Personal Biographies

Sophie Jenkins is living a happy life in the idyllic Dorset countryside when she meets Martin Brett, the man who will go on to abuse her and haunt her dreams for years to come. A momentary act of neglect leads to a horrible series of events that leaves her changed forever. Badly let down by the adults entrusted to care for her, Sophie’s life begins to spiral downward. However, Sophie’s message is ultimately one of hope and empowerment. She is in the process of rebuilding her life when fate leads her to encounter her childhood attacker once again.

Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad’s diner and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th century mill.

Stephen Smith is the boy who did not exist. Born out of wedlock in the early 1960s, Steve's parents - both devout Catholics - had felt so 'shamed' by their son's illegitimate birth that they hid him away from the world by locking him in the cellar...for 13 years. Apart from a few admissions to hospital as a result of his 'imprisonment', Steve remained in the coal cellar of the family home where he was deprived of daylight, his childhood, school and human contact until he'd reached his teenage years.

A holy man to Hindus, a hero to Muslims, and a criminal to the British, Mohandas K. Gandhi was an inspiring figure of the 20th century, a man whose quest to live in accord with God’s highest truth led him to initiate massive campaigns against racism, violence, and colonialism.

Five years ago, Lauren Martin was sure something was wrong with her. She had a good job in New York, an apartment in Brooklyn, a boyfriend, yet every day she wrestled with feelings of inferiority, anxiety and irritability. It wasn't until a chance encounter with a (charming, successful) stranger who revealed that she also felt these things, that Lauren set out to better understand the hold that these moods had on her, how she could change them, and began to blog about the wisdom she uncovered.

Award-winning filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam bravely recounts the intimate abuse she suffered from former New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, using her story as a prism to examine the domestic violence crisis plaguing America. Sensitive and nuanced, Assume Nothing details how Tanya’s relationship devolved into abuse, how she found the strength to leave - risking her career, reputation, and life - and how she reclaimed her freedom and her voice.

In this important and ground-breaking, deeply personal investigation, Jones writes of the emerging concept of “matrescence”—the wholeness of becoming a mother. Drawing on her own experiences of twice becoming a mother, as well as exploring the latest research in the fields of neuroscience and evolutionary biology; psychoanalysis and existential therapy; sociology, economics and ecology, Jones writes of the physical and emotional changes in the maternal mind, body, and spirit and shows us how these changes are far more profound, wild, and enduring than have been previously explored.

In September 2017, a knock on the door upends Michelle Horton’s life: she learns that her sister has just shot her partner and is now in jail. Stunned, Michelle rearranges her life to raise Nikki's two young children alongside her own son. During the investigation that follows, Michelle is shocked to learn that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years. Michelle launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system designed to punish the entire family.

Behind the tall, foreboding gates of a commune in Brazil, Daniella Mestyanek Young was raised in the religious cult The Children of God, also known as The Family, as the daughter of high-ranking members. Her great-grandmother donated land for one of The Family’s first communes in Texas. Her mother, at thirteen, was forced to marry the leader and served as his secretary for many years. Beholden to The Family’s strict rules, Daniella suffers physical, emotional, and sexual abuse—masked as godly discipline and divine love—and is forbidden from getting a traditional education.

Receptionist Pam Beesly and accountant Angela Martin had very little in common when they toiled together at Scranton’s Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. But, in reality, the two bonded in their very first days on set and, over the nine seasons of the series’ run, built a friendship that transcended the show and continues to this day.

By the time she was in her late 20s, Tara Schuster was a rising TV executive who had worked for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and helped launch Key & Peele to viral superstardom. By all appearances, she had mastered being a grown-up. But beneath that veneer of success, she was a chronically anxious, self-medicating mess. No one knew that her road to adulthood had been paved with depression, anxiety, and shame. Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies is the story of Tara’s path to re-parenting herself and becoming a "ninja of self-love".

In Vindicated: Confessions of a Video Vixen, Ten Years Later, Karrine takes listeners into the belly of the beast as she harrowingly chronicles the systematic breakdown of her mind, body, and spirit at the hand of one man and the events that propelled her back to prosperity after losing everything. She candidly shares her struggle to be what others demand, her obsession with the American dream, her desperation to appear normal, the lengths to which she went, and the price she paid for it all.

When Emily Halnon lost her beloved mother to a rare uterine cancer at just sixty-six years old, she wanted to do something monumental to honor the person her mother had been. Emily's mom had taken up running in her late forties; she ran her first marathon at fifty. She even went skydiving to celebrate her sixtieth birthday. Emily, already an accomplished ultrarunner, decided to try to break the record for the Fastest Known Time by a woman on the Pacific Crest Trail's 460 miles across Oregon.

She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless 11-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.

At six years old, Terry was told by his headteacher that he would never amount to anything. He spent the rest of his life proving that teacher wrong. At 66, Terry had lived a life full of achievements: becoming one of the UK's best-selling writers, winning the Carnegie Medal and being awarded a knighthood for services to literature. Following his untimely death from Alzheimer's disease, the mantle of completing Terry's memoir was passed to Rob Wilkins, his former assistant, friend and now head of the author's literary estate.

Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past fifty, every hair’s root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts), and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything). Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting—the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries—Laurie accepts it. And then some.

When Stephanie Kiser moves to New York City after college to pursue a career in writing, she quickly learns that her entry-level salary won't cover the cost of living. But there is one in-demand job that pays enough to allow Stephanie to stay in the city: nannying for the 1%. Desperate to escape the poverty of her own childhood, Stephanie falls into a job that hijacks her life for the next seven years: a glorified personal assistant to toddlers on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Divorce was everything for Haley Mlotek. As a child, she listened to her twice-divorced grandmother tell stories about her “husbands.” As a pre-teen, she answered the phones for her mother’s mediation and marriage counseling practice and typed out the paperwork for couples in the process of leaving each other. She grew up with the sense that divorce was an outcome to both resist and desire. But when she herself went on to marry—and then divorce—the man she had been with for twelve years, suddenly, she had to reconsider her generation’s inherited understanding of the institution.

This is the second volume of true, heinous child-abuse stories.

Before Alex Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, they think their position is clear. The child of two lawyers, Alex is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as Alex reviews old tapes—the moment they hear him speak of his crimes—they are overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by their reaction, Alex digs deeper and deeper into the case.