With the same spirit and humor that characterize her novels, Amy Tan now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer,...

The German-Irish author recounts his young adulthood desire to escape the legacies of his German mother and cousin, entanglement in a bitter dispute between Catholic and Protestant neighbors, and exposure to forbidden cultural elements.

The legendary crime writer unsparingly describes his shattered childhood, his delinquent teens, his writing life, his love affairs and marriages, his nervous breakdown, and the beginning of a relationship with an extraordinary woman who may just be the long-sought "Her."

The author shares the life story of her mother, Anna Gagliano Gordon--a hard-working single mother whose life was shaped by polio, alcoholism, and dementia--and discusses their relationship and her role as a daughter.

Bestselling author Buckley's most personal and transcendent work--the tragicomic true story of the year in which he lost both of his parents. The author offers consolation, wit, and warmth to those coping with the death of a mother or father.

In 1994, Fig looks back on her life and relates her experiences, from age six to nineteen, as she desperately tries to save her mother from schizophrenia while her own mental health and relationships deteriorate.

In order to to keep the peace between their feuding gang families, Japanese high school students Raku Ichijou and Chioge Kirisaki agree to pretend they are in a romantic relationship.

"Anne Lamott enters a new and unexpected chapter of her own life: grandmotherhood. Stunned to learn that her son, Sam, is about to become a father at nineteen, Lamott begins a journal about the first year of her grandson Jax's life. In careful and often hilarious detail, Lamott and Sam, about whom she first wrote so movingly in Operating Instructions, struggle to balance their changing roles with the demands of college and work, as they both forge...

Enter the complex world of the Walkers and explore what it means to be an American family in the 21st century. Though they live very different and conflicting lives, the Walkers find unity under the family roof. Relationships bend but never break as they strive to find their own identities and embrace each other's differences.

"A glimpse into a beloved novelist's inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and...