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Biography and Memoir January 2026 |
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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. In Strangers, Burden revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was--someone nicknamed Belle the Good--gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice. With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.
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| In the Arena: Theodore Roosevelt in War, Peace, and Revolution by David S. BrownIn the Arena is a detailed study of President Theodore Roosevelt that is sharply focused on his years in office in the first decade of the 20th century. Roosevelt’s energy and charisma characterized the country’s burgeoning influence and power, but biographer David S. Brown doesn’t gloss over the president’s blind spots regarding aggressive militarism and the treatment of African and Indigenous Americans. Another evocative study of a president and an era can be found in The Age of Eisenhower: America and the World in the 1950s by William I. Hitchcock. |
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Detours: Hope & Growth After Life's Hardest Turns
by Elizabeth Smart
In this powerful memoir of survival and healing, Elizabeth Smart empowers readers to navigate life's detours, embrace resilience, and find healing and purpose after adversity. In Detours, Elizabeth Smart explores how trauma can derail one's path in life and shares her struggles with captivity, reintegration, and resilience. Using the metaphor of life as a road, Smart introduces four key Rest Stops for navigating life's detours--grieving lost paths, embracing change, seeking connections, and redefining destinations. Through themes of hope, community, and self-discovery, she inspires readers to find strength in their own journeys toward healing.
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How to Cook a Coyote: The Joy of Old Age
by Betty Fussell
From telling what it's like to go blind to confronting the ongoing erosion of time and the mystery of what's to come, How to Cook a Coyote recounts a decade of change as the celebrated food writer and critic Betty Fussell moves from Manhattan to the Montecito retirement community where Julia Child once resided. As Fussell recalls family, friends, enemies, and lovers with wry humor, affection, and a sharp-eyed confrontation with mortality, all the while, the coyote watches. An emblem of the wild and her metaphor for all the things one can't control--this coyote stalks her, taking on greater emotional and metaphorical resonance as the days progress. Ultimately this exciting new work from an incomparable voice in American writing provides a recipe for how to enjoy each moment as if it were the last day of your life.
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.The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World by Tilar J. MazzeoThe true story of the first female captain of a merchant ship and her treacherous navigation of Antarctica's deadly waters. Summer, 1856. Nineteen-year-old Mary Ann Patten and her husband Joshua were young and ambitious. Both from New England seafaring families, they had already completed their first clipper-ship voyage around the world with Joshua as captain. If they could win [a] race to San Francisco that year, their dream of building a farm and a family might be within reach. It would mean freedom. And the price of that freedom was one last dangerous transit--into the most treacherous waters in the world. As their ship, Neptune's Car, left New York Harbor and sailed down the jagged coast of South America, Joshua fell deathly ill and was confined to his bunk, delirious. ... With no obvious option for a new captain and heartbroken about her husband, Mary Ann stepped into the breach and convinced the crew to support her, just as they slammed into a gale that would last 18 days. ... Set against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush and taking us to the brink of Antarctica, this book finally gives Mary Ann Patten her due.
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| Grit, Spit, and Never Quit: A Marine's Guide to Comedy and Life by Rob RiggleComedian, actor, and Marine Corps veteran Rob Riggle debuts with a funny and energetic take on comedy, military life, and a career in showbiz. Sure, his path may have been unconventional – Riggle cut his teeth on the New York stand-up stage between deployments to Kosovo and Afghanistan – but he entertains by drawing surprising parallels between the two jobs. This is a great choice for readers who liked You’re on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir by Parker Posey. |
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Vagabond: A Memoir
by Tim Curry
There are few stars in Hollywood today that can boast the kind of resume Emmy award-winning actor Tim Curry has built over the past five decades. From his breakout role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show to his iconic depiction as the sadistic clown Pennywise in It to his critically acclaimed role as the original King Arthur in both the Broadway and West End versions of Spamalot, Curry redefined what it meant to be a 'character actor,' portraying heroes and villains alike with complexity, nuance, and a genuine understanding of human darkness. He's had dozens of roles across movies, TV shows, and musicals; lent his instantly recognizable voice to dozens of voice roles, audiobooks, and videogames; and he's changed the lives of countless fans in the process. Now, in his memoir, Curry takes readers behind-the-scenes of his rise to fame from his early beginnings as a military brat with difficult family dynamics, to his formative years in boarding school and university, to the moment when he hit the stage for the first time.
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| The Six Loves of James I by Gareth RussellHistorian Gareth Russell’s well-researched biography of England’s James I is a gossipy exposé of the first Stuart king. By detailing James’ loving relationships with both women (his wife Anna of Denmark) and men (royal favorite Lord George Villiers), Russell’s book normalizes the subject of homosexuality among British royalty while providing a riveting read. For more about the Stuart monarchs, check out Don Jordan and Michael Walsh’s The King’s Bed: Ambition and Intimacy in the Court of Charles II. |
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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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| Queens at War by Alison WeirBritish historian and novelist Alison Weir makes the final volume of her England’s Medieval Queens series about the last five Plantagenet consorts: Joan of Navarre, Catherine of Valois, Margaret of Anjou, Elizabeth Woodville, and Anne Neville. These women ruled against the bloody backdrop of the Hundred Years’ War and the War of the Roses, and were thus witnesses to (and sometimes participants in) the intrigue, betrayal, and violence of the age. For further stories about the women of the English royal court, try The Waiting Game: The Untold Story of the Women Who Served the Tudor Queens by Nicola Clark. |
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Contact your librarian for more great books! |
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