As you scroll through my blog, it’s clear that I read mostly YA, fantasy and romance novels. I do enjoy a biography once in a while however. Not so much about celebrities, singers or politicians, but about businessmen and people who did (survived, invented, built, imagined, …) extraordinary things. For example, I have read several non-fiction books about Apple and thoroughly enjoyed the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson.
- I’m Supposed to Protect You from All This: A Memoir by Nadja Spiegelman
Publication date: August 2nd 2016
A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, her daughter Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in this gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir, which helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most. - The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer
Publication date: August 16th 2016
The Emmy Award-winning comedian, actress, writer, and star of Inside Amy Schumer and the acclaimed film Trainwreck has taken the entertainment world by storm with her winning blend of smart, satirical humor. Now, Amy Schumer has written a refreshingly candid and uproariously funny collection of (extremely) personal and observational essays. In The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo, Amy mines her past for stories about her teenage years, her family, relationships, and sex and shares the experiences that have shaped who she is—a woman with the courage to bare her soul to stand up for what she believes in, all while making us laugh. - Born Bright: A Young Girl’s Journey from Nothing to Something in America by C. Nicole Mason
Publication date: August 16th 2016
Standing on the stage, I felt exposed and like an intruder. In these professional settings, my personal experiences with hunger, poverty, and episodic homelessness, often go undetected. I had worked hard to learn the rules and disguise my beginning in life… So begins Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason’s powerful memoir, a story of reconciliation, constrained choices and life on the other side of the tracks. While showing us her own path out of poverty, Mason examines the conditions that make it nearly impossible to escape and exposes the presumption harboured by many—that the poor don’t help themselves enough. - Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere But Here by Angela Palm
Publication date: August 16th 2016
Angela Palm grew up in a place not marked on the map, her house set on the banks of a river that had been straightened to make way for farmland. Every year, the Kankakee River in rural Indiana flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window, Palm watched the neighbour boy and loved him in secret, imagining a life with him even as she longed for a future that held more than a job at the neighbourhood bar. For Palm, caught in this landscape of flood and drought, escape was a continually receding hope. Though she did escape, as an adult Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins.
- Girl Hearts Girl by Lucy Sutcliffe
Publication date: August 2nd 2016
An inspiring, uplifting and sympathetic story about sexuality and self-acceptance, Lucy Sutcliffe’s debut memoir is a personal and moving coming out story. In 2010, at seventeen, Lucy Sutcliffe began an online friendship with Kaelyn, a young veterinary student from Michigan. Within months, they began a long distance relationship, finally meeting in the summer of 2011. Lucy’s video montage of their first week spent together in Saint Kitts, which she posted to the couple’s YouTube channel, was the first in a series of films documenting their long-distance relationship. Funny, tender and candid, the films attracted them a vast online following. Now, for the first time, Lucy’s writing about the incredible personal journey she’s been on; from never quite wanting the fairy-tale of Prince Charming to realising she was gay at the age of 14, through three years of self-denial to finally coming out to friends and family, to meeting her American girlfriend Kaelyn.
Other new releases of August 2016 can be found by genre right here on Goodreads.
So, what do you think? Will any of these new biographies end up on your to-read lists? I’d love to hear from you guys in the comments!
Happy reading,
Loes M.