Last night, @RitaOra gathered 300K people to celebrate 10th anniversary of independence. Zero incidents. Lots of love and pride. This is the new #Kosova10. This is #Kosovo’s fantastic youth. Teaching a lesson or two in #Civilization. #Prishtinapic.twitter.com/s8QQUueiDz

— Meliza Haradinaj (@MelizaHaradinaj) February 18, 2018

#Kosovo's very own daughter... our greatest Ambassador... welcome home #Kosova10@RitaOrapic.twitter.com/ukDAY36ynj

— Meliza Haradinaj (@MelizaHaradinaj) February 17, 2018

https://instagram.com/p/BfUn7XPnCzf

#Kosova10 celebration endedwith perfect concert by our superstar @RitaOra#Prishtina#Kosovo#UK#London#RitaOrapic.twitter.com/Qa4EAGqg4m

— Uranik Begu (@uranikbegu) February 17, 2018

There are more people outside waiting to see @RitaOra perform than at Trumps Inauguration Day! pic.twitter.com/dBjDQEWNJo

— Azem || Buy Proud & For You (@azemmm_) February 17, 2018

https://instagram.com/p/BfVg-ItH6pK

nigga what the fuck is this pic.twitter.com/USLe7YJoRy

— Zachary Fox (@zackfox) February 18, 2018

Nelly Furtado....*bows down* I am not worthy to know how you got this thick but I must know...😭😭😭✨✨✨ pic.twitter.com/CyuIhFfebc

— Aallyhia Ivette Cruz (@BigtimeAallyhia) February 18, 2018

We're here for Nelly Furtado's amazing new album, but we're also here to figure out when she got hit with TheThickness™️. pic.twitter.com/eqI7jX8Cjs

— ESPR.Media (@_ESPRMedia) February 18, 2018

Berlin: Veteran German Actress Hanna Schygulla Criticizes #MeToohttps://t.co/yfhxjGIlBtpic.twitter.com/cxigltwBOT

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 18, 2018

Patton Oswalt's wife died before completing her book on the Golden State Killer. So Oswalt recruited two writers "to comb through her handwritten notes and the roughly 3,500 files on her computer and piece together the story she set out to tell." https://t.co/ZOyfURJIKF

— Pamela Colloff (@pamelacolloff) February 16, 2018

Weekend Box Office: #BlackPanther bounds to record-shattering $218M debut https://t.co/LrV4ucHtb0pic.twitter.com/gbrvT03ztx

— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) February 18, 2018

The Big Interview: NME Icon Shirley Manson on life, death, Trump, the #MeToo movement, Dolores O'Riordan and the future of Garbage https://t.co/y6rulCJ4e6pic.twitter.com/Bn7mGpxV8S

— NME (@NME) February 18, 2018

True love is having a bad week: Rebecca Gayheart has filed for divorce from Eric Dane
https://t.co/c9tV68fGy3pic.twitter.com/xAOJS98xew

— TV Guide (@TVGuide) February 18, 2018

MCC Severs Ties With Playwright-in-Residence Neil LaBute

https://instagram.com/p/BfTi1-NnGnq

https://instagram.com/p/BfRKepABYPS

https://instagram.com/p/BfOXJbZBTD5

Sally Field is trying to get Adam Rippon to date her son https://t.co/uXYmN15ogU

— Entertainment Weekly (@EW) February 17, 2018

• Sam Greisman, son of Academy Award winner Sally Field, tweeted about his "olympic crush" with an image of a text between him and his mother.


• Field, who later tagged Adam in the post, responded to her son's message with "Sam...he's insanely pretty...find a way"


• Field has been a huge LGBTQ activist, and in 2014 she wrote in an open letter that she considered raising her son to be one of the greatest privileges of her life. “What horrifies me is that there are parents who so disapprove, who are so brainwashed to think that this is something out of the Bible or ungodly or against nature. It’s not against nature if nature has actually done this. Sam was always Sam, this wonderful human that he is, from the time he was born.”

#BlackPanther actor Florence Kasumba on the movie's lack of queer representation https://t.co/k8XiVfU51q

— Vulture (@vulture) February 17, 2018

• Florence Kasumba portrays Ayo, one of the Dora Milaje that serve as King T'Challa's personal guard in Black Panther. Having previously appeared in Captain America: Civil War, the character was expected to have a major role in this film.


• In the comic books, Ayo has a romantic relationship with Okoye, who is portrayed in this film by Danai Gurira, and a Vanity Fair reporter claimed that she saw footage of Ayo and Okoye flirting with each other. However, the footage was cut for unknown reasons (you know why).


• Florence was asked about the relationship between Okoye and Ayo, and she revealed she had read the World of Wakanda comic book. "The thing is, if the makers would have wanted everyone to see the scene, it would have been in the movie. The final result that we’ve seen, there were a few scenes that have been cut. Different scenes, also. They didn’t make it into the movie for certain reasons, and at that point, I have to say: What their reason is, I can’t tell you, because nobody told me about whether it’s in or not."


• She did mention that she would like to see it play out eventually. "I’d love to, at some point. Not now, because it’s too soon. At this point, the focus is somewhere else. I started reading World of Wakanda towards the end of filming and I loved reading the comics. I loved reading about, Okay, how do the Doras become Doras? … That’s the whole reason why we had a boot camp [to train for the movie]: In order to be physically able to move as a unit. That was more important. That’s what I’m saying, right? Who is in love with whom and whatever — that was not important in this movie."
  

Omarosa denies sleeping with President Trump but revealed that someone in the White House is “sleeping around with everybody” https://t.co/s21INujsVQ

— Vulture (@vulture) February 17, 2018

ONTD Original: 100 Memoirs by Women

1. Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residental School. In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution’s lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.


2. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, The Right To Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet. In this culmination of Watt-Cloutier's regional, national, and international work over the last twenty-five years, The Right to Be Cold explores the parallels between safeguarding the Arctic and the survival of Inuit culture.


3. Mini Aodla Freeman, Life Among the Quallunaat. The story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic.


4. Ma-Nee Chacaby, A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder.** Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.


5. Maria Campbell, Half-Breed. A young Métis woman's struggle to come to terms with the joys, sorrows, loves and tragedies of her northern Saskatchewan childhood.


6. Linda Hogan, The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. Hogan recounts her difficult childhood as the daughter of an army sergeant, her love affair at age fifteen with an older man, the legacy of alcoholism, the troubled history of her adopted daughters, and her own physical struggles since a recent horse accident.


7. Wilma Mankiller, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People. Mankiller's life unfolds against the backdrop of the dawning of the American Indian civil rights struggle, and her book becomes a quest to reclaim and preserve the great Native American values that form the foundation of our nation.


8. Mary Crow Dog,Lakota Woman. Mary Brave Bird grew up fatherless in a one-room cabin, without running water or electricity, on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Rebelling against the aimless drinking, punishing missionary school, narrow strictures for women, and violence and hopeless of reservation life, she joined the new movement of tribal pride sweeping Native American communities in the sixties and seventies.


9. Deborah A. Miranda, Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir.** This book leads readers through a troubled past using the author's family circle as a touch point and resource for discovery. Personal and strong, these stories present an evocative new view of the shaping of California and the lives of Indians during the Mission period in California.


10. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins,Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs And Claims. Sarah Winnemucca (c. 1844-1891), daughter of a Paiute chief, presents in her autobiography a Native American viewpoint on the impact of whites settling in the West.

1. Maxine Beneba Clarke, The Hate Race.  A powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.


2. Sally Morgan, My Place. Looking at the views and experiences of three generations of indigenous Australians, this autobiography unearths political and societal issues contained within Australia's indigenous culture.


3. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan peasant woman, reflects on the experiences common to many Indian communities in Latin America.


4. Carolina Maria de Jesus, Child of the Dary: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. A powerful first-hand account of life in the streets of São Paulo from 1955 to 1960 that drew international attention to the plight of the poor.


5. Domitila B. De Chungara, Let Me Speak! Testimony of Domitila, a Woman of the Bolivian Mines. Blending firsthand accounts with astute political analysis, Domitila describes the hardships endured by Bolivia's vast working class and her own efforts at organizing women in the mining community.


6. Carmen Aguirre, Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter. A gripping, darkly comic first-hand account of a young underground revolutionary during the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980s Chile.


7. Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us. From an award-winning novelist and sought-after public speaker, an eye-opening memoir about life before and after illegally emigrating from Mexico to the United States.


8. Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.


9. Jeanne Cordova, When We Were Outlaws.** When We Were Outlaws offers a rare view of the life of a radical lesbian during the early cultural struggle for gay rights, Women’s Liberation, and the New Left of the 1970s.


10. Daisy Hernández, A Cup of Water Under My Bed.** In this lyrical, coming-of-age memoir, Daisy Hernández chronicles what the women in her Cuban-Colombian family taught her about love, money, and race.

1. Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped. In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life—to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: Why?


2. Angela Y. Davis, An Autobiography.** Her own powerful story to 1972, told with warmth, brilliance, humor & conviction. The author, a political activist, reflects upon the people & incidents that have influenced her life & commitment to global liberation of the oppressed.


3. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials.


4. bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child's journey toward becoming a writer.


5. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power. Brown's account of her life at the highest levels of the Black Panther party's hierarchy.


6. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.** From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s wois cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her.


7. Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming.** In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.


8. Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small Southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother’s side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age—and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime.


9. Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida. B Wells. This engaging memoir tells of her private life as mother of a growing family as well as her public activities as teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight against attitudes and laws oppressing blacks.


10. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This autobiographical account chronicles the remarkable odyssey of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) whose dauntless spirit and faith carried her from a life of servitude and degradation in North Carolina to liberty and reunion with her children in the North.

1. Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don't Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock's Central HighThe Other Side of Paradise. In 1957, well before Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, Melba Pattillo Beals and eight other teenagers became iconic symbols for the Civil Rights Movement and the dismantling of Jim Crow in the American South as they integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in the wake of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board of Education.


2. Staceyann Chinn, The Other Side of Paradise.** Told with grace, humor, and courage, Chin plumbs tender and unsettling memories as she writes about drifting from one home to the next, coming out as a lesbian, finding the man she believes to be her father, and ultimately, discovering her voice.


3. Mary Matsuda Grueneald, Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps, The author at 16 years old was evacuated with her family to an internment camp for Japanese Americans, along with 110,000 other people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. She faced an indefinite sentence behind barbed wire in crowded, primitive camps.


4. Hana Yamagawa, From Okinawa to the Americas: Hana Yamagawa and Her Reminiscences of a Century. Hana's richly detailed memoir is a rare, first-hand account of the life of a female Okinawan immigrant in the New World. It spans nearly a century, from Hana's early life in a small village not long after the Ryukyu Kingdom's annexation to Japan; to a sugar plantation in Peru and its capital, Lima; to her dangerous trek through Mexico and the California desert to enter the U.S. and start a new life, this time in the Imperial Valley and finally Los Angeles.


5. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian-American Memoir of Homelands. Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s memoir is a courageously frank and deeply affecting account of a Malaysian girlhood and of the making of an Asian-American woman, writer, and teacher.


6. Raicho Hiratsuka, In the Beginning, Woman Was the Sun: The Autobiography of a Japanese Feminist. Raicho Hiratsuka (1886-1971) was the most influential figure in the early women's movement in Japan. In 1911, she founded Bluestocking (Seito), Japan's first literary journal run by women. In 1920, she founded the New Women's Association, Japan's first nationwide women's organization to campaign for female suffrage, and soon after World War II, the Japan Federation of Women's Organizations.


7. Anchee Min, Red Azalea.** Red Azalea is Anchee Min’s celebrated memoir of growing up in the last years of Mao’s China.


8. Yeonmi Park, In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom. Human rights activist Park, who fled North Korea with her mother in 2007 at age 13 and eventually made it to South Korea two years later after a harrowing ordeal, recognized that in order to be "completely free," she had to confront the truth of her past. It is an ugly, shameful story of being sold with her mother into slave marriages by Chinese brokers, and although she at first tried to hide the painful details when blending into South Korean society, she realized how her survival story could inspire others.


9. Loung Ung, First They Killed My Father. Chronicles the brutality of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, from the author's forced ''evacuation'' of Phnom Penh in 1975 to her family's subsequent movements from town to town and eventual separation.


10. Le Ly Hayslip, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places: A Vietnamese Woman's Journey from War to Peace. The youngest of six children in a close-knit Buddhist family, Le Ly Hayslip was twelve years old when U.S. helicopters landed in Ky La, her tiny village in central Vietnam. As the government and Viet Cong troops fought in and around Ky La, both sides recruited children as spies and saboteurs. Le Ly was one of those children.

1. Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir. In search of a place to call home, thousands of Hmong families made the journey from the war-torn jungles of Laos to the overcrowded refugee camps of Thailand and onward to America. But lacking a written language of their own, the Hmong experience has been primarily recorded by others. Driven to tell her family’s story after her grandmother’s death, The Latehomecomer is Kao Kalia Yang’s tribute to the remarkable woman whose spirit held them all together.


2. Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. In 1903, a young woman sailed from India to Guiana as a “coolie”—the British name for indentured laborers who replaced the newly emancipated slaves on sugar plantations all around the world. In Coolie Woman—shortlisted for the 2014 Orwell Prize—her great-granddaughter Gaiutra Bahadur embarks on a journey into the past to find her.


3. Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman's Memoirs. Activist and award-winning writer Urmila Pawar recounts three generations of Dalit women who struggled to overcome the burden of their caste.


4. Phoolan Devi, The Bandit Queen of India. Enduring cruel poverty, Phoolan Devi survived the humiliation of an abusive marriage, the savage killing of her bandit-lover, and horrifying gang rape to claim retribution for herself and all low-caste women of the Indian plains. In a three-year campaign that rocked the government, she delivered justice to rape victims and stole from the rich to give to the poor, before negotiating surrender on her own terms. Throughout her years of imprisonment without trial, Phoolan Devi remained a beacon of hope for the poor and the downtrodden.


5. Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban. When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education.


6. Rafia Zakaria, The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan. Telling the parallel stories of [Rafia's aunt's] polygamous marriage and Pakistan’s hopes and betrayals, The Upstairs Wife is an intimate exploration of the disjunction between exalted dreams and complicated realities


7. Riverbend, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq. In August 2003 a young Iraqi blogger began reporting her experiences as a civilian observer in Baghdad. Calling herself Riverbend, she has offered searing eyewitness accounts of daily life in the war zone and has garnered a worldwide audience hungry for unfiltered news and fresh analysis.


8. Shirin Ebadi, Iran Awakening. The book movingly chronicles [Ebadi's] childhood in a loving, untraditional family, her upbringing before the Revolution in 1979 that toppled the Shah, her marriage and her religious faith, as well as her life as a mother and lawyer battling an oppressive regime in the courts while bringing up her girls at home.


9. Samar Yazbek, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution. A well-known novelist and journalist from the coastal city of Jableh, Samar Yazbek witnessed the beginning four months of the uprising first-hand and actively participated in a variety of public actions and budding social movements. Throughout this period she kept a diary of personal reflections on, and observations of, this historic time.


10. Soha Bechara, Resistance: My Life for Lebanon. In 1988, at the age of twenty, Souha Béchara attempted to assassinate General Lahad, chief of militia in charge of Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon. Immediately apprehended, interrogated, and tortured for weeks, she was sent to Khiam, a prison and death camp regularly condemned by humanitarian organizations.

1. Ibtisam Barakat, Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine. As a child, Ibtisam Barakat wanted nothing more than to become a writer. This wasn’t a common path for a girl living in the politically tumultuous Palestine of the 1970s, but she found inspiration in pen pal correspondence and from the adults who encouraged her dream. Still, the most surprising turn of events for Ibtisam happened when her mother decided that she, too, wanted to defy circumstances and seek an education.


2. Ghada Karmi, In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story. Ghada Karmi’s acclaimed memoir relates her childhood in Palestine, flight to Britain after the catastrophe, and coming of age in Golders Green, the north London Jewish suburb. A powerful biographical story, In Search of Fatima reflects the author’s personal experiences of displacement and loss against a backdrop of the major political events which have shaped conflict in the Middle East.


3. Manal al-Sharif,Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening. A ferociously intimate memoir by a devout woman from a modest family in Saudi Arabia who became the unexpected leader of a courageous movement to support women’s right to drive.


4. Fatema Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Gilrhood. In Dreams of Trespass, Mernissi weaves her own memories with the dreams and memories of the women who surrounded her in the courtyard of her youth—women who, deprived of access to the world outside, recreated it from sheer imagination. Dreams of Trespass is the provocative story of a girl confronting the mysteries of time and place, gender and sex in the recent Muslim world.


5. Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage. Leila Ahmed grew up in Cairo in the 1940s and '50s in a family that was eagerly and passionately political. [W]hen the Revolution arrived, the family's opposition to Nasser's policies led to persecutions that would throw their lives into turmoil and set their youngest child on a journey across cultures. Hers is a life lived through some of the major transformations of our century: the end of colonialism and of the European empires, the creation of Israel, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the breakdown of the multireligious society that had thrived in Egypt.


6. Nawal El Saadawi, Walking Through Fire: A Life of Nawal El Saadawi. Famous for her novels, short stories and writings on women, Saadawi is known as the first Arab woman to have written about sex and its relation to economics and politics. Imprisoned under Sadat for her opinions, she has continued to fight against all forms of discrimination based on class, gender, nationality, race or religion. This autobiography shows the passion for justice that has shaped her life and her writing.


7. Ahdaf Soueif, Cairo: My City, Our Revolution. Ahdaf Soueif - novelist, commentator, activist - takes us through her city of Cairo and traces the path of the revolution that's redrawing its future. Through a map of stories drawn from private history and public record, she charts a story of the revolution that is both intimately hers and publicly Egyptian.


8. Wangari Maathai, Unbowed. Hugely charismatic, humble, and possessed of preternatural luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her extraordinary life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya.


9. Nkunzi Zandile Nkabinde, Black Bull, Ancestors and Me: My Life as a Lesbian Sangoma. Describing the dichotomy of being both revered and reviled, this memoir traces the story of a sangoma—a traditional healer—who is also a lesbian. Descriptions of traditional African healing practices and rituals are provided alongside the personalized account of one woman acting as a mirror to the daily hardships and indignities felt by members of the gay community in Africa


10. Miriam and Mark Mathabane, Miriam's Song: A Memoir. Mathabane's newest book, Miriam's Song, is the story of Mark's sister, who was left behind in South Africa. It is the gripping tale of a woman -- representative of an entire generation -- who came of age amid the violence and rebellion of the 1980s and finally saw the destruction of apartheid and the birth of a new, democratic South Africa.

1. Mende Nazer, Slave: My True Story. Mende Nazer lost her childhood at age twelve, when she was sold into slavery. It all began one horrific night in 1993, when Arab raiders swept through her Nuba village, murdering the adults and rounding up thirty-one children, including Mende.


2. Halima Bashir, Tears of the Desert. Tears of the Desert is the first memoir ever written by a woman caught up in the war in Darfur.


3. Scholastique Mukasong, Cockroaches. Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda--the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994.


4. Thea Halo, Not Even My Name: A True Story. Not Even My Name is a rare eyewitness account of the horrors of a little-known, often denied genocide, in which hundreds of thousands of Armenian and Pontic Greek minorities in Turkey were killed during and after World War I.


5. Dawn Anahid MacKeen, The Hundred-Year Walk: An Armenian Odyssey. An epic tale of one man’s courage in the face of genocide and his granddaughter’s quest to tell his story. Reading [her grandfather's] rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension.


6. Courtney Angela Brkic, The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living. When she was twenty-three years old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. As she describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family's history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother's childhood in Herzegovina, early widowhood, and imprisonment during World War II for hiding her Jewish lover.


7. Ruth Klüger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. Kluger's story of her years in the camps and her struggle to establish a life after the war as a refugee survivor in New York, has emerged as one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust. Interwoven with blunt, unsparing observations of childhood and nuanced reflections of an adult who has spent a lifetime thinking about the Holocaust, Still Alive rejects all easy assumptions about history, both political and personal.


8. Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968. In this powerful and moving memoir, Kovály describes her imprisonment by the Nazis during WWII and her persecution by the Communists in the 1950s -- a classic account of life under totalitarianism.


9. Nadia Murad, The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State. Nadia's story—as a witness to the Islamic State's brutality, a survivor of rape, a refugee, a Yazidi—has forced the world to pay attention to the ongoing genocide in Iraq. It is a call to action, a testament to the human will to survive, and a love letter to a lost country, a fragile community, and a family torn apart by war.


10. Kamla Patel, Torn from the Roots: A Partition Memoir. Offers first-hand account of operation recovery carried out by the newly constituted Governments of India and Pakistan in 1947 to recover women and children who had been abducted during the riots and chaos of Partition and restore them to their families.

1. Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City: A Diary. For eight weeks in 1945, as Berlin fell to the Russian army, a young woman kept a daily record of life in her apartment building and among its residents. A Woman in Berlin tells of the complex relationship between civilians and an occupying army and the shameful indignities to which women in a conquered city are always subject--the mass rape suffered by all, regardless of age or infirmity.


2. Una, Becoming, Unbecoming.* A devastating personal account of gender violence told in comic book form, set against the backdrop of the 1970s Yorkshire Ripper man-hunt. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned.


3. Margaux Fragoso, Tiger, Tiger. This extraordinary memoir is an unprecedented glimpse into the psyche of a young girl in free fall and conveys to readers - including parents and survivors of abuse - just how completely a pedophile enchants his victim and binds her to him.


4. Jane Doe, The Story of Jane Doe. On an August night in 1986, Jane Doe became the fifth reported woman raped by a sexual serial predator dubbed the Balcony Rapist. Even though the police had full knowledge of the rapist’s modus operandi, they made a conscious decision not to issue a warning to women in her neighbourhood.  In 1987, Jane Doe sued the Metropolitan Police Force and won.


5. Lacy M. Johnson, The Other Side: A Memoir. Lacy Johnson was held prisoner in a soundproofed room in a basement apartment that her ex-boyfriend rented and outfitted for the sole purpose of raping and killing her. The Other Side is the haunting account of a first passionate and then abusive relationship, the events leading to Johnson’s kidnapping and imprisonment, her dramatic escape, and her hard-fought struggle to recover.


6. Jaycee Dugard, A Stolen Life. On 10 June 1991, eleven-year-old Jaycee Dugard was abducted from a school bus stop within sight of her home in Tahoe, California. It was the last her family and friends saw of her for over eighteen years. Dugard's memoir is written by the 30-year-old herself and covers the period from the time of her abduction in 1991 up until the present.


7. Linda Lovelace, Ordeal. Linda Lovelace became a household name in 1972, when Deep Throat became the first pornographic movie ever to cross over into the mainstream. Soon after, Lovelace joined in with anti-pornography feminists led by Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and she testified before Attorney General Meese's Commission on Pornography in 1986.


8. Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know For Sure.** Tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them, often abused them, and, nonetheless, shared their destinies. With luminous clarity, Allison explores how desire surprises and what power feels like to a young girl as she confronts abuse.


9. Susan Faludi, In the Dark Room.When the feminist writer learned that her 76-year-old father—long estranged and living in Hungary—had undergone sex reassignment surgery, her investigation into the meaning of identity in the modern world and in her own haunted family saga would turn personal and urgent.  Faludi chases that mystery into the recesses of her suburban childhood and her father's many previous incarnations: American dad, Alpine mountaineer, swashbuckling adventurer in the Amazon outback, Jewish fugitive in Holocaust Budapest.


10. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness. This powerful memoir follows Mock’s quest for identity, from an early, unwavering conviction about her gender to a turbulent adolescence in Honolulu that saw her transitioning during the tender years of high school, self-medicating with hormones at fifteen, and flying across the world alone for sex reassignment surgery at just eighteen.

1. Thea Hillman, Intersex (For Lack of A Better Word).** In first-person prose as intimate as a diary, Hillman redefines memoir in a series of compelling stories that take a no-holds-barred look at sex, gender, family, and community.


2. Claudia Brenner, Eight Bullets: One Woman's Story of Surviving Anti-Gay Violence.** The lesbian victim of a violent hate crime that left her seriously wounded and her partner dead is the story of family and community, the medical system, the police and courts, and the media--and of one woman's incredible courage.


3. Chana Wilson, Riding Fury Home: A Memoir.** In 1958, when Chana Wilson was seven, her mother attempted suicide, holding a rifle to her own head and pulling the trigger.  It would be many years before she learned the secret of her mother’s anguish: her love affair with another married woman, and the psychiatric treatment aimed at curing her of her lesbianism.


4. Alex Cooper, Saving Alex: When I Was Fifteen I Told My Mormon Parents I Was Gay, and That's When My Nightmare Began.** For eight harrowing months, Alex was held captive in an unlicensed “residential treatment program” modeled on the many “therapeutic” boot camps scattered across Utah.With the help of a dedicated legal team in Salt Lake City, Alex eventually escaped and made legal history in Utah by winning the right to live under the law’s protection as an openly gay teenager.


5. Terry Galloway, Mean Little Deaf Queer.** In 1959, the year Terry Galloway turned nine, the voices of everyone she loved began to disappear. No one yet knew that an experimental antibiotic given to her mother had wreaked havoc on her fetal nervous system, eventually causing her to go deaf. With disarming candor, she writes about her mental breakdowns, her queer identity, and living in a silent, quirky world populated by unforgettable characters.


6. Cece Bell, El Deafo.* This funny perceptive graphic novel memoir about growing up hearing impaired is also an unforgettable book about growing up, and all the super and super embarrassing moments along the way.


7. Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen. Legally blind since the age of eleven, Georgina Kleege draws on her experiences to offer a detailed testimony of visual impairment - both her own view of the world and the world's view of the blind.


8. Simi Linton, My Body Politic: A Memoir. While hitchhiking from Boston to Washington, D.C., in 1971 to protest the war in Vietnam, Linton was involved in a car accident that paralyzed her legs and took the lives of her young husband and her best friend... Linton takes us on the road she traveled (with stops in Berkeley, Paris, Havana) and back to her home in Manhattan, as she learns what it means to be a disabled person in America.


9. Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face. At age nine, Grealy was diagnosed with a potentially terminal cancer. When she returned to school with a third of her jaw removed, she faced the cruel taunts of classmates. In this strikingly candid memoir, Grealy tells her story of great suffering and remarkable strength without sentimentality and with considerable wit.


10. Amy Berkowitz, Tender Points. Named after the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia, the book-length lyric essay explores sexual violence, gendered illness, chronic pain, and patriarchy through the lenses of lived experience and pop culture.

1. Sarah Manguso, The Two Kinds of Decay. At twenty-one, just as she was starting to comprehend the puzzles of adulthood, Sarah Manguso was faced with another: a wildly unpredictable autoimmune disease that appeared suddenly and tore through her twenties, paralyzing her for weeks at a time, programming her first to expect nothing from life and then, furiously, to expect everything.


2. Irene Vilar, The Ladies' Gallery: A Memoir of Family Secrets.Vilar revisits the legacy of her grandmother (Lolita Lebrón, the revered martyr for Puerto Rican independence) and that of her anguished mother, who leapt from a speeding car when Vilar was eight. Eleven years after her mother's death, Vilar awakens in a psychiatric hospital and begins to face the devastating inheritance of abandonment and suicide passed down to her from grandmother and mother.


3. Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression. Wrapped within Danquah's engaging account of this universal affliction is rare and insightful testimony about what it means to be black, female, and battling depression in a society that often idealizes black women as strong, nurturing caregivers.


4. Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life, I Write to You in Your Life. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living.


5. Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she's an endowed professor at the prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis -- and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.


6. Kate Millett, The Loony-Bin Trip.** A personal story of Kate Millett's struggle to regain control of her life after falling under an ascription of manic depression.


7. Ellen Forney, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.*** Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.


8. Meghan O'Rourke, The Long Goodbye. After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond.


9. Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm Dying. In a single day in 2004, Danticat learns that she’s pregnant and that her father, André, is dying... In the end, as Danticat prepares to lose her ailing father and give birth to her daughter, [Danticat's uncle] is threatened by a volatile sociopolitical clash and forced to flee Haiti. He’s then detained by U.S. Customs and neglected for days, dying a prisoner while loved ones await news of his release. (PW)


10. Sonali Deraniyagala, Wave. On the morning of December 26, 2004, on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, Deraniyagala lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived. In this brave and searingly frank memoir, she describes those first horrifying moments and her long journey since.

sources: goodreads (apart from where directly indicated), publishersweekly
milfordacademy& vindictaa& cloudsnberries& lady_of_elves& me

I asked J.J. Abrams about STAR WARS fans who didn't like all those LADIEZZZZ in THE LAST JEDI, and he had kind of the perfect answer: https://t.co/Kggqpb04DS

— Kate Erbland (@katerbland) February 16, 2018

New York City Ballet's investigation of Peter Martins has failed to corroborate accusations of sexual harassment or physical abuse, according to a statement https://t.co/OekI8FCRmN

— New York Times Arts (@nytimesarts) February 16, 2018

I sure would love to read this fair and appropriate report that they won't be releasing to the public https://t.co/4vrZhp0069

— Chloe Angyal (@ChloeAngyal) February 17, 2018

All Martins ballet should be pulled from the rep. Yet another thing the board sleeps on. (Perhaps because they were all chosen by Martins.)

— Vanessa Carlton (@VanessaCarlton) February 15, 2018