The August chill is still with us and I don’t know about you, but all I want to do is curl up with a good book and a cat on my lap. This month’s new biographies and memoirs in the collection are particularly inviting, including literary greats, world changing activists, stories of overcoming poverty and struggle, the glamour of Hollywood and everyday people who went on to make a difference.
Tell me everything : a memoir / Kelly, Minka
“Raised by a single mother who worked as a stripper and struggled with addiction, Minka spent years waking up in strange apartments as she and her mom bounced around the country, relying on friends and relatives to take them in. At times they even lived in storage units. She reconnected with her father, Aerosmith’s Rick Dufay, and eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where she landed the role of a lifetime on Friday Night Lights. Now an established actress and philanthropist, Minka takes this next step in her career as a writer. She has poured her soul into the pages of this book, which ultimately tells a story of triumph over adversity, and how resilience and love are all we have in the end.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
The marriage question : George Eliot’s double life / Carlisle, Clare
“When she was in her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot – an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes – writer, philosopher and married father of three. After ‘eloping’ to Berlin in 1854 they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her ‘Mrs Lewes’ and dedicated each novel to her ‘Husband’. Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the ‘great experience’ of marriage – ‘this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength’. Reading them afresh, Carlisle’s searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Poor : grit, courage, and the life-changing value of self-belief / O’Sullivan, Katriona
“As the middle of five kids growing up in dire poverty, the odds were low on Katriona O’Sullivan making anything of her life. When she became a mother at 15 and ended up homeless, what followed were five years of barely coping. This is the extraordinary story – moving, funny, brave, and sometimes startling – of how Katriona turned her life around. How the seeds of self-belief planted by teachers in childhood stayed with her. How she found mentors whose encouragement revived those seeds in adulthood. Now an award-winning lecturer whose work challenges barriers to education, Poor stands as a stirring argument for the importance of looking out for our kids’ futures. Of giving them hope, practical support and meaningful opportunities.” (Catalogue)
Vessel : a memoir / Cai, Chongda
“An unprecedented and heartfelt memoir that illuminates the lives of rural Chinese workers, offering a portrait of generational strife, family, love, and loss that crosses cultures and time. Cai Chongda spent his childhood in a rural fishing village in Fujian province. When his father-a former communist gang leader turned gas station owner-has a stroke that partially paralyzes him, his responsibilities fall to Cai, his only son. As Cai works his way through university and moves to Beijing, eventually becoming a director of GQ China, he finds his life increasingly at odds with the family he supports but has left behind. Like The Glass Castle and Hillbilly Elegy, Vessel neither romanticizes nor condemns the people and circumstances that shaped a young man’s life, but instead offers a way forward, revealing how tradition can enrich modern life.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
King : a life / Eig, Jonathan
“Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.–and the first to include recently declassified FBI files. In this revelatory new portrait of the preacher and activist who shook the world, the bestselling biographer gives us an intimate view of the courageous and often emotionally troubled human being who demanded peaceful protest for his movement but was rarely at peace with himself. King reveals a minister wrestling with his own human frailties and dark moods, a citizen hunted by his own government, and a man determined to fight for justice even if it proved to be a fight to the death.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
Thinning blood : a memoir of family, myth, and identity / Myers, Leah
“Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family’s totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven. As she pieces together their stories, Myers weaves in tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. Throughout, she tells the larger story of how, as she puts it, her “culture is being bleached out,” offering sharp vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds.” (Catalogue)
The wild year / Benson, Jen
“With a baby and a toddler, mounting debt, work demands and stress trampling over their desire to spend time together as a family in nature, Jen and Sim Benson move out of their rented accommodation, sell up their possessions and decide to live in a tent for a year as nomads around rural Britain. This is the story of that year – the highs and the lows – the doubts, epiphanies and the weather. Detailing one family’s search for a life in the wild, away from the screens and stresses of modern life, this captivating memoir is a must read for nature lovers or anyone who has dreamed of a life outdoors.” (Catalogue)
Blue eyes and a wild spirit : a life of Dorothy Wellesley / Wellesley, Jane
“Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, and duchess; she was also bisexual and a rebel. The biography by her granddaughter includes unpublished material relating to the Bloomsbury Group and W.B. Yeats. This is a riveting story of a complex and fascinating woman.” (Catalogue)
Wifedom : Mrs Orwell’s invisible life / Funder, Anna
“Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s literary brilliance shaped Orwell’s work and her practical common sense saved his life. But why-and how-was she written out of the story? Using newly discovered letters from Eileen to her best friend, Funder recreates the Orwells’ marriage, through the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War in London. As she rolls up the screen concealing Orwell’s private life she is led to question what it takes to be a writer-and what it is to be a wife.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
The critic’s daughter : a memoir / Gilman, Priscilla
“Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother, renowned literary agent Lynn Nesbit, abruptly announced that she was ending the marriage. The resulting cascade of disturbing revelations–about her parents’ hollow marriage, her father’s double life and tortured sexual identity–fundamentally changed Priscilla’s perception of her father, as she attempted to protect him from the depression that had long shadowed him.” (Adapted from Catalogue)
For more new books in the collection, go to: What’s new / August 2023 (wcl.govt.nz)
