Showing titles in Biographies & Memoirs

Shortlisted for the Indie Book Awards, Christopher Bland Prize and The People's Book Prize A Waterstones Best Memoir of 2024 An Independent and Stylist Best Non-Fiction Book The captivating true story of an underdog business – a feminist bookshop founded in Thatcher’s Britain – from a...

Few people serve time in prison before studying at Cambridge. You might be surprised to know that Stephen Fry is one of them. Moab is My Washpot, the remarkable story of Stephen Fry's tumultuous early life, is by turns funny, shocking, tender, delicious, sad, lyrical, bruisingly frank and addictively listenable.

Mohsin grew up in a deprived pocket of East London; his family was close-knit but very religiously conservative. From a young age Mohsin felt different, but in a home where being gay was inconceivable, he also felt very alone. Outside of home Mohsin went to a failing inner city school where gang violence was a fact of life. As he grew up, life didn’t seem to offer teenage Mohsin any choices: he was disenfranchised as a poor brown boy, and he was isolated from his family as a closet gay Muslim.

What’s it like to parent a child in transition? Inspired by the acclaimed podcast How to Be a Girl, this is a highly personal and beautifully narrated memoir by Marlo Mack recounting the journey she’s been on since her three-year-old declared he should have been born a girl. And Mack agrees to the child’s request to be a girl.

Named a Best Book by: The Globe and Mail, Indigo, Out Magazine, Audible, CBC, Apple, Quill & Quire, Kirkus Reviews, Brooklyn Public Library, Writers’ Trust of Canada, Autostraddle, Bitch, and BookRiot. Finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction Nominated for the 2019...

Hey, I'm Jamie, a 29-year-old trans guy from the UK. I've been transitioning for 12 years now after realising I was trans (by accident!) at sixteen years old. I knew I was a boy since the age of four, but realised whilst growing up that I was different. It was only in my teens that I found the words to express who I was and what I needed to do. Since then, I've been on testosterone for more than a decade - I know, I can't believe it either - I've also had top and bottom surgery and legally changed my sex, so I know a few things about the transitioning process and being trans!

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.

Siri Lindley wanted to be a world champion triathlete . . . even though she didn't know how to swim. She wanted to love and be loved . . . even though her father shunned her because she was gay. She wanted to savor every day and enjoy the life she'd made with her wife, her career, and her passion for horses . . . even though in November 2019 she was diagnosed with a rare—and usually fatal—form of acute myeloid leukemia. Every time Siri has faced what seemed impossible, she found a way to not only survive the situation, but to thrive within it.

In 2010, Chelsea Manning, working as an intelligence analyst in the US Army in Iraq, disclosed 720,000 classified military documents that she had smuggled out via the memory card of her digital camera. In March 2011, the US Army sentenced Manning to 35 years in military prison, charging her with 22 counts relating to the unauthorized possession and distribution of classified military documents. The day after her conviction, Manning declared her gender identity as a woman and began to transition.

n this unforgettable meet-cute, Samantha Allen traces her story of self-discovery during gender transition and the life-altering partnership that began with a simple hello in an elevator. Feeling “unfinished” at the liminal age of twenty-six, the author had already accumulated decades of emotional baggage growing up in a Mormon family and living with gender dysphoria. When she met Corey midtransition, she felt even more like an awkward shape-shifter. Now Samantha shares how taking a chance on that fortuitous encounter meant having the courage to be herself.

The woman behind the icon known as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, the undisputed Queen of Halloween, reveals her full story filled with intimate bombshells—told by the bombshell herself. On Good Friday in 1953, at only 18 months old, 25 miles from the nearest hospital in Manhattan, Kansas...

In A Part of the Heart Can’t Be Eaten, award-winning author, sex educator, filmmaker, and podcast host Tristan Taormino shares her coming-of-age story, revealing how her radical sexuality and unconventional career grew out of an extraordinary queer father-daughter relationship. Raised by a hard-working single mother on Long Island, Tristan got her sex ed from the 1980s TV show Solid Gold and The Joy of Sex. She spent summers at drag shows in Provincetown with her father, Bill, who had come out as gay in the mid-1970s.

Brought to you by Penguin. My friends will respect me, I hope, just as much under my jacket as under my dress... So take me for a man or a woman as you wish. By the age of thirty, the novelist who had been born Aurore Dupin in 1804 had become the internationally renowned George Sand. In English...

Lambda Award and American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award-winning author Dorothy Allison is known for her bold and insightful writing on issues of class and sexuality. In Skin, she approaches these topics through 23 impassioned essays that explore her identity - from her childhood in a poor family in South Carolina to her adult life as a lesbian in the suburbs of New York - and her sexuality.

Born in the postwar East End of London, young Michael’s life is changed when he is spotted in a school play, cast in Lionel Bart’s Oliver! and is transported to the glittering West End. Acting on stage and screen into adulthood, he finds his most defining role as Colin in Eastenders, making television history as one half of the first gay kiss ever broadcast on a British soap. But it is a chance encounter in a Butlins resort that leads Michael to the great love of his life: Paul Cottingham, who would become his husband and partner of 31 years.

When Greg's straight best friend Dale tells him he's spending the summer at Marine Corps boot camp on Parris Island, all Greg hears is "summer" and "camp." So, he signs up too. Never mind that he's underweight, out of shape—and gay, which is illegal in the U.S. military at the time. Yes, it's insanely dangerous for both of them. But as fate would have it, the Few and the Proud turn out to be a bunch of oddballs and eccentrics—and a brotherhood is born.

Harvey Milk - eloquent, charismatic, and a smart-aleck - was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but he had not even served a full year in office when he was shot by a homophobic fellow supervisor. Milk's assassination at the age of 48 made him the most famous gay man in modern history; 20 years later, Time magazine included him on its list of the hundred most influential individuals of the 20th century.

So often the stories shared by trans people about their transition center on gender dysphoria: a feeling of deep discomfort with their birth-assigned gender, and a powerful catalyst for coming out or transitioning. But for many non-cisgender people, it's gender euphoria that pushes forward their transition: the joy the first time a parent calls them by their new chosen name, the first time they have the confidence to cut their hair short, the first time they truly embrace themself.

When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain's best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humor, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world.

Pidgeon Pagonis always felt like their life was a constant attempt to fit in with other girls—a feeling that was only exacerbated when puberty failed to hit. They never understood why…until they uncovered the secret that had haunted their childhood. Bouncing between their Chicago home and the city’s children’s hospital, Pidgeon weathered a series of traumatic surgeries, fabrications, and misdirections. It wasn’t until college that Pidgeon pieced together the puzzle of their identity.