Listen to Latest Full Audiobooks in Biography & Memoir, Women

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/689716 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar

Author: Cynthia Carr

Narrator: Justin Vivian Bond

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 14 hours 2 minutes

Release date: March 19, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

This program is read by cabaret legend Justin Vivian Bond. A Must-Read: The New York Times Book Review, Nylon, Star Tribune, Ms., Kirkus Reviews, The Bay Area Reporter, Town & Country, InsideHook “[A] monumental biography.” —Hilton Als, The New Yorker “A rich portrait of a glittering, communal, and bygone NYC . . . [and] of the glamorous queer icon.” —Arimeta Diop, Vanity Fair From the acclaimed biographer Cynthia Carr, the first full portrait of the queer icon and Warhol superstar Candy Darling. Warhol superstar and transgender icon Candy Darling was glamour personified, but she was without a real place in the world. Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play. Yet Candy lived on the edge, relying on the kindness of strangers, friends, and her quietly devoted mother, sleeping on couches and in cheap hotel rooms, keeping a part of herself hidden. She wanted to be a star, but mostly she wanted to be loved. Her last diary entry was: “I shall try to be grateful for life . . . Cannot imagine who would want me.' Candy died at twenty-nine in 1974, as conversations about gender and identity were really just starting. She never knew it, but she changed the world. Packed with tales of luminaries and gossip and meticulous research, immersive and laced with Candy’s words and her friends' recollections, Cynthia Carr's Candy Darling is Candy's long-overdue return to the spotlight. A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697197 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Not Your China Doll: The Wild and Shimmering Life of Anna May Wong

Author: Katie Gee Salisbury

Narrator: Katie Gee Salisbury, Caroline Mclaughlin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 36 minutes

Release date: March 12, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

“Enlightening, nuanced, and honest.”—Lisa See Set against the glittering backdrop of Los Angeles during the gin-soaked Jazz Age and the rise of Hollywood, this debut book celebrates Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star, to bring an unsung heroine to light and reclaim her place in cinema history. One of Entertainment Weekly's 'Books We Are Excited to Read in 2024'   Before Constance Wu, Sandra Oh, Awkwafina, or Lucy Liu, there was Anna May Wong. In her time, she was a legendary beauty, witty conversationalist, and fashion icon. Plucked from her family’s laundry business in Los Angeles, Anna May Wong rose to stardom in Douglas Fairbanks’s blockbuster The Thief of Bagdad. Fans and the press clamored to see more of this unlikely actress, but when Hollywood repeatedly cast her in stereotypical roles, she headed abroad in protest.   Anna May starred in acclaimed films in Berlin, Paris, and London. She dazzled royalty and heads of state across several nations, leaving trails of suitors in her wake. She returned to challenge Hollywood at its own game by speaking out about the industry’s blatant racism. She used her new stature to move away from her typecasting as the China doll or dragon lady, and worked to reshape Asian American representation in film.   Filled with stories of capricious directors and admiring costars, glamorous parties and far-flung love affairs, Not Your China Doll showcases the vibrant, radical life of a groundbreaking artist.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/682244 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Manicurist's Daughter: A Memoir

Author: Susan Lieu

Narrator: Susan Lieu

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

Release date: March 12, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 4

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

'Susan Lieu's narration of her memoir, The Manicurist's Daughter, adds to the already raw emotion that flows throughout her journey to know her mother.'—The Berkshire Eagle This program is read by the author. An emotionally raw memoir about the crumbling of the American Dream and a daughter of refugees who searches for answers after her mother dies during plastic surgery. Susan Lieu has long been searching for answers. About her family’s past and about her own future. Refugees from the Vietnam War, Susan’s family escaped to California in the 1980s after five failed attempts. Upon arrival, Susan’s mother was their savvy, charismatic North Star, setting up two successful nail salons and orchestrating every success—until Susan was eleven. That year, her mother died from a botched tummy tuck. After the funeral, no one was ever allowed to talk about her or what had happened. For the next twenty years, Susan navigated a series of cascading questions alone—why did the most perfect person in her life want to change her body? Why would no one tell her about her mother’s life in Vietnam? And how did this surgeon, who preyed on Vietnamese immigrants, go on operating after her mother’s death? Sifting through depositions, tracking down the surgeon’s family, and enlisting the help of spirit channelers, Susan uncovers the painful truth of her mother, herself, and the impossible ideal of beauty. The Manicurist’s Daughter is much more than a memoir about grief, trauma, and body image. It is a story of fierce determination, strength in shared culture, and finding your place in the world. A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/702411 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Double Click: Twin Photographers in the Golden Age of Magazines

Author: Carol Kino

Narrator: Carlotta Brentan

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 40 minutes

Release date: March 5, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A Town & Country Must-Read Book of Spring 2024 “Fashion, photography, and pop culture aficionados will be captivated” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) by this riveting dual biography of the McLaughlins—identical twin sisters who became groundbreaking magazine photographers in New York during the glamorous golden age of the 1930s and ’40s. In Double Click, author Carol Kino “has interwoven a biography of the McLaughlins with an authoritative, detailed history of fashion, the art world and photography in midcentury New York” (The Wall Street Journal). The McLaughlin twins were trailblazing female photographers, celebrated in their time as stars in their respective fields, but have largely been forgotten since. Here, in Double Click, Carol Kino brings these two brilliant women and their remarkable accomplishments to vivid life. Frances was the only female photographer on staff in Condé Nast’s photo studio, hired just after Irving Penn, and became known for streetwise, cinema verité-style work, which appeared in the pages of Glamour and Vogue. Her sister Kathryn’s surrealistic portraits filled the era’s new “career girl” magazines, including Charm and Mademoiselle. Both twins married Harper’s Bazaar photographers and socialized with a glittering crowd that included the supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives and the photographer Richard Avedon. Kino uses their careers to illuminate the lives of young women during this time, an early 20th-century moment marked by proto-feminist thinking, excitement about photography’s burgeoning creative potential, and the ferment of wartime New York. Toward the end of the 1940s, and moving into the early 1950s, conventionality took over, women were pushed back into the home, and the window of opportunity began to close. Kino renders this fleeting moment of possibility in gleaming multi-color, so that the reader cherishes its abundance, mourns its passing, and gains new appreciation for the talent that was fostered at its peak. Pulling back the curtain on an electric, creative time in New York’s history, and rich with original research, Double Click is cultural reportage and biography at its finest.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/697412 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: In True Face: A Woman's Life in the CIA, Unmasked

Author: Jonna Mendez

Narrator: Barbara Benjamin-Creel

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Release date: March 5, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

The bestselling coauthor of The Moscow Rules and Argo tells her riveting, courageous story of being a female spy at the height of the Cold War Jonna Hiestand Mendez began her CIA career as a “contract wife” performing secretarial duties for the CIA as a convenience to her husband, a young officer stationed in Europe. She needed his permission to open a bank account or shut off the gas to their apartment. Yet Mendez had a talent for espionage, too, and she soon took on bigger and more significant roles at the Agency. She parlayed her interest in photography into an operational role overseas, an unlikely area for a woman in the CIA. Often underestimated, occasionally undermined, she lived under cover and served tours of duty all over the globe, rising first to become an international spy and ultimately to Chief of Disguise at CIA’s Office of Technical Service. In True Face recounts not only the drama of Mendez’s high-stakes work—how this savvy operator parlayed her “everywoman” appeal into incredible subterfuge—but also the grit and good fortune it took for her to navigate a misogynistic world. This is the story of an incredible spy career and what it took to achieve it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/656192 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: [Spanish] - Legitimate Kid Hija legítima (Spanish edition): Una vida entre el dolor y la risa

Author: Aida Rodriguez

Narrator: Kianny Antigua

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Release date: March 5, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Un divertido y conmovedor libro de memorias en ensayo de la comediante Aida Rodríguez sobre el poder de superar las dificultades y transformar el dolor en risa. Aida Rodríguez ha vivido, por decir poco, una vida de torbellino. La historia de cómo pasó de la pobreza a la opulencia es alucinante: cuando era niña, su madre la secuestró y se la llevó de la República Dominicana a los Estados Unidos. Más tarde, un nuevo secuestro, esta vez a manos de su abuela y su tío, la dejó en Florida. Ya de adulta, escapó de un matrimonio tormentoso y terminó, junto con sus hijos, mendigando por las calles de Los Ángeles. Durante todas esas adversidades, Aida nunca perdió su sentido del humor. Nacida con un maravilloso ingenio y un espíritu irrefrenable, Aida ha utilizado su talento y trabajado sin descanso para convertir la tragedia y el dolor en una comedia mordaz que abarca todo, desde la misoginia y el racismo hasta las redes sociales y los titulares de prensa. Con el tiempo, lanzó un exitoso especial en HOB Max que la llevó a múltiples acuerdos de desarrollo, un logro que le ganó una audiencia nacional, le abrió puertas y la ayudó expandir la forma en que los latinos están representados en la comedia. En este, su tan esperado primer libro, Aida dibuja sus muchos altibajos. Desde los contratiempos personales hasta los éxitos profesionales, Hija legítima es entrañable, impactante y, en última instancia, vivificante.  A hilarious and heartbreaking memoir-in-essays from comic Aida Rodriguez on the power of overcoming hardship and transforming pain into laughter. Aida Rodriguez has, to put it mildly, lived a whirlwind life. Her rags to-riches story is mind-blowing: She was kidnapped as a child by her mother in the Dominican Republic and brought to the US. She was later kidnapped again by her grandmother and uncle, and moved from New York to Florida. As an adult, she ended a difficult marriage and endured homelessness with her children in Los Angeles. But through it all she never lost her sense of humor. Born with a wonderful wit and an irrepressible spirit, Aida used her gifts and worked tirelessly, turning tragedy and pain into biting comedy that takes on everything from misogyny and racism to social media and news headlines. She eventually released a hit HBO Max special which led to multiple development deals—success that won her a nationwide audience, opened doors, and helped her expand the way Latinos are represented in comedy. In this, her highly anticipated first book, Aida charts her many ups and downs. From personal setbacks to career highs and everything in between, Legitimate Kid is endearing, shocking, and ultimately life-affirming.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/701677 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Outspoken: My Fight for Freedom and Human Rights in Afghanistan

Author: Sima Samar

Narrator: Wajma Soroor, Sally Armstrong

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

Release date: February 27, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The impassioned memoir of Afghanistan's Sima Samar: medical doctor, public official, founder of schools and hospitals, thorn in the side of the Taliban, nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, and lifelong advocate for girls and women. “I have three strikes against me. I’m a woman, I speak out for women, and I’m Hazara, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.” Dr. Sima Samar has been fighting for equality and justice for most of her life. Born into a polygamous family, she learned early that girls had inferior status, and she had to agree to an arranged marriage if she wanted to go to university. By the time she was in medical school, she had a son, Ali, and had become a revolutionary. After her husband was disappeared by the pro-Russian regime, she escaped. With her son and medical degree, she took off into the rural areas—by horseback, by donkey, even on foot—to treat people who had never had medical help before. Sima Samar's wide-ranging experiences both in her home country and on the world stage have given her inside access to the dishonesty, the collusion, the corruption, the self-serving leaders, and the hijacking of religion. And as a former Vice President, she knows all the players in this chess game called Afghanistan. With stories that are at times poignant, at times terrifying, inspiring as well as disheartening, Sima provides an unparalleled view of Afghanistan’s past and its present.  Despite being in grave personal danger for many years, she has worked tirelessly for the dream she is convinced is an achievable one: justice and full human rights for all the citizens of her country.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/692333 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Carson McCullers: A Life

Author: Mary V. Dearborn

Narrator: Barrie Kreinik

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 14 minutes

Release date: February 27, 2024

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

The first major biography in more than twenty years of one of America’s greatest writers, based on newly available letters and journals V. S. Pritchett called her “a genius.” Gore Vidal described her as a “beloved novelist of singular brilliance . . . Of all the Southern writers, she is the most apt to endure . . .” And Tennessee Williams said, “The only real writer the South ever turned out, was Carson.” She was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia. Her dream was to become a concert pianist, though she’d been writing since she was sixteen and the influence of music was evident throughout her work. As a child, she said she’d been “born a man.” At twenty, she married Reeves McCullers, a fellow southerner, ex-soldier, and aspiring writer (“He was the best-looking man I had ever seen”). They had a fraught, tumultuous marriage lasting twelve years and ending with his suicide in 1953. Reeves was devoted to her and to her writing, and he envied her talent; she yearned for attention, mostly from women who admired her but rebuffed her sexually. Her first novel—The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—was published in 1940, when she was twenty-three, and overnight, Carson McCullers became the most widely talked about writer of the time. While McCullers’s literary stature continues to endure, her private life has remained enigmatic and largely unexamined. Now, with unprecedented access to the cache of materials that has surfaced in the past decade, Mary Dearborn gives us the first full picture of this brilliant, complex artist who was decades ahead of her time, a writer who understood—and captured—the heart and longing of the outcast. Cover image: Carson McCullers, 1940 [detail] by Louise Dahl-Wolfe © 2024 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/692323 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm

Author: Emmeline Clein

Narrator: Karissa Vacker

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 26 minutes

Release date: February 27, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

A personal and cultural look at the dark underbelly of Western beauty standards and the lethal culture of disordered eating they've wrought 'An authoritative, generous, and persuasive debut that I wish I could go back in time and gift to my teenage self.”—Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood “Electric with insight, and suffused with a strange, stubborn tenderness—a deep regard for what intimacy, hope, and resistance might look like in a world where women are taught to devote their lives to destroying themselves.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Recovering In Dead Weight, Emmeline Clein recounts her struggle with disordered eating alongside the stories of other women: historical figures, pop culture celebrities, and the girls she’s known and loved. Through the story of her own sickness, the raw recollections of interview subjects, and dispatches from social media rabbit holes, Clein challenges stereotypes and renders statistics and science deeply personal and urgent. From her first encounters with icons of the thin ideal to her years ricocheting between hunger and bingeing, from the pro-anorexia blog that unexpectedly saved someone’s life to the residential treatment centers that make so many people sicker, from a wrenching elegy for those who didn’t survive to a manifesto for sisterhood, solidarity, and recovery, Clein uncovers girlhood’s appetites and injuries to reveal the economic, cultural, and political history of an epidemic. Dead Weight makes the case that we are faced with a culture of suppression, self-denial, and self-harm, an insidious, pervasive, and dangerous American cult of femininity rooted in racism and misogyny. Tracing the medical and cultural histories of anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder and investigating the recent rise of orthorexia, Clein reveals the economic conditions underpinning diet culture, and grapples with the ways today’s feminism can be complicit in propping up the fetish of self-shrinking. Drawing on a kaleidoscopic array of sources—from cult classic films like Jennifer’s Body to the aughts-era Tumblrverse, the writing of Simone Weil, Chris Kraus, and Anne Boyer to the medieval canon of anorexic saints—Clein calls for a feminism that doesn’t compel women to shrink their bodies to increase their value, urging radical acceptance of all our appetites instead: for food, connection, and love. A sharp, perceptive, and revelatory polemic about the external forces that shape our lives, Dead Weight is electrifying, unapologetically bold, and fiercely compassionate.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/690814 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Whiskey Tender: A Memoir

Author: Deborah Taffa

Narrator: Charley Flyte

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Release date: February 27, 2024

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3

Genres: Women

Publisher's Summary:

Finalist for the National Book Award Longlisted for a Carnegie Medal for Excellence An Oprah Daily ''Best New Book'' and ''Riveting Nonfiction and Memoir You Need to Read'' * A New York Times ''New Book to Read'' * An Esquire ''Best Nonfiction Book'' * A Washington Post ''Book to read this summer'' * An Elle ''Best Book'' * A Zibby Mag ''Most Anticipated Book'' * A San Francisco Chronicle ''New Book to Cozy Up With'' * The Millions ''Most Anticipated'' * An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read'' * An Amazon Editors ''Best Book of the Month'' * Publishers Weekly ''Best Book of the Year'' A Parade ''Best New Work By Indigenous Writers'' “We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so.”  — Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There There  Reminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition. Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.” Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation. Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.