Download or read book Let s Pretend This Never Happened written by Jenny Lawson and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

Download or read book Stay True written by Hua Hsu and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu “This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Download or read book Based on a True Story written by Norm Macdonald and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Driving, wild and hilarious” (The Washington Post), here is the incredible “memoir” of the legendary actor, gambler, raconteur, and Saturday Night Live veteran. When Norm Macdonald, one of the greatest stand-up comics of all time, was approached to write a celebrity memoir, he flatly refused, calling the genre “one step below instruction manuals.” Norm then promptly took a two-year hiatus from stand-up comedy to live on a farm in northern Canada. When he emerged he had under his arm a manuscript, a genre-smashing book about comedy, tragedy, love, loss, war, and redemption. When asked if this was the celebrity memoir, Norm replied, “Call it anything you damn like.”

Download or read book Tell Me True written by Patricia Hampl and published by Minnesota Historical Society. This book was released on 2008-10-14 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fourteen accomplished writers investigate the tantalizing gray area where memory and history intersect.

Download or read book The True Memoirs of Little K written by Adrienne Sharp and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2010-10-26 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exiled in Paris, tiny, one-hundred-year-old Mathilde Kschessinska sits down to write her memoirs before all that she believes to be true is forgotten. A lifetime ago, she was the vain, ambitious, impossibly charming prima ballerina assoluta of the tsar's Russian Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg. Now, as she looks back on her tumultuous life, she can still recall every slight she ever suffered, every conquest she ever made. Kschessinka's riveting storytelling soon thrusts us into a world lost to time: that great intersection of the Russian court and the Russian theater. Before the revolution, Kschessinska dominated that world as the greatest dancer of her age. At seventeen, her crisp, scything technique made her a star. So did her romance with the tsarevich Nicholas Romanov, soon to be Nicholas II. It was customary for grand dukes and sons of tsars to draw their mistresses from the ranks of the ballet, but it was not customary for them to fall in love. The affair could not endure: when Nicholas ascended to the throne as tsar, he was forced to give up his mistress, and Kschessinska turned for consolation to his cousins, two grand dukes with whom she formed an infamous ménage à trois. But when Nicholas's marriage to Alexandra wavered after she produced girl after girl, he came once again to visit his Little K. As the tsar's empire—one that once made up a third of the world—began its fatal crumble, Kschessinka's devotion to the imperial family would be tested in ways she could never have foreseen. In Adrienne Sharp's magnificently imagined novel, the last days of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov empire are relived. Through Kschessinska's memories of her own triumphs and defeats, we witness the stories that changed history: the seething beginnings of revolution, the blindness of the doomed court, the end of a grand, decadent way of life that belonged to the nineteenth century. Based on fact, The True Memoirs of Little K is historical fiction as it's meant to be written: passionately eventful, crammed with authentic detail, and alive with emotions that resonate still.

Download or read book Real American written by Julie Lythcott-Haims and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Courageous, achingly honest." —Michelle Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness “A compelling, incisive and thoughtful examination of race, origin and what it means to be called an American. Engaging, heartfelt and beautifully written, Lythcott-Haims explores the American spectrum of identity with refreshing courage and compassion.” —Bryan Stevenson, New York Times bestselling author of Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption A fearless memoir in which beloved and bestselling How to Raise an Adult author Julie Lythcott-Haims pulls no punches in her recollections of growing up a black woman in America. Bringing a poetic sensibility to her prose to stunning effect, Lythcott-Haims briskly and stirringly evokes her personal battle with the low self-esteem that American racism routinely inflicts on people of color. The only child of a marriage between an African-American father and a white British mother, she shows indelibly how so-called "micro" aggressions in addition to blunt force insults can puncture a person's inner life with a thousand sharp cuts. Real American expresses also, through Lythcott-Haims’s path to self-acceptance, the healing power of community in overcoming the hurtful isolation of being incessantly considered "the other." The author of the New York Times bestselling anti-helicopter parenting manifesto How to Raise an Adult, Lythcott-Haims has written a different sort of book this time out, but one that will nevertheless resonate with the legions of students, educators and parents to whom she is now well known, by whom she is beloved, and to whom she has always provided wise and necessary counsel about how to embrace and nurture their best selves. Real American is an affecting memoir, an unforgettable cri de coeur, and a clarion call to all of us to live more wisely, generously and fully.

Download or read book Memoirs written by David Rockefeller and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born into one of the wealthiest families in America—he was the youngest son of Standard Oil scion John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and the celebrated patron of modern art Abby Aldrich Rockefeller—David Rockefeller has carried his birthright into a distinguished life of his own. His dealings with world leaders from Zhou Enlai and Mikhail Gorbachev to Anwar Sadat and Ariel Sharon, his service to every American president since Eisenhower, his remarkable world travels and personal dedication to his home city of New York—here, the first time a Rockefeller has told his own story, is an account of a truly rich life.

Download or read book Genuine and Authentic Memoirs of a Well Known Woman of Intrigue written by and published by . This book was released on 1787 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Memoirs and Misinformation written by Jim Carrey and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2020-07-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "None of this is real and all of it is true." --Jim Carrey From movie star Jim Carrey and novelist Dana Vachon, a fearless and semi-autobiographical novel about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, destruction of persona, our "one big soul," Canada, and apocalypses within and without. Meet Jim Carrey. Sure, he's an insanely successful and beloved movie star drowning in wealth and privilege--but he's also lonely. Maybe past his prime. Maybe even...getting fat? He's tried diets, gurus, and cuddlin' with his military-grade Israeli guard dogs, but nothing seems to lift the cloud of emptiness and ennui. Even the advice of his best friend, actor and dinosaur skull collector, Nicolas Cage, isn't enough to pull Carrey out of his slump. Then Jim meets Georgie: ruthless ingénue, love of his life. And thanks to auteur screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, he has a role to play in a boundary-pushing new picture that may help him uncover a whole new side to himself. Finally, his Oscar vehicle! Things are looking up. But the universe has other plans. Memoirs and Misinformation is a fearless semi-autobiographical novel, a deconstruction of persona. In it, Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon have fashioned a story about acting, Hollywood, agents, celebrity, privilege, friendship, romance, addiction to relevance, fear of personal erasure, our "one big soul," Canada, and a cataclysmic ending of the world--apocalypses within and without.

Download or read book sic written by Joshua Cody and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-21 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joshua Cody was about to receive his PhD from Columbia University when he was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. He underwent six months of chemotherapy. The treatment failed. Expectations for survival plummeted. After consulting with several oncologists, he embarked on a risky course of high-dose chemotherapy, full body radiation, and an autologous bone marrow transplant. In a fevered, mesmerising voice, slaloming effortlessly between references to Ezra Pound, The Rolling Stones and Beethoven, he charts the struggle: the fury, the tendancy to self-destruction, the ruthless grasping for life, for sensation - he beautiful Ariel who gives him cocaine and a blowjob in a Manhattan restaurant following his first treatment; the detailed Hungarian morphine fantasy complete with bride called Valentina while, in reality, hospital staff are pinning him to his bed. As fresh and beguiling as it is brave and revealing, Joshua Cody has created a book that gives readers a long glimpse into a gorgeous, dark thrashing in the forecourt of death. Literary, hallucinatory and at times uncomfortable reading, [sic] is ultimately a celebration of art, language music and life.

Download or read book The Best of Us written by Joyce Maynard and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Indie Next Pick "For Reading Groups" From New York Times bestselling author Joyce Maynard, a memoir about discovering strength in the midst of great loss--"heart wrenching, inspiring, full of joy and tears and life." (Anne Lamott) In 2011, when she was in her late fifties, beloved author and journalist Joyce Maynard met the first true partner she had ever known. Jim wore a rakish hat over a good head of hair; he asked real questions and gave real answers; he loved to see Joyce shine, both in and out of the spotlight; and he didn't mind the mess she made in the kitchen. He was not the husband Joyce imagined, but he quickly became the partner she had always dreamed of. Before they met, both had believed they were done with marriage, and even after they married, Joyce resolved that no one could alter her course of determined independence. Then, just after their one-year wedding anniversary, her new husband was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. During the nineteen months that followed, as they battled his illness together, she discovered for the first time what it really meant to be a couple--to be a true partner and to have one. This is their story. Charting the course through their whirlwind romance, a marriage cut short by tragedy, and Joyce's return to singleness on new terms, The Best of Us is a heart-wrenching, ultimately life-affirming reflection on coming to understand true love through the experience of great loss.

Download or read book Geisha written by Mineko Iwasaki and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2003-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Kyoto geisha describes her initiation into an okiya at the age of four, the intricate training that made up most of her education, her successful career, and the traditions surrounding the geisha culture.

Download or read book Hold Still written by Sally Mann and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2015-05-12 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This National Book Award finalist is a revealing and beautifully written memoir and family history from acclaimed photographer Sally Mann. In this groundbreaking book, a unique interplay of narrative and image, Mann's preoccupation with family, race, mortality, and the storied landscape of the American South are revealed as almost genetically predetermined, written into her DNA by the family history that precedes her. Sorting through boxes of family papers and yellowed photographs she finds more than she bargained for: "deceit and scandal, alcohol, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land . . . racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of the prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder." In lyrical prose and startlingly revealing photographs, she crafts a totally original form of personal history that has the page-turning drama of a great novel but is firmly rooted in the fertile soil of her own life.

Download or read book Memoirs of a Geisha written by Arthur Golden and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1999-11-09 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha, we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction—at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful—and completely unforgettable.

Download or read book The Genuine Memoirs of Joshua Crompton Written by Himself in the Cells of Guildford After His Unhappy Conviction for Forgery on the Bank of England The Whole Authenticated by the Rev Mr Dyer written by Joshua CROMPTON and published by . This book was released on 1778 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte written by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne and published by . This book was released on 1892 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Memoir of the Queen of Etruria Written by Herself An Authentic Narrative of the Seizure and Removal of Pope Pius 7 on the 6th of July 1809 with Genuine Memoirs of His Journey from Rome to France and Thence to Savona Written by One of His Attendants Translated from the Italian written by Maria Luisa : di duchessa di Lucca Borbone (duchessa di Lucca) and published by . This book was released on 1814 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: