Memoir & Biography

By: Kate Bornstein, 2013, Paperback

In the early 1970s, a boy from a Conservative Jewish family joined the Church of Scientology. In 1981, that boy officially left the movement and ultimately transitioned into a woman. A few years later, she stopped calling herself a woman—and became a famous gender outlaw.

Gender theorist, performance artist, and author Kate Bornstein is set to change lives with her stunningly original memoir. Wickedly funny and disarmingly honest, this is Bornstein's most intimate book yet, encompassing her early childhood and adolescence, college at Brown, a life in the theater, three marriages and fatherhood, the Scientology hierarchy, transsexual life, LGBTQ politics, and life on the road as a sought-after speaker.

By: Melissa Febos, 2017, Hardcover

Named One of the Best Books of 2017 by:
Esquire, Refinery29, LitHub, BookRiot, Medium, Electric Literature, The Brooklyn Rail, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Largehearted Boy, The Coil and The Cut.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Jeanne Cordova Prize for Lesbian/Queer Nonfiction
Finalist, Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography
Finalist, Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
An Indie Next Pick

For readers of Maggie Nelson and Leslie Jamison, a fierce and dazzling personal narrative that explores the many ways identity and art are shaped by love and loss.

In her critically acclaimed memoir, Whip Smart, Melissa Febos laid bare the intimate world of the professional dominatrix, turning an honest examination of her life into a lyrical study of power, desire, and fulfillment.

In her dazzling Abandon Me, Febos captures the intense bonds of love and the need for connection -- with family, lovers, and oneself. First, her birth father, who left her with only an inheritance of addiction and Native American blood, its meaning a mystery. As Febos tentatively reconnects, she sees how both these lineages manifest in her own life, marked by compulsion and an instinct for self-erasure. Meanwhile, she remains closely tied to the sea captain who raised her, his parenting ardent but intermittent as his work took him away for months at a time. Woven throughout is the hypnotic story of an all-consuming, long-distance love affair with a woman, marked equally by worship and withdrawal. In visceral, erotic prose, Febos captures their mutual abandonment to passion and obsession -- and the terror and exhilaration of losing herself in another.

At once a fearlessly vulnerable memoir and an incisive investigation of art, love, and identity, Abandon Me draws on childhood stories, religion, psychology, mythology, popular culture, and the intimacies of one writer’s life to reveal intellectual and emotional truths that feel startlingly universal.

By: George M. Johnson, 2020, Paperback

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson's All Boys Aren't Blue explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia.

A New York Times Bestseller!
Good Morning America, NBC Nightly News, Today Show, and MSNBC feature stories

From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren't Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson's emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.

By: Angela Y. Davis (Author), 2023, Paperback

“An activist. An author. A scholar. An abolitionist. A legend.”
—Ibram X. Kendi

This beautiful new edition of Angela Davis’s classic Autobiography features an expansive new introduction by the author.

“I am excited to be publishing this new edition of my autobiography with Haymarket Books at a time when so many are making collective demands for radical change and are seeking a deeper understanding of the social movements of the past.” —Angela Y. Davis

Angela Davis has been a political activist at the cutting edge of the Black Liberation, feminist, queer, and prison abolitionist movements for more than 50 years. First published and edited by Toni Morrison in 1974, An Autobiography is a powerful and commanding account of her early years in struggle. Davis describes her journey from a childhood on Dynamite Hill in Birmingham, Alabama, to one of the most significant political trials of the century: from her political activity in a New York high school to her work with the U.S. Communist Party, the Black Panther Party, and the Soledad Brothers; and from the faculty of the Philosophy Department at UCLA to the FBI's list of the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Told with warmth, brilliance, humor and conviction, Angela Davis’s autobiography is a classic account of a life in struggle with echoes in our own time.

By: Neema Avashia, 2022, Paperback

When Neema Avashia tells people where she’s from, their response is nearly always a disbelieving “There are Indian people in West Virginia?” A queer Asian American teacher and writer, Avashia fits few Appalachian stereotypes. But the lessons she learned in childhood about race and class, gender and sexuality continue to inform the way she moves through the world today: how she loves, how she teaches, how she advocates, how she struggles.

Another Appalachia examines both the roots and the resonance of Avashia’s identity as a queer desi Appalachian woman, while encouraging readers to envision more complex versions of both Appalachia and the nation as a whole. With lyric and narrative explorations of foodways, religion, sports, standards of beauty, social media, gun culture, and more, Another Appalachia mixes nostalgia and humor, sadness and sweetness, personal reflection and universal questions.

By:  Nicki Pappas, 2022, Paperback

Nicki Pappas experienced abuse as love from a young age. In As Familiar as Family, she explores and examines the ways in which she was groomed for unhealthy relationships and toxic religion.

This book chronicles her journey to find her voice — and a way out — which began once she understood how the spiritual abuse, power dynamics, narcissism, and emotional detachment in the church were as familiar as family.

By sharing her story, she hopes to empower others to leave anything toxic in their own lives.

By: Nicki Pappas (Author), Stephen Kappas (Author), Kimberly Marsh (Editor), 2023, Paperback

In honor of the journey Nicki and Stephen Pappas have been on individually and together, they wrote Becoming Egalitarian. In Becoming Egalitarian, they examine their limited (and limiting) beliefs about marriage and gender roles. They begin with why they were drawn to complementarianism and explore how their theology shifted to egalitarianism.

Becoming Egalitarian is their story, but it’s not just their story. There are untold numbers of people who have been harmed by religious ideologies that prop up unhealthy power dynamics. Nicki and Stephen found that by actively dismantling the hierarchy in their relationship, they could become true partners. Becoming Egalitarian isn’t an answer book. Rather, it is a vulnerable and authentic exploration of how to find a healthier partnership when operating from a place of mutuality.

By: bell hooks (Author), Mike Kendall (Introduction), 2023, Paperback (The Last Interview Series)

"With a thoughtful introduction by Mikki Kendall, it will remind you why she was loved, honored, challenged and respected." - Ms. Magazine

“This new collection is essential reading for both longtime readers of hooks and new fans seeking to learn more about her groundbreaking contributions to cultural and intellectual movements.” - Electric Lit

"Wide-ranging and insightful, this makes for a solid primer on hooks’s ideas." --Publishers Weekly

"I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance."
—bell hooks

bell hooks was a prolific, trailblazing author, feminist, social activist, cultural critic, and professor. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell used her pen name to center attention on her ideas and to honor her courageous great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

hooks’s unflinching dedication to her work carved deep grooves for the feminist and anti-racist movements. In this collection of 7 interviews, stretching from early in her career until her last interview, she discusses feminism, the complexity of rap music and masculinity, her relationship to Buddhism, the “politic of domination,” sexuality, and love and the importance of communication across cultural borders. Whether she was sparking controversy on campuses or facing criticism from contemporaries, hooks relentlessly challenged herself and those around her, inserted herself into the tensions of the cultural moment, and anchored herself with love.

By: barb morrison (Author), 2023, Paperback

Bottoming For God: A story about gender euphoria, sobriety, old skool NYC, true love, past lives and coming home.

**A 2024 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST**

“Zachary Zane is one of the best sex writers working today.” —Dan Savage, New York Times bestselling author

Named a Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Book of the Year by Buzzfeed

A sex and relationship columnist bares it all in a series of essays—part memoir, part manifesto—that explore the author’s coming-of-age and coming out as a bisexual man and move toward embracing and celebrating sex unencumbered by shame.

As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. Without an explanation as to why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.

Boyslut is a series of personal and tantalizing essays that articulate how our society still shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. Through the lens of his bisexuality and much self-described sluttiness, Zane breaks down exactly how this sexual shame negatively impacts the sex and relationships in our lives, and through personal experience, shares how we can unlearn the harmful, entrenched messages that society imparts to us.

From stories of drug-fueled threesomes and risqué Grindr hookups to insights on dealing with rejection and living with his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s wife, Boyslut is reassuring and often painfully funny—but is most potently a testimony that we can all learn to live healthier lives unburdened by stigma.

By: Ria Brodell (Author), 2018, Hardcover

Portraits and texts recover lost queer history: the lives of people who didn't conform to gender norms, from the fifteenth through the twentieth centuries.

“A serious—and seriously successful—queer history recovery project.”
—Publishers Weekly

Katherina Hetzeldorfer, tried “for a crime that didn't have a name” (same sex sexual relations) and sentenced to death by drowning in 1477; Charles aka Mary Hamilton, publicly whipped for impersonating a man in eighteenth-century England; Clara, aka “Big Ben,” over whom two jealous women fought in 1926 New York: these are just three of the lives that the artist Ria Brodell has reclaimed for queer history in Butch Heroes. Brodell offers a series of twenty-eight portraits of forgotten but heroic figures, each accompanied by a brief biographical note. They are individuals who were assigned female at birth but whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine, who did not want to enter into heterosexual marriage, and who often faced dire punishment for being themselves.

Brodell's detailed and witty paintings are modeled on Catholic holy cards, slyly subverting a religious template. The portraits and the texts offer intriguing hints of lost lives: cats lounge in the background of domestic settings; one of the figures is said to have been employed variously as “a prophet, a soldier, or a textile worker”; another casually holds a lit cigarette. Brodell did extensive research for each portrait, piecing together a life from historical accounts, maps, journals, paintings, drawings, and photographs, finding the heroic in the forgotten.

By: Zoe Bossiere (Author), 2024, Hardback

A striking literary memoir of genderfluidity, class, masculinity, and the American Southwest that captures the author’s experience coming of age in a Tucson, Arizona, trailer park.

Newly arrived in the Sonoran Desert, eleven-year-old Zoë’s world is one of giant beetles, thundering javelinas, and gnarled paloverde trees. With the family’s move to Cactus Country RV Park, Zoë has been given a fresh start and a new, shorter haircut.

Although Zoë doesn’t have the words to express it, he experiences life as a trans boy—and in Cactus Country, others begin to see him as a boy, too. Here, Zoë spends hot days chasing shade and freight trains with an ever-rotating pack of sunburned desert kids, and nights fending off his own questions about the body underneath his baggy clothes.

As Zoë enters adolescence, he must reckon with the sexism, racism, substance abuse, and violence endemic to the working class Cactus Country men he’s grown close to, whose hard masculinity seems as embedded in the desert landscape as the cacti sprouting from parched earth. In response, Zoë adopts an androgynous style and new pronouns, but still cannot escape what it means to live in a gendered body, particularly when a fraught first love destabilizes their sense of self.

But beauty flowers in this desert, too. Zoë persists in searching for answers that can’t be found in Cactus Country, dreaming of a day they might leave the park behind to embrace whatever awaits beyond.

Equal parts harsh and tender, Cactus Country is an invitation for readers to consider how we find our place in a world that insists on stark binaries, and a precisely rendered journey of self-determination that will resonate with anyone who’s ever had to fight to be themself.

By: Shannon Ronan (Author), 2023, Paperback

Our hopes with Coming Out Together. Memoirs on the LGBTQ+ Experience, is that it helps make those who have gone through the experience of coming out, or are currently going through it, to know that they are not alone, that it can get better, or that it might just not be all that bad. Some coming out stories are hard, some ugly, and some good. All are important. By shining the light onto these experiences, we hope to contribute to the positive ripple effects of progress

By: Naomi Watts (Author), 2025, Hardcover

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A frank, funny and informative guide to menopause and aging by beloved actress Naomi Watts, one of the leading voices in menopause awareness—with a foreword by Mary Claire Haver, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The New Menopause

At thirty-six, Naomi Watts had just completed filming King Kong and was trying to start a family when she was told that she was on the brink of menopause. It is estimated that seventy-five million women in the United States are currently dealing with menopause symptoms (dry itchy skin, raging hormones, night sweats), and yet the very word “menopause” continues to be associated with stigma and confusion. With so little information, many women feel unprepared, ashamed, and deeply alone when the time comes.

This is the book Naomi Watts wishes she had when she first started experiencing symptoms. Like sitting down over coffee and having an intimate chat with your girlfriend, Dare I Say It blends funny and poignant stories from Naomi and her friends with advice from doctors, hormone experts, and nutritionists to take the secrecy and shame out of menopause and aging. Answering questions such as: What’s hormone therapy and should I be on it? Will I ever sleep again? Will I get myself back? What happened to my libido? Do I need eighteen serums for my aging skin? Whose body is this anyway? Who am I now? Naomi Watts shares the most up-to-date research on how to manage menopause symptoms and tackle the physical and emotional challenges we encounter as we age.

Irreverent, bold, and reassuring, Dare I Say It is the companion every woman needs to embrace the best version of herself as she moves into what can be the most powerful and satisfying period of her life.

By: David Bowie (Author), 2016, Paperback

A revealing collection of interviews with the shape-shifting, genre-bending, wildly influential musician and song writer
 
David Bowie was an icon, not only his stunning musical output, but also his fascinating refusal to stay the same—the same as other trending artists, or even the same as himself.
 
In this remarkable collection, Bowie reveals the fierce intellectualism, artistry, and humor behind it all. From his very first interview—as a teenager on the BBC, before he was even a musician—to his last, Bowie takes on the most probing questions, candidly discussing his sexuality, his drug use, his sense of fashion, his method of composition, and more.
 
For fans still mourning his passing, as well as for those who know little about him, it’s a revealing, interesting, and inspiring look at one of the most influential artists of the last fifty years.