Armed with the information from Cathryn's Wild Sexual Animal Kingdom research and her "Love is Important but Chocolate is Essential" Chocolate Fun Facts, her posse of Grrl Geniuses struggle with singlehood, married life, sexual preferences, widowhood, and friendship. Cathryn's journey veers from a "nails-on-chalkboard-scratchingly-awful" divorce and the botched kidnapping of her own dog, to pretending to be a lesbian, seeing her old lingerie sold on her old front lawn by her ex-husband's girlfriend, losing her job, and a tragic industrial accident-level bikini wax. And through everything, Cathryn searches for the answer to the most important relationship question of all: why are all the best men gay?If you've ever been tempted to have sex with another person, this is an essential read. If you've ever felt inadequate to a task or a failure at love or in any way anything less than a genius and you've sunk so low that even a new pair of cute shoes won't help, Cathryn Michon can show you the way to relationship happiness-all you have to do is learn from her very funny mistakes. However badly you think you've done anything, Cathryn has done it even worse, and reveals lessons learned in the wryly witty and devastatingly honest style that has made her the favorite of aspiring geniuses everywhere!

    Kenyon's fourth collection is built around two perfectly orchestrated poem sequences. In the first, the speaker contrasts memories of her baby carriage with other images from her childhood, such as her parents' toiling away at low-paying jobs. She also recalls the present-day life of her aging, increasingly dependent mother. Melancholia, the subject of the second sequence and several poems surrounding it, has been played to death in modern poetry, but still Kenyon offers new insights and gives even the most depressing poems an uplifting lilt in their final lines. In her hands a list of the latest medications becomes fit material for poetry: "The coated ones smell sweet or have / no smell; the powdery ones smell / like the chemistry lab at school / that made me hold my breath." She writes, in addition to illness, of sleep, insomnia and death. She interacts with the insects, birds and flowers in her New Hampshire landscape, relying on their fragility to teach her of her own. Kenyon describes afterlife, or "the Other Side," with the same precise, hard-edged imagery that fills her other poems." from Publisher's Weekly

    Through a blend of personal narrative, social history and hard-eyed wisdom, Joan Thatiah delves into life lessons she has lived and learnt.Into the big things, the small things and the things that today's young woman never imagines that she will have to deal with.

    Inside were more than 100 revealing letters the legendary pilot wrote to her beloved mother. The first was a four-year-old's thank-you note. The last, three short lines, was written just prior to her final 1937 flight when she vanished into a Pacific mist of conjecture. Fitted together, they portray the evolution to adulthood of a warm, sensible, fun-loving tomboy who would become the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo. Amid these captivating letters, Jean L. Backus skillfully weaves accounts of Earhart and her family's joys and squabbles from an aristocratic mother who was the first woman to scale Pike's Peak to husband George Putnam who made her a media sensation, secured financing for her flights, and led her to reject any "medieval code of faithfulness." Written under all conditions - in school, on trains, at the White House - the engrossing messages show devotion, wisdom, and a hilarious talent for playing with the English language, as well as a rare ability to stand apart from her own legend. Letters from Amelia is an apt testimony to the totality of an extraordinary person.

    Ella’s growing consciousness begins to shake the foundations of her life, and she comes to the realization that she is irrevocably changed—and that to be true to herself, she must make painful choices.First published in 1972, Ella Price's Journal is a deeply authentic literary rendering of a woman’s struggle to give voice to what Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique called “the problem that has no name,” and a novel that affirms the possibility of growth toward a richly intense and authentic life at any age.

    A profoundly moving story of love during a time of great social change, with an ending that will leave you cheering. May Callaghan is seventeen years old and on her own. At least that’s how it feels.Her devoutly religious mother and her gentle but damaged father are fighting, and May's boyfriend, Sam, has left their rural hometown for Melbourne without so much as a backward glance.When May lies to her parents and takes the train to visit Sam at his shared house in Carlton, her world opens wide in glorious complexity. She is introduced to his housemates, Clancy, an indigenous university student, and Ruby, a wild bohemian. With their liberal thinking and opposition to the war in Vietnam, they are everything that May's strict Catholic upbringing should warn her against.May knows too well the toll that war has taken on her father, and the peace movement in the city has a profound effect on her. For a while, May’s future burns bright. But then it begins to unravel, and something happens to her that will change her life forever.

    Interiors tells of one woman's trip to insanity and her journey back--a story not of the suffering and recovery of an incest survivor, but the story of all women who suffer.

    . . far more than a sartorial survey' The Oldie* * * * * * A vivid history of ordinary women and their extraordinary deeds through two world wars and beyond, by From Our Own Correspondent presenter Kate Adie.Uniform is universally seen as both a stamp of authority and of official acceptance. But the sight of a woman in military uniform still provokes controversy. Although more women are now taking prominent roles in combat, the status implied by uniform is often regarded as contrary to the general perception of womanhood. In association with the Imperial War Museum, this is the first book to look at the image of uniformed women, both in conflict and in civilian roles throughout the twentieth century. Kate Adie examines the extraordinary range of jobs that uniformed women have performed, from nursing to the armed services. Through contemporary correspondence and many personal stories she brings the enormous and often unsung achievements of women in uniform vividly to life, and looks at how far women have come in a century which, for them, began restricted in corsets and has ended on the battlefield in camouflage.

    Appropriating this quote, Malebo boldly renounces societal expectations placed on her as a Black woman and shares her journey towards misbehaviour. According to Malebo, it is a norm for a Black woman to live through a society that will prescribe what it means to be a well behaved woman. Acting like this prescribed woman equals good behaviour. But what happens when a black woman decides to live her own life and becomes her own form of who she wants to be? She is often seen as misbehaving.Miss Behave challenges society’s deep-seated beliefs about what it means to be a well behaved woman. In this book, Malebo tracks her journey on a path towards achieving total autonomy and self-determinism. Miss Behave will challenge, rattle and occasionally cause you to reflect on your own life – asking yourself the question – are you truly living life the way you want to?

    MacLeod’s young protagonist enters all the bright open avenues of peer-group play and the dark blind alleys of individual and collective terror, as she discovers within herself both the capacity for and the conflict between impulses of good and evil. In thinking back on the history of her own tight-knit group of friends, she begins to see how in the excitement of belonging to a ritualized, secret collective, the self is created by the increasing dehumanization of the other—of both the bully and the victim. The Shape of a Girl goes far beyond a simple dramatization of the seemingly inexplicable code of silence and tacit complicity which surrounded the sensationalized Reena Virk murder in 1997 on which the play is based. It speaks eloquently and compassionately to a world increasingly dominated by all forms of collectivised and ritualized tribalist hatred, and offers the embrace of trust as the only way out of this circle of violence.Jewel is also based on a real-life catastrophe—the sinking of the Ocean Ranger, an oil rig off the coast of Newfoundland, on Valentine’s Day, 1982. Three years later, a widow, Marjorie Clifford, at home in her trailer in Fort St. John, British Columbia, begins to take the first step in understanding that the humanity of love, in all of its tentative frailty, uncertainty and promise, can free a life paralyzed and dominated by loss.

    Unsurprisingly, neither worked.After a visit to Sex Camp and many attempts to fix her 'broken' vagina, Fran decided to share her own hilarious, excruciating, and sometimes upsetting experiences. With the help of her 16 year old self's diary, expert advice,  candid and enlightening interviews with others about sex,  and some self-care exercises, Fran sets about trying to make herself, and other people, feel like they're not being gaslit by their own vaginas.

    With the help of the gang of girls of Weight Watchers, and their fearless leader —former fatty and community college dropout—Pantsuit Pam, Amye spends the next year losing weight and learning to live in a skinny (er) woman’s body. Only being skinny is not as easy as it looks, especially when inside, she will always be a fat girl. Fat Girl, Skinny is Amye’s story, but it’s also the story of anyone who has ever been told: “You’d be pretty…if”.

    From professional women who hit the maternal wall, to childcare workers who can't afford quality care for their own children, this book captures what it means to be a mother in America today. This groundbreaking book also celebrates the successes of companies that have discovered the value of good family policies, families who are making it work, model childcare programs, and legislation that supports families.

    Michelle Harrison kept throughout her months of residency in OB/GYN--draws us into the serious and thrilling work of delivering new life into the world...and into Dr. Harrison's own struggle to reconcile the often startling difference between patient care and hospital convenience. She writes about her patients, for whom she never had quite enough time; about her colleagues, with whom she did not always agree; about the excitement of learning new procedures; about the pressures that never let up. She brings us as close as most of us are likely to come to the intense inner life of a big hospital."

    Jennifer Graham doesn't run to lose weight—she runs because she loves it. And as much as she runs, her excess poundage never leaves. So she accepts her body type for what it is, and runs for the sheer joy of it. But along the way she must endure not only her self-made exhaustion and lactic acid, but also the bemused stares of neighbors, offers of a car ride from strangers, and disdain from the dominant strain of runner—those long, lean "shirtless wonders."The story revolves around her decision to run a serious half-marathon race, and her imaginary coaching relationship with the spirit of Steve Prefontaine. The late, great Oregon distance star gives her advice and encouragement, and doesn't like excuses. ("Yeah, I know he's been dead thirty-five years; it's a minor metaphysical challenge.") Moreover, the race is one month after Graham's ex-husband is getting remarried (to a skinny woman), and the emotional rollercoaster heightens the intensity of her running. As she says, "If training for it doesn't help me get over the pain, at least it will keep me preoccupied."Her irreverent, hilarious, and brutally honest story will appeal to runners and non-runners alike, fat or thin.