Access Top-Rated Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769733 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Only Way Through Is Out

Author: Suzette Mullen

Narrator: Shawna Wolf

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 7 minutes

Release date: June 18, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“With candor and deep vulnerability, Mullen offers a compelling, honest, and hopeful memoir that examines the hidden truths involved in accepting our deepest wants and desires. The Only Way Through Is Out is a lesson to all of us on what great things can happen when we act with authenticity.”—Jessi Hempel, author of The Family Outing “I could not put this book down. Mullen shows us the search for one’s authentic self has no expiration date and is worth whatever it takes. This book is a glorious tale of tenacious courage that anyone searching for their own path in life will love.”—Jennifer Louden, national bestselling author of Why Bother? Discover the Desire for What’s Next Suzette Mullen had been raised to play it safe—and she hated causing others pain. With college and law degrees, a kind and successful husband, two thriving adult sons, and an ocean-view vacation home, she lived a life many people would envy. But beneath the happy facade was a woman who watched her friends walk boldly through their lives and wondered what was holding her back from doing the same. Digging into her past, Suzette uncovered a deeply buried truth: she’d been in love with her best friend—a woman—for nearly two decades—and still was. Leaning into these “unspeakable” feelings would put Suzette’s identity, relationships, and life of privilege at risk—but she knew taking this leap might also provide her only chance to feel fully alive. Introspective, bittersweet, and empowering, The Only Way Through Is Out is both a coming-out and coming-of-age story, as well as a call to action for every human who is longing to live authentically but is afraid of the cost.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/715823 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People

Series: Part of Significations

Author: Tiya Miles

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 5 minutes

Release date: June 18, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

From the National Book Award–winning author of All That She Carried, an intimate and revelatory reckoning with the myth and the truth behind an American everyone knows and few really understand Harriet Tubman is among the most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the twenty-dollar bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero. Despite being barely five feet tall, unable to read, and suffering from a brain injury, she managed to escape from her own enslavement, return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some seven hundred people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood. Tiya Miles’s extraordinary Night Flyer changes all that. With her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges, uncannily, is a human being whose mysticism becomes more palpable the more we understand it—a story that offers us powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles. Harriet Tubman traversed many boundaries, inner and outer. Now, thanks to Tiya Miles, she becomes an even clearer and sharper signal from the past, one that can help us to echolocate a more just and sustainable path. © 2024 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/709891 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: 1974: A Personal History

Author: Francine Prose

Narrator: Francine Prose

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 20 minutes

Release date: June 18, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“In this remarkable memoir, the qualities that have long distinguished Francine Prose’s fiction and criticism—uncompromising intelligence, a gratifying aversion to sentiment, the citrus bite of irony—give rigor and, finally, an unexpected poignancy to an emotional, artistic, and political coming-of-age tale set in the 1970s—the decade, as she memorably puts it, when American youth realized that the changes that seemed possible in the ’60s weren’t going to happen. A fascinating and ultimately wrenching book.”—Daniel Mendelsohn, author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million The first memoir from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Francine Prose, about the close relationship she developed with activist Anthony Russo, one of the men who leaked the Pentagon Papers--and the year when our country changed. During her twenties, Francine Prose lived in San Francisco, where she began an intense and strange relationship with Tony Russo, who had been indicted and tried for working with Daniel Ellsberg to leak the Pentagon papers. The narrative is framed around the nights she spent with Russo driving manically around San Francisco, listening to his stories--and the disturbing and dramatic end of that relationship in New York. What happens to them mirrors the events and preoccupations of that historical moment: the Vietnam war, drugs, women's liberation, the Patty Hearst kidnapping. At once heartfelt and ironic, funny and sad, personal and political, 1974 provides an insightful look at how Francine Prose became a writer and artist during a time when the country, too, was shaping its identity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/757704 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Candida Royalle & the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below

Author: Jane Kamensky

Narrator: Mia Barron

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 16 hours 6 minutes

Release date: June 11, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Acclaimed historian Jane Kamensky chronicles an indelible twentieth-century American life—and offers an entirely new understanding of the so-called sexual revolution.Whether in front of the camera or behind it, Candice Vadala understood herself as both an artist and an entrepreneur. As Candida Royalle (1950–2015)—underground actress, porn star, producer of adult movies, and staunch feminist—she made a business of pleasure. She helped crystalize the broader hedonistic turn in American life in the second half of the twentieth century: a period when the rules of sex were rewritten; when the white-hot “sex wars” cleaved feminism and realigned American politics; when Big Freud, Big Drugs, and Big Porn all came into looming focus; when the sex industry of the 1970s and ’80s radically upended conventional understandings of law, technology, culture, love, and human desire.The sexual revolution was Royalle’s war—even when other avowed feminists exited the field or became her opponents—and pornography emerged as the arena in which she would wage it. With the founding of her adult film company, Femme Productions, in 1984, Royalle became an owner of the means of pornographic production, infusing her sets with the ideals of labor feminism. Onscreen and off-, she was, by turns, exuberant and thoughtful, self-possessed and gleefully shameless. A trailblazer who lived along the cultural fault lines of her generation, she danced at Woodstock, marched for women’s liberation, survivedthe AIDS crisis, and became a talk show regular, interviewed by Phil Donahue, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Morton Downey Jr., Jane Pauley, and many others. As a performer, director, producer, and writer, she moved the needle of her industry. But she never transcended the politics of pleasure.With full access to Royalle’s remarkable archive, historian Jane Kamensky has spent years examining the intersection of Royalle’s life with the clashes that have defined her era—and ours. Deeply informed by these never-before-studied materials, Kamensky explodes the conventions of biography, with its assumptions about who makes history and how. Written with cinematic verve, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution evokes Royalle’s times in their broadest contours as Kamensky traces the rise of an improbable heroine who broke the mold and was herself broken in turn.“A riveting, humane, and essential contribution to modern feminist history. Jane Kamensky has written a biography that reads like a novel, an astute intellectual work that recognizes and humanizes the role of sex workers in recent women’s movements. Thanks to this book, I am proud to recognize the place of Candida Royalle in my own lineage.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/722532 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell

Author: Ann Powers

Narrator: Hillary Huber

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 24 minutes

Release date: June 11, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

*An Observer Best New Biographies of 2024* Celebrated NPR music critic Ann Powers explores the life and career of Joni Mitchell in a lyrical style as fascinating and ethereal as the songs of the artist herself. “What you are about to read is not a standard account of the life and work of Joni Mitchell. Instead, it’s a tale of long journeying through a life that changed popular music: of a homesick wanderer forging ahead on routes of her own invention, and of me on her trail, heading toward the ringing of her voice.” —From the introduction For decades, Joni Mitchell’s life and music have enraptured listeners. One of the most celebrated artists of her generation, Mitchell has inspired countless musicians—from peers like James Taylor, to inheritors like Prince and Brandi Carlile—and authors, who have dissected her music and her life in their writing. At the same time, Mitchell has always been a force beckoning us still closer, as—with the other arm—she pushes us away. Given this, music critic Ann Powers wondered if there was another way to draw insights from the life of this singular musician who never stops moving, never stops experimenting. In Traveling, Powers seeks to understand Mitchell through her myriad journeys. Through extensive interviews with Mitchell's peers and deep archival research, she takes readers to rural Canada, mapping the singer’s childhood battle with polio. She charts the course of Mitchell’s musical evolution, ranging from early folk to jazz fusion to experimentation with pop synthetics. She follows the winding road of Mitchell’s collaborations with other greats, and the loves that emerged along the way, all the way through to the remarkable return of Mitchell to music-making after the 2015 aneurysm that nearly took her life. Along this journey, Powers’ wide-ranging musings on the artist’s life and career reconsider the biographer’s role and the way it twines against the reality of a fan. In doing so, Traveling illustrates the shifting nature of biography, and the ultimate contradiction of celebrity: that an icon cannot truly, completely be known to a fan. Kaleidoscopic in scope, and intimate in its detail, Traveling is a fresh and fascinating addition to the Joni Mitchell canon, written by a biographer in full command of her gifts who asks as much of herself as of her subject.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/720884 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Consent: A Memoir

Author: Jill Ciment

Narrator: Eileen Stevens

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 0 minutes

Release date: June 11, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

From the acclaimed novelist (“A virtuoso”—Donna Seaman, Booklist), a deft, shocking memoir that asks whether we can judge past behavior by today’s moral codes, as the author reevaluates her decades-long marriage to the forty-seven-year-old man she met when she was seventeen, revisiting a singular passion in the 21st-century aftermath of #MeToo. “Few writers can tackle the bedroom—or female libido . . . but Ciment is a master: in exquisitely spare prose, she nails it.” — The New York Times In this unflinching account of the ardent love affair between the author and her painting teacher, which began in the 1970s, when she was a teenager and he was married with two children, Ciment not only reflects on how their love ignited (who leaned in first for that kiss?) but interrogates her 1996 memoir on the subject, Half a Life. She asks herself if she told the whole truth back then, and what truth looked like to her in the even longer-ago era of love-bead curtains when she fell in love, when no one asked who was served by the permissibility around a May-December romance. In the light of #metoo, with new understanding about the balance of power between an older man and an underage girl, Ciment re-explores the erotic wild ride and intellectual flowering that shaped an improbable but blissful marriage that lasted for forty-five years, until her husband’s death at ninety-three. This riveting book about art, memory, and morality asks many questions along the way: Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? Does a kiss in one moment mean something else entirely five decades later? Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself? Suffused with the wisdom that comes with time, Consent is an author’s brave recasting of her life’s settled narrative, and an urgent read for women of all ages.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/769546 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Taylor: Era by Era: The Unauthorized Biography

Author: Caroline Sullivan

Narrator: Katelyn Levering

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 53 minutes

Release date: June 6, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Celebrate the incredible career of pop music’s biggest star in this sparkling biography. We're all living in the Taylor Swift Era. Since her 2006 debut album, she’s sold more than 200 million records, sold out countless arenas, and become one of the most influential artists of her generation. Her Eras Tour is on track to gross more than $1 billion by the time it concludes in December 2024, and her most recent studio album hit No. 1 in more than 25 countries. In this revealing and entertaining biography, author and music journalist Caroline Sullivan charts Taylor’s journey from budding country starlet to pop music phenomenon, encompassing her evolution as an artist, her high-profile relationships, and the stories behind her songs. Each of Taylor’s Eras is explored in depth, detailing her influences, her collaborators and the aesthetics that have become such a crucial part of her performance. Spanning her entire career, this is the most complete portrait yet of one of the most popular artists on the planet.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/730167 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Ambition Monster: A Memoir

Author: Jennifer Romolini

Narrator: Jennifer Romolini

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

An “intimate, intensely resonant memoir about workaholism, unresolved trauma, and the ‘addictive nature of ambition’” (Harper’s Bazaar), this is an anti-girlboss tale for our times for readers of Drinking: A Love Story and Uncanny Valley. After years of relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, Jennifer Romolini reached the kind of success many crave: a high-profile, C-suite dream job, a book well-received enough that reporters wanted to know the secrets to her success, and a gig traveling around the country giving speeches on “making it.” But beneath this polished surface was a powder keg of unresolved trauma and chronic overwork. It was all about to blow. Ambition Monster is a gutsy and powerful look at workaholism, the lingering effect of childhood trauma, and the failures of our modern rat race. This is a Cinderella story of success and a brutal appraisal of the cost of capitalism—perfect for people pleasers, overachievers, and those whose traumas have driven them to be perfect, no matter the cost. “If you find yourself on the other end of burnout, trying desperately to figure out a new way forward—wow, is this book for you” (Anne Helen Petersen, author of Can’t Even).

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/718974 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: I Shouldn't Be Telling You This: (But I'm Going to Anyway)

Author: Chelsea Devantez

Narrator: Chelsea Devantez

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

Release date: June 4, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

"It’s f*cking great!!! Raw, intimate, hilarious, actually inspiring.” –Jon Stewart *A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM BUSTLE, GOODREADS, GOODREADS, SHEREADS, BOOKRIOT, AND MORE* A dynamic memoir-in-essays by comedian, screenwriter, and podcaster Chelsea Devantez, detailing her tumultuous upbringing and uproarious career path into Hollywood, featuring a bonus chapter exclusive to the audio edition. There are things Chelsea Devantez probably shouldn’t be telling you. Many of them are in this book: some are embarrassing (like when she tried to break her three year spell of celibacy using a guide of seduction tips). Some are confessional (getting sentenced to the “hell hill” at Mormon church camp). Some are TMI (a series of outrageous doctor visits that ended with one doctor misdiagnosing her as “pregnant.” Woopsies!). Then there are things Chelsea really shouldn’t be telling you: like the time her biggest family secret was publicly outed, or about the drive-by shootings and the precipitating domestic violence she survived. Yet through it all, it’s the women in Chelsea’s life who kept her going – from the lowest points of her childhood when she and her mom had only $100 left to their name, all the way to her career highs as the Emmy-nominated Head Writer for The Problem with Jon Stewart and sensational podcaster deemed “the celebrity memoir whisperer” by her fans.  In I Shouldn't Be Telling You This, Chelsea centers each story around a different woman who shaped her life, taking us on a tour of friends and strangers, fictional characters and celebrities, heroes and villains who will destroy any Netflix algorithm for a “strong female lead.” Reading it will feel kinda like that moment at a party when your friend beckons you close, sloshes her martini around, and covertly whispers, “I really shouldn’t say this, but…”

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/789532 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Into my Hands: A Midwife’s Memoir

Author: Catherine Rae Shields

Narrator: Catherine Rae Shields

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 32 minutes

Release date: May 29, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

'Into My Hands' is an intimate and inspiring memoir that delves into the life of a passionate midwife, tracing her path from childhood to her fulfilling career in midwifery. This poignant narrative was born from a transformative moment in the author's early twenties, following a traumatic birth experience with her own daughter. It was then that she resolved to put an end to birth trauma and dedicate her life to supporting women during the sacred journey of childbirth. With a background as a labor and delivery nurse and a nurse-midwife, she embarked on a remarkable journey to achieve her mission. In her role, she went above and beyond to provide comfort, aid, and unwavering reassurance to mothers in their birthing moments. 'Into My Hands' is not only a personal account but also a tribute to the countless mothers she had the privilege to work with, as they generously share their own unique birth stories. This memoir beautifully captures the profound impact of having a midwife's skilled and caring hands present during childbirth. It's a testament to the strength, resilience, and the incredible bond that forms between midwives and the women they serve. Through this book, readers will gain a deep appreciation for the transformative power of compassionate care during one of life's most extraordinary experiences.