She Writes Press: 369 books

Every woman who waited to have a child will understand this story. Eileen Stukane’s determination to become a mother led her to adoption. When agencies said she was “too old,” she found a country that considered her young. She would not be stopped—until a mystery in Italy almost ended everything....

Carol Ardman traveled to Tangier in 1970 to tend her broken heart and—she hoped—find Jane Bowles, whose writing had literally saved her. Instead she found Paul Bowles at a time when he was as lonely and searching as she was. The two began an unconventional love affair that roiled Tangier’s incestuous...

What do you do when fate hands you a wild daughter? As Micah recounts her struggles to raise a brave daughter and to keep her safe at the same time, she also tells the story of her own sometimes humorous, sometimes harrowing two-week solo adventure in the Adirondack Mountains as a teenager. Micah...

As a young girl, Deborah Jiang-Stein discovered a shattering secret—she was born in prison and her birth mother, a heroin addict, kept her inside for the first year of her life. This book is the story of how Jiang-Stein came to terms with these traumatic facts and eventually began to dedicate herself...

When Gore’s narcissistic mother is diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, she reluctantly moves with her girlfriend and their preschool-age son to New Mexico to help her. "We can do anything for a year," her girlfriend consoles her. But that year ends up pushing Gore to the edge of her...

Pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a teenager living in a town of 3,000 Catholics keeps her secret from everyone until six weeks before the baby’s due date. Hustled out of town and hidden in the Iowa countryside within hours of finally confiding in her mother, she concocts a scheme that will...

Abby Douglas grew up with a distant dad and a desperate hot mess of a mom. Now she’s got a thing for bad boys, a weakness for fad diets, and ironically, a job as an advice columnist. When she accidentally cheats on her supposed boyfriend with a mysterious older man, Abby’s already confusing world...

She’ll do anything to become a mother—including stalking prospective egg donors’ profiles on Facebook. In this hilarious yet poignant memoir of one woman’s quest to conceive, the brave new world of artificial baby-making takes an unexpected turn when social media comes into play. As the not-quite-young-enough...

Dr. Mary Lake Polan takes us on a compelling journey into Eritrea, where she started a surgical clinic to offer life-changing care to African women. She and her team repair fistulas, a condition that results from traumatic births and leads many African women to lives of stigma and shame. Dr. Polan...

Carol Merchasin first visited San Miguel de Allende in 2005, fell in love with its language, people, and culture, and moved there full-time with her husband shortly thereafter. A lawyer by training, Merchasin is curious about how everything around her in Mexico works—the health care system, religious...

This haunting yet wry coming-of-age memoir set at an all-girls summer camp fast-forwards decades into the future as Barbara Graham grapples with the knowledge that the “love affair” she believed she’d shared with her female camp counselor in the 1960s fits every definition of sexual abuse. The...

What can a daughter do when the mother she loves is bent on destroying herself? With lyricism and honesty, memoirist Lydia Bird chronicles the unlikely course of her mother’s alcoholism—and the power and limitations of their bond. Through stories spanning four decades and three continents, Bird...

In this memoir of adolescence in Kingston, Jamaica, the daughter of a sprawling family raised in relative privilege explores the secret sense of exile that fuels her dreams of a new life in a foreign place. Along the way she falls in love with a lonely girl who lives at the orphanage up the street...

Mary Moon explores the landscape of long-married life—the hidden hurts and disappointments that lead women to consider leaving, and the tender weight of shared history that prompts them to stay. In “Into the Light,” a wife and mother finds the idea that she might legally choose the moment of...