Biography and Memoir
March 2026

Recent Releases
You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir by Christina Applegate
You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir
by Christina Applegate

Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, You with the Sad Eyes unveils a side of Christina Applegate we've never seen. She rocketed to stardom on the sitcom Married...with Children, and went on to captivate audiences in classics like Don't Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead..., Anchorman, and Dead to Me in her five-decade long career.
Then it all stopped.
An MS diagnosis in 2021 confined her to a king-sized bed and the company of memories she'd rather forget: memories of the self-doubt and body dysmorphia that stalked her meteoric rise, of her mother's fight against addiction and abuse after her father left, and of the tax life had taken on her body and mind that was suddenly coming due.
Now, at her most intimate and vulnerable, she unveils a story not even those closest to her fully know. She returns to the diaries she kept her whole life, finding the pain matched by joy, the losses mitigated by the extraordinary, and the weight of life lifted by her unrelenting belief that something greater lay ahead.
You with the Sad Eyes presents a remarkable woman, forever cementing her formidable and iconoclastic legacy
Homeschooled: A New York Times Bestselling Memoir and Read with Jenna Pick by Stefan Merrill Block
Homeschooled: A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan 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...
Upside-Down Love: A Memoir in Two Voices
by Sari Bashi

Israeli American human rights lawyer Sari Bashi tells the story of how she met her Palestinian Arab husband in a candid and moving memoir. Osama was a professor who needed to obtain a permit to work outside of the West Bank when he became Bashi’s client, and their attraction to each other was immediate. The two would overcome family pressures, bureaucracy, and racism to build a family together. Bashi’s inspiring “real-life love story brings welcome humanity to a fraught subject” (Publishers Weekly). 
 
Queens at War by Alison Weir
Queens at War
by Alison Weir

British 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: women who 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.
The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters by Sasha Bonét
The Waterbearers: A Memoir of Mothers and Daughters
by Sasha Bonét

Sasha Bonét grew up in 1990s Houston, worlds removed from the Louisiana cotton plantation that raised her grandmother, Betty Jean, and the Texas bayous that shaped Sasha's mother, Connie. And though each generation did better, materially, than the last, all of them carried the complex legacy of Black American motherhood with its origins in slavery. All of them knew that the hands used to comb and braid hair, shell pecans, and massage weary muscles were the very hands used to whip children into submission. When she had her own daughter, Sofia, Bonét was determined to interrupt this tradition. She brought Sofia to New York and set off on a journey--not only up and down the tributaries of her bloodline but also into the lives of Black women in history and literature, to understand both the love and pain they passed on to their children and to create a way of mothering that honors the legacy but abandons the violence that shaped it. The Waterbearers is a dazzling and transformative work of American storytelling that reimagines not just how we think of Black women, but how we think of ourselves--as individuals, parents, communities, and a country.
Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain's Queen...
by Ann Foster

Caroline of Brunswick, niece of Britain’s King George III, was chosen as queen-to-be for his profligate heir, George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales. Never mind that she was treated cruelly by George’s family and thoughtlessly cast aside soon after his coronation: the Regency royals were so detested by the British populace that Caroline quickly became a heroine of the emerging tabloid press. History podcaster Ann Foster dishes all the dirt. Try this next: The Duchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandalized Eighteenth Century London by Catherine Ostler. 
 
Black Dahlia: Murder, Monsters, and Madness in Midcentury Hollywood
by William J. Mann

Biographer William J. Mann's (Bogie & Bacall) well-researched true crime account offers fresh insights on the 1947 murder of actress Elizabeth Short, who posthumously came to be known by the moniker "Black Dahlia." Further reading: Sisters in Death: The Black Dahlia, the Prairie Heiress, and Their Hunter by Eli Frankel. 
 
The Escapes of David George: An Odyssey of Slavery, Freedom, and the American Revolution
by Gregory E. O'Malley

Historian Gregory E. O’Malley’s biography of freedom seeker David George is a tale that seems too incredible to be true. In an eventful, inspiring life that took him from the U.S. colonies to the Caribbean to Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, George would escape slavery multiple times and eventually become a family man and respected minister in a “story that reads like fiction” (Library Journal). For fans of: Flee North: A Forgotten Hero and the Fight for Freedom in Slavery’s Borderland by Scott Shane. 
 
Contact your librarian for more great books!