personal book collection and recounts some of these meetings, like when she shared an apartment with Shelley Winters in West Hollywood, where they entertained Dylan Thomas and Christopher Isherwood for drinks (probably several drinks), after which Monroe arranged for Thomas to meet his childhood hero, Charlie Chaplin. Or when Life magazine arranged for Monroe to be interviewed by Dame Edith Sitwell at the Sunset Tower Hotel, and Sitwell was both charmed and blown away by Monroe's intelligence. Marilyn And Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe charts the intellectual life of a screen legend, revealing how Monroe, who left high school before graduation, embarked on an impressive and progressive program of self-education, hungry for knowledge and devouring books as an active and engaged reader. Her personal library reflects this inquiring mind. In 2026, for her centenary, this book showcases Marilyn Monroe the reader. Because, at the end of her life, it was not her jewels or her furs, shoes, or dresses that she cared about. It was her books.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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The Public Library
501 Copper NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87102
505-768-5141abqlibrary.org |
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