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Biography and Memoir August 2026 |
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| Fully Baked: A Messy Memoir by Rosebud BakerIn comedian and former SNL writer Rosebud Baker’s Fully Baked, she reflects on an upbringing colored by dysfunction and tragedy, and how the experience taught her the value of laughter in the face of trauma. Baker’s “joke-dense” (Booklist) debut recounts her tumultuous journey to discovering her talent for standup and, eventually, choosing sobriety, marriage, and motherhood -- heavily laced with her trademark sarcasm and dark humor. For fans of: What in the World?! by Leanne Morgan. |
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Unshaming: A Memoir of Recovery, Relapse, and What Comes After
by Jowita Bydlowska
From the national bestselling and critically acclaimed author of Drunk Mom, a powerful and transformative memoir exploring the intersection of addiction and shame. It's been over a decade since Jowita Bydlowska published her bestselling lightning rod of a memoir on overcoming alcohol addiction as a young mother. Both hailed and criticized for its no-holds-barred transparency, Drunk Mom was--and continues to be--refreshing and revelatory in its gritty exploration of addiction and relapse in the context of new parenthood, specifically from the experience of a woman. But what happens after the last page is turned, after the happy ending of an addiction the world assumes is safely in the rearview? When Bydlowska relapses after the success of her book, her overwhelming sense is one of shame. She struggles to reconcile the knowledge that she's helped bring comfort and hope to countless readers with her own frustration and mounting fear that the truth will only let others down. In prose that is by turns harsh and beautiful, tender and devastating, she writes about her ensuing spiral into alcoholism--and the climb back up and out. Unshaming is a raw, unsparing navigation of the intricacies of shame. With the same generosity and grim humour that made Drunk Mom such a standout, Bydlowska uses her own story as a vehicle to interrogate and challenge the narrative surrounding addiction, exploring the ways in which the conversation has both evolved and stayed the same over the last decade. Told with breathtaking narrative immediacy, Unshaming transcends the typical self-help memoir and punches through every expectation about what the perfect woman, mother, and writer in recovery should look like.
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The Family Snitch: A Daughter's Memoir of Truth and Lies
by Francesca Fontana
A Wall Street Journal reporter confronts the most difficult source she's ever encountered, her own father, in this unsparing interrogation of the ways we deceive ourselves and others A stunning debut, perfect for fans of searing family memoirs that lift the veil of childhood, as in books by Nicole Chung and Ashley C. Ford Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only My life started when you were born. Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away... The first in her family to attend college, The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation, as Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out? In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can't be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this one: theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth. The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.
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Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke...
by Gabriel Sherman
In media tycoon Rupert Murdoch’s winner-takes-all worldview, his four children -- Lachlan, Liz, James, and Prudence -- become little more than negotiators across the conference table vying for control of his mega-corporation. Biographer Gabriel Sherman documents the family drama, cynicism, and ruthlessness of all concerned in Bonfire of the Murdochs. For fans of: Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams; the HBO dramedy series Succession.
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| Push the Wall: My Life, Writing, Drawing, and the Art of Storytelling by Frank MillerLauded comics author and artist Frank Miller (Dark Knight Returns, Sin City) tells his life story with a tone as edgy as his comics oeuvre. His passion for storytelling remains undimmed as he peppers his career highlights with advice for fellow creators, exhorting readers to “push the wall” -- i.e. force creative boundaries outward to make something new. Miller’s book, generously illustrated with his groundbreaking artwork, will appeal to fans of Magic Words: The Extraordinary Life of Alan Moore by Lance Parkin. |
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| When the Revolution Comes: A Fight for the Future of the Working Class by Chris SmallsWhen Chis Smalls, an employee at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, figured out that he was repeatedly passed over for advancement opportunities because he was Black, he staged a walkout and was fired for it. But that was only the beginning. Smalls’ autobiography recounts his founding of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) to combat unfair pay and poor working conditions at the only unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. For other inspiring examples of labor activism, try Get on the Job and Organize by Jaz Brisack. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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