Helen Plum Library

"For decades, Rebel Wilson had single-mindedly focused on her career, making a name for herself through her iconic roles in Pitch Perfect, Bridesmaids, and Isn't It Romantic. Now, she's ready to chronicle the emotional and physical lessons she learned, as well as her most embarrassing experiences. A malaria-induced hallucination? An all-style martial arts fighting tournament? Junior handling at dog shows? And this was all BEFORE she moved to Hollywood!...

"A delightful and evocative memoir by Leacock Medal nominee Antanas Sileika. The acclaimed novelist who wrote this book wasn't always Antanas. Growing up in the immigrant hub of Weston, Ontario -- with a child- hood of Lithuanian summer camp, folk dancing, and booze-soaked Christmases -- Sileika was known to friends and teachers as Tony. It wasn't until he entered university and began to understand his deep attachment to his heritage that he shed...

"In this inspiring, poignant, and delicious memoir, the founder of France's largest nonprofessional culinary institute traces her journey from the American midwest to Paris, and shares how, through painstaking work, she triumphed over French elitism. When Jane Bertch was eighteen, her mother took her on a graduation trip to Paris. Thrilled to use her high school French, Jane found her halting attempts greeted with withering condescension by every...

"Born and raised in rural West Virginia, Jonathan Corcoran was the youngest and only son of three siblings in a family balanced on the precipice of poverty. His mother, a traditional, evangelical, and insular woman who had survived abuse and abandonment, was often his only ally. Together they navigated a strained homelife dominated by his distant, gambling-addicted father and shared a seemingly unbreakable bond. When Corcoran left home to attend Brown...

"From the award-winning New York Times-bestselling author, Alexandra Fuller, comes a career defining memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her twenty-one-year-old child. "Fair to say, I was in a ribald state the summer before my fiftieth birthday." And so begins Alexandra Fuller's open, vivid new memoir, Fi. It's midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from...

"Through forty-five years of journals, poems, and letters to love, Blackwildgirl's autobiographical journey from girlhood to womanhood unfolds like a play, with acts, stages, and scenes. Join her as she reclaims her superpower--sacrificed in a bargain by her parents when she was a child--and discover a road map for girls and women seeking to become warriors in the world." -- Back cover

Growing up in the diverse and bustling California Bay Area, renowned wildlife ecologist Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant always felt worlds away from the white male adventurers she watched explore the wilderness on TV. She dreamed of a future where she could spend sleepless nights under the crowded canopies of the Amazon and the starry skies of the savanna. But as Rae set off on her own expeditions in the wild, she saw nature's delicate balance in a new light....

Venice, 2020. As a pandemic rages across the globe, Zito Madu finds himself in a nearly deserted city, its walls and basilicas humming with strange magic. As he wanders a haunted landscape, we see him twist further into his own past: his family's difficult immigration from Nigeria to Detroit, his troubled relationship with his father, the sporadic joys of daily life and solitude, his experiences with migration, poverty, foreignness, racism, and his...

"Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad's diner and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th century mill. This singular memoir-a classic American story-invites readers...

"An astonishing memoir of twelve years as a contemplative nun in a silent monastery. Cloistered takes the reader deep into the hidden world of a traditional Carmelite monastery as it approaches the third Millennium and tells the story of an intense personal journey into and out of an enclosed life of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Finding an apparently perfect world at Akenside Priory, in Northumberland, Catherine trusts herself to a group of twenty...