An astonishing memoir that "demonstrates the true meaning of family" from the author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark, detailing the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s and (Chicago Tribune). 
As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving...

"Poets of the twentieth century Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that 'Elizabeth had more talent for life--and for poetry--than anyone else I've known.' This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters--a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love...

A memoir from the Native American poet describes her youth with an abusive stepfather, becoming a single teen mom, and how she struggled to finally find inner peace and her creative voice.

"Built on her wildly popular Modern Love column, 'When a Couch is More Than a Couch' (9/23/2016), a breathtaking memoir of living meaningfully with 'death in the room' by the 38 year old great-great-great granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, mother to two young boys, wife of 16 years, after her terminal cancer diagnosis"-- "An exquisite memoir about how to live--and love--every day with 'death in the room, ' from poet Nina Riggs, mother of two young...

The author presents an account of her sister's suicide, and the lifelong impact that the suicide has had on her own life and the lives of the other members of her family.

This volume explores the legacy of the works of American writer and poet Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). The author discusses how Plath's reputation was forged from the poems she wrote just before her suicide; how her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, as executor of her estate, tried to serve two masters - Plath's art and his own need for privacy; and how it fell to his sister, Olwyn Hughes, as literary agent for the estate, to protect him by limiting...

At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

"In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange, intimate experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived chronic coughing spell-something the medical establishment will later use against her, as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle. With The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine-from...