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Biography and Memoir April 2026 |
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Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour
by Mark Haddon
An unflinching, brilliantly written, darkly funny, lavishly illustrated memoir by the acclaimed author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time A ringing testament about how one artist sees the world, and how his experiences have shaped his vision Tender, addictive, informative and unlike anything elseand brilliantly illustrated. It's a gem. Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry Simultaneously heart-breaking and hilarious, Leaving Home is a portrait of the artist both as a child and as an adult. His parents were not really cut out for the job of having children. They were cut out, respectively, for the jobs of designing abattoirs and keeping a pathologically clean and tidy house. At least he had the consolations of The Weetabix Solar System Wallchart, walnut whips and the occasional Babycham. Astringently honest and scalpel sharp, this is a book about being different and seeing the world differently. It's about being a cartoonist and a care assistant. It's about family. It's about knickerbocker glories and heart surgery, about papier m ch and mental breakdown and great white sharks. It's about how art, in all its varied forms, provides a way of understanding and coming to terms with the mess of human life. It's richly illustrated throughout with images from the author's childhood, some of them altered in unforgiveable ways. As bracing as it is embracing, Leaving Home is about escaping a place that never felt like home and learning to create somewhere that does.
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The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family
by Dorothy Roberts
From Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing the Black Body and a writer who has brilliantly illuminated the Black experience in America for decades (Bryan Stevenson), comes a spirited and riveting memoir of growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago and a daughter's journey to understand her parents' marriage--and her own identity. Dorothy Roberts grew up in a deeply segregated Chicago of the 1960s where relationships barely crossed the colorline. Yet inside her own home, where her father was white and her mother a Black Jamaican immigrant, interracial marriage wasn't just a part of her upbringing, it was a shared mission. Her father, an anthropologist, spent her entire childhood working on a book about Black-white marriages--a project he never finished but shaped every aspect of their family life. As a 21-year-old graduate student, Dorothy's father dedicated himself to the study of interracial marriage and her mother soon became his full-time partner in that work. Together over the years they interviewed over 500 couples and assembled stunning stories about interracial marriages that took place as early as the 1880s--studying, but also living, championing, and believing in their power to advance social equality. Decades later, while sorting through her father's papers, Roberts uncovers a truth that upends everything she thought she knew about her family: her father's research didn't begin with her parents' love story--it came long before it. This discovery forces her to wrestle with her father's intentions, her own views about interracial relationships, and where she fits in that story. Rather than finish the book her father never published, Roberts immerses herself in their archive of interviews to trace the story of her parents and to better understand her own. Though grounded in her parents' research, it's Roberts' captivating storytelling that drives this memoir. In following the arc of her parents' interviews and marriage, The Mixed Marriage Project invites us into the everyday lives of interracial couples in Chicago over four decades. Along the way, Roberts reflects on her own childhood as a Black girl with a white father, and how those experiences shaped her into one of today's most prominent public thinkers and scholars on race. Blurring the boundaries between the political and the personal, between memoir and history, The Mixed Marriage Project is a deeply moving meditation on family, race, identity, and love.
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| The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg, and the Battle for the Soul of... by Paul FischerDocumentarian Paul Fischer’s collective biography charts the early careers of Hollywood titans Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg, whose rise coincided with the fall of the old studio system and ushered in the era of the blockbuster. Though each director has his own style and vision, Fischer’s gossipy, novelistic narrative shows the influence they had on each other as friends, competitors, and co-conspirators while changing the way movies are made. |
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Traversal
by Maria Popova
From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. What is life?What is death?What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? In Traversal, Maria Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with the bewilderment of being alive--our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems--through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wegener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads--the first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue--to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet clearer as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate--as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to one other--Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light.
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| La Lucci by Susan Lucci with Laura MortonActress Susan Lucci opens up in her “vivid and engaging” (Kirkus Reviews) second memoir about her life and career highs and lows. With unsentimental candor, the soap icon recounts continuing to work in film and Broadway in her late seventies and goes deep into her inspirations, disappointments, and her motivation to keep going despite some painful losses, notably the death of her husband of 53 years, Helmut Huber, of a stroke in 2022. |
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| Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria by Loubna MrieWhen Syrian photojournalist Loubna Mrie joined the Arab Spring protests as a teenager in 2011, her father, an intelligence official for the Assad regime, cut her off. This started her career documenting the ensuing civil war, and her powerful debut details the personal toll it took -- both from the horrors she witnessed and the implosion of her family -- as political and sectarian violence engulfed the country. For a gripping fictional account of the Arab Spring’s aftermath, try The Republic of False Truths by Alaa Al Aswany. |
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| Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery by Gavin NewsomCalifornia governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Gavin Newsom’s book briskly lays out his rise in the Democratic party, reveals some of the struggles early in his life that propelled him into politics, and talks about some key achievements of his tenure, including overseeing California’s legalization of same-sex marriage seven years prior to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Try this next: The Deeper the Roots by Michael Tubbs. |
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| Judy Blume: A Life by Mark OppenheimerHistorian and journalist Mark Oppenheimer’s “fitting tribute” (Booklist) to author Judy Blume provides a detailed, chronological view of an ambitious, talented woman seeking something beyond the strictures of her early marriage and motherhood. Though her work was sometimes controversial, Oppenheimer pinpoints the secret of Blume’s success: she was able to produce children’s stories with a keen sense of realism in which young readers could actually see themselves. |
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Hysterical: A Memoir
by Elissa Bassist
SEMI-FINALIST FOR THE 2023 THURBER PRIZE FOR AMERICAN HUMOR - A fiery cultural critique. --Kirkus Reviews - ...a powerful, beautifully written, and utterly important book.--New York Journal of Books Hysterical is staggeringly good. ... This is one of the most intelligent, painful, ridiculous, awesome, relevant things I've ever read. -Roxane Gay ...an impressive debut. Elissa Bassist wrote it like a motherfucker.-Cheryl Strayed Acclaimed humor writer Elissa Bassist shares her journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that doesn't listen to women in this medical mystery, cultural criticism, and rallying cry. Between 2016 and 2018, Elissa Bassist saw over twenty medical professionals for a variety of mysterious ailments. She had what millions of American women had: pain that didn't make sense to doctors, a body that didn't make sense to science, and a psyche that didn't make sense to mankind. Then an acupuncturist suggested that some of her physical pain could be caged fury finding expression, and that treating her voice would treat the problem. It did. Growing up, Bassist's family, boyfriends, school, work, and television shows had the same expectation for a woman's voice: less is more. She was called dramatic and insane for speaking her mind. She was accused of overreacting and playing victim for having unexplained physical pain. She was ignored or rebuked (like so many women throughout history) for using her voice inappropriately by expressing sadness or suffering or anger or joy. Because of this, she said yes when she meant no; she didn't tweet #MeToo; and she never spoke without fear of being too emotional. She felt rage, but like a good woman, she repressed it. In her witty and incisive debut, Bassist explains how girls and women internalize and perpetuate directives about their voices, making it hard to just speak up and burn down the patriarchy. But then their silence hurts them more than anything they could ever say. Hysterical is a memoir of a voice lost and found, a primer on new ways to think about a woman's voice--about where it's being squashed and where it needs amplification--and a clarion call for readers to unmute their voice, listen to it above all others, and use it again without regret.
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It's Never Too Late: A Memoir
by Marla Gibbs
The star of classic television series, including The Jeffersons and 227, reveals her difficult journey from a tempestuous childhood to becoming a confident Hollywood powerbroker and groundbreaker who paved the way for today's superstar talents.Marla Gibbs has been a Hollywood icon for generations of fans. Now, at ninety-three, she chronicles her climb from a difficult youth in which she yearned for safety and love, to the high-stakes world of Hollywood where she became a confident powerbroker learning to work behind the scenes for fair pay, access, and more creative control for herself and her colleagues.Told in her forthright voice, It's Never Too Late illuminates Gibbs' daring move to Los Angeles to rebuild her life after an abusive marriage, how she became an actor, and how she eventually learned to balance acting with show running. She was a Boss Bae decades before the term would become entertainment industry shorthand for a power flex. While developing 227 her lawyer won her all rights, courtesies and privileges of an executive producer without the credit. Though the authority she wielded behind the scenes created deep tensions on and off the set, her hard-luck young life had prepared her to succeed even as her tenacity was put to the test. Her experiences laid the groundwork for powerbrokers like Shonda Rhimes and Issa Rae.An inspiring personal portrait of triumph and Hollywood that reminds us we can leave the past behind, It's Never Too Late is the true tale of a remarkable life and a wise guidebook for aspiring artists, entrepreneurs, and entertainment fans.
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Contact your librarian for more great books!
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