Showing results by publisher "She Writes Press" in All Categories

Set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement, Redlined exposes the racist lending rules that refuse mortgages to anyone in areas with even one black resident. As blacks move deeper into Chicago’s West Side during the 1960s, whites flee by the thousands. But Linda Gartz’s parents, Fred and Lil, choose to stay in their integrating neighborhood, overcoming previous prejudices as they meet and form friendships with their African American neighbors.

When Deb Brandon discovered that cavernous angiomas - tangles of malformed blood vessels in her brain - were behind the terrifying symptoms she'd been experiencing, she underwent one brain surgery. And then another. And then another. And that was just the beginning. The book also includes an introduction by Connie Lee, founder and president of the Angioma Alliance. Unlike other memoirs that focus on injury crisis and acute recovery, But My Brain Had Other Ideas follows Brandon’s story all the way through to long-term recovery, revealing without sugarcoating or sentimentality Brandon’s struggles - and ultimate triumph.

Part culinary memoir and part travelogue, Carole Bumpus gathered this compilation of intimate interviews, conversations, stories, and traditional family recipes (cuisine pauvre) in the kitchens of French families as she traveled throughout the countryside. Travel with her through Champagne caves/wineries and historic cathedrals, local farmers’ markets, ancient potters’ guilds, and restaurant kitchens with wood-fire ovens.

Where Have I Been All My Life? is a compelling memoir recounting one woman’s journey through grief and a profound feeling of unworthiness to wholeness and healing. It begins with the chillingly sudden death of Rice’s mother, and is followed by her foray into the center of mourning.

It's 1942. Cynical young gossip columnist Jane Benjamin joins FDR’s Office of War Information propaganda unit, aiming to replace big league gossip queen Hedda Hopper and get syndicated across the country. Jane scours the shipyard for a picture perfect Wendy-the-Welder poster girl to boost ship production by coaxing women into the workforce and to get her own name on newspapers everywhere. But when two top candidates die on the job, Jane’s got to choose between personal ambition and service, before the murderer kills another woman welder and America’s best chance of winning the war.

Covering seven decades of living, traveling, and growing, Does My Voice Matter? follows James’ journey of self-discovery and authenticity as she gradually recognizes that she has a voice—and learns how to use it. She uses her own life experiences as a backdrop for her exploration of how the voice is used as a tool of engagement.

Born into a Hassidic Jewish family in Poland in 1924, Mendek grew up surrounded by extreme anti-Semitism. Armed with an ingenious mind, he survived three horrific years in Nazi slave-labor concentration camps while virtually his entire family was murdered in Auschwitz. After arriving in America in 1946 — despite having no money or professional skills — his inventions helped revolutionize both the jewelry and packaged-salad industries. Remarkably, Mendek also applied his ingenuity to his own psyche, developing innovative ways to heal his heart and end his emotional suffering.

Years later, Willa Goodfellow revisits this account of her antidepressant-induced hypomania that hijacked a Costa Rican vacation and tells the rest of the story: the wrong medications, an overlooked diagnosis of bipolar 2, and finally a path to recovery. Prozac Monologues: A Voice from the Edge is a book within a book, part memoir of misdiagnosis and part self-help guide about the bipolar spectrum. This edgy and comedic collection of essays offers information about a mood disorder frequently mistaken for major depression as well as resources for recovery. Plus, Costa Rica.

At the age of four, a little girl stands on a cold, windy railroad platform in Wichita, Kansas, watching a train take her mother away. For the rest of her life, her mother will be an only occasional—and always troubled—visitor who denies her the love she longs for. Linda Joy Myers’s compassionate, gripping, and soul-searching memoir tells the story of three generations of daughters who, though determined to be different from their absent mothers, ultimately follow in their footsteps, recreating a pattern that they yearn to break.

When Terry Repak and her husband moved to West Africa with two small children at the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, she seized the opportunity to connect with people of other cultures and bear witness to the ravages of the disease. Circling Home chronicles the adventures and challenges of raising children overseas and trying to find home in countries as diverse as Ivory Coast, Tanzania, and Switzerland. Her memoir spotlights the complexity, struggles, and profound lessons at the heart of the expat journey.

Leaving a successful career in the US, a father makes a fateful decision to settle his wife and two young daughters on an isolated beach in the Dominican Republic. He plants ten thousand coconut seedlings and declares they are the luckiest people alive. In reality, the family is in the path of hurricanes, and in the grip of a brutal dictator.

There are more outlets than ever for writers to spread their messages and share their work, more opportunities to speak out and be seen. Writers expose themselves freely and willingly in a way that would have been unfathomable 50 years ago, and more people than ever are writing and publishing. Men and women are writing with equal fervor and commitment to their message and craft. As a result, it’s easy to assume, or hope, that the gendered playing field is a thing of the past, too. Unfortunately for women writers, it’s not.

On the brink of World War II, Jane Benjamin wants to have it all. By day she hustles as a tomboy cub reporter. By night, she struggles to raise her toddler sister, Elsie, and protect her from their mother. But Jane’s got a plan: she’ll become the San Francisco Prospect’s first gossip columnist and make enough money to care for Elsie. Jane finagles her way to the women’s championship at Wimbledon, starring tennis phenom Tommie O’Rourke. But then she witnesses Edith “Coach” Carlson, Tommie’s closest companion, drop dead in the stands of apparent heart attack.

In this richly depicted story, told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of her sexual abuse, from age four to 13, by her father. A victim of her father’s anger and her mother’s complacency with his abusive behavior, Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to the abuse, and as a way to block her own sense of self. How does a child confused by episodes of abuse come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal?

Cheryl and her siblings are the offspring of an eccentric professor father and unflappable mother. Mindful of their ever-expanding family’s need for cash, her parents begin acquiring tumbledown houses in the campus town to renovate and rent. Dad, who changes out of his suit and tie into a carpenter’s battered white overalls, like Clark Kent into Superman, is supremely confident his offspring can do anything, whether he’s there or not.

Mary Carlson didn't plan to become a veterinarian, but her husband's work inspired her to leave teaching, become a vet herself, and open a feline-exclusive clinic. Along the way, there were grueling years of vet school, a shattered hip, an enduring love, illness, and death - and the rediscovery that life, especially one filled with delightful animals, is worth living.

Valeria Vose: A Novel takes a listener deep inside the cultural and emotional life of a 1970’s southern woman. Privileged, approaching age 40, her “perfect” life is shattered. Determined to survive, she’s forced to confront all preconceived values and expectations in order to find a path toward creative, spiritual independence and her true identity.

When her brother dies of AIDS and her husband dies of cancer in the same year, Rosemary is left on her own with two young daughters and antsy addiction demons dancing in her head. This is the nucleus of The Art of Losing It: a young mother jerking from emergency to emergency as the men in her life drop dead around her; a high-functioning radio show host waging war with her addictions while trying to raise her two little girls who just lost their daddy.

It’s the summer of 2017 in Wellington Beach, California, a suburban coastal town increasingly divided by politics, protests, and escalating housing prices—divisions that change the lives of five neighbors as they search for home and community in a neighborhood where no one can agree who belongs.

The secrets, lies, and layers of deception about Diane Dewey’s origins were meant for her protection - but eventually, they imploded. Living with her family in suburban Philadelphia, Diane had grown up knowing she was born in Stuttgart and adopted at age one from an orphanage. She’d been told her biological parents were dead. Then, in 2002, when she was 47 years old, Diane got a letter from Switzerland: Her biological father, Otto, wanted to bring her into his life. With that, her world shifted on its axis.