Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

One Thing for Certain, Two Things for Sure reminds us that there are no mistakes or accidents in life - that everything happens as it should. Through the dissolution of a sordid affair with a married man, friendships, and personal setbacks, Stewart teaches us the art of letting go, and adapting to whatever comes our way. Stewart allows us, the listener, an intimate look into his personal life through stories that center on dating, love, fear, fate, and destiny.

After going viral “reading” the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas finally knew who he was and where he was going. He was living his best life. But then everything changed. In this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaving completely out of character.

In this remarkable memoir, former Olympian and Kardashian family member Caitlyn Jenner reveals shocking and heartbreaking stories from her journey to become a transgender woman and fight for the LGBTQ+ community.

The story of Christopher Isherwood's life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years painted his death portrait. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness.

Who - or what - was the real love of Freddie Mercury's life? Millions of Queen and screen fans who watched the Oscar-winning film Bohemian Rhapsody believe that Mary Austin, the woman he could never quite let go of, was the love of Freddie Mercury's life. But the truth is infinitely more complicated. Best-selling biographer and music writer Lesley-Ann Jones explores the charismatic frontman's romantic encounters and reveals why none of his love interests ever perfected the art of being Freddie's life partner.

Wallace is an award-winning journalist who has built his career on writing unforgettable profiles, bringing a provocative and engaged sensitivity to his subjects. Now he turns the focus on himself, examining his own life and the circumstances that frame it—to make sense of seeking refuge from homelessness with a young single mother, living in a ghostly white Pennsylvania town, becoming a partner and parent, raising two teenagers in what feels like a collapsing world.

Rose and Rosie are known for their candid and hilarious YouTube videos...but now they are taking oversharing to a whole new level. Discussing sexuality, revealing secrets and empowering others, Overshare is a book packed with Rose and Rosie's unique take on friendships, fame, mental health and LGBT issues. As visibly out members of the LGBT community, they open up about their own experiences, both together and as individuals, and have written this book in the hope that it gives strength to those who have faced similar difficulties.

Manboobs is Aijazuddin’s riotous yet intelligent memoir of searching for love, seamlessly blending humor, politics, pop culture, and the bravery required to be yourself. Komail Aijazuddin confidently announces himself as a sharp new voice in humor with his moving, wickedly funny reexamination of the American Dream and our search for home.

Five years after the death of his husband, G. Scott Graham thought he had equanimity. He thought he had made peace with his grief. But when a new love entered his life, everything shifted. The grief came back—different this time, disguised as hope, desire, and fear. And with it came a whole new set of questions: Can you open your heart again after unimaginable loss? Can you love fully when you know what love can cost?

Nineteen eighties Detroit was a volatile place to live, but above the fray stood a safe haven: Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine, where anyone—from the city’s first Black mayor to the local drag queens, from a big-time Hollywood star to elderly Jewish couples—could sit down for a warm, home-cooked meal. Here was where, beneath a bright-red awning and surrounded by his multigenerational family, filmmaker and activist Curtis Chin came of age; where he learned to embrace his identity as a gay ABC, or American-born Chinese.

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis. All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it’s like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one’s deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Save Yourself is full of funny and insightful recollections about everything from coming out (at a Catholic college where sexual orientation wasn't in the nondiscrimination policy) to how joining the circus can help you become a better comic (so much nudity) to accepting yourself for who you are-even if you're, say, a bowl cut-sporting, bespectacled, gender-nonconforming child with an eye patch (which Cameron was).

Does peaking in high school ruin you for life? Was Miley Cyrus right, is it all about the climb (when it comes to building a career?) And what - scientifically - is the best way to mend a broken heart? Comedian Suzi Ruffell is considering life's big questions. In this brutally honest, funny, and often moving memoir, Suzi winningly tells her life story, and asks a host of experts to answer the tricky questions it prompts along the way. Diamond life advice comes from the likes of Elizabeth Day, Dolly Alderton, Charlene Douglas, Laura Bates, Dr Kirren Schnack, and more.

The relationship between Freddie Mercury and Jim Hutton evolved over several months in 1984 and 1985. Even when they first slept together, Hutton had no idea who Mercury was, and, when the star told him his name, it meant nothing to him. Hutton worked as a barber at the Savoy Hotel and retained his job and his lodgings in Sutton, Surrey, for two years after moving in with Mercury. He was never fully assimilated into Mercury's jet-setting lifestyle, but, from 1985 until Mercury's death in 1991, he was closer to him than anyone and knew all Mercury's closest friends.

The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.

For over half a century, Child has collaborated with the world’s most celebrated artists creating timeless classics, such as Bon Jovi’s “Livin' On A Prayer” and “You Give Love A Bad Name,” as well as Ricky Martin’s “Livin’ La Vida Loca” and “The Cup Of Life,” amongst his vast catalog. But in his memoir, Child himself takes center stage to share his transformational story of a misfit outsider to cultural pacesetter.

With unflinching honesty and moving prose, Janet Mock relays her experiences of growing up young, multiracial, poor, and trans in America, offering listeners accessible language while imparting vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of a marginalized and misunderstood population.

Hidden in the margins of history books, classical literature, and thousands of years of stories, myths and legends, through to contemporary literature, TV and film, there is a diverse and other-worldly super community of queer heroes to discover, learn from, and celebrate. Queer Heroes of Myth & Legend brings to life characters who are romantic, brave, mysterious, and always fantastical. It is a magnificent celebration of queerness through the ages in all its legendary glory.

Despite all the welcome changes that have happened in our culture and laws over the past few decades in regards to sexuality, the subject remains one of the most influential but least understood aspects of our lives. For psychologist and bestselling author Julia Shaw, this is both professional and personal—Shaw studies the science of sexuality and she herself is proudly and vocally bisexual. Despite statistics that show bisexuality is more common than homosexuality, bisexuality is often invisible.

For a long time, Lucy Sante felt unsure of her place. Born in Belgium, the only child of conservative working-class Catholic parents who transplanted their little family to the United States, she felt at home only when she moved to New York City in the early 1970s and found her people among a band of fellow bohemians. Some would die young, from drugs and AIDS, and some would become jarringly famous. Sante flirted with both fates on her way to building an estimable career as a writer. But she still felt like her life was a performance. She was presenting a facade, even to herself.