Reading Resources

Books That Can Help You Map Your Journey (**books just for women)

"Learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading." --Eudora Welty

• The Story of Your Life--Becoming the Author of Your Experience, by Mandy Aftel. Simon & Schuster, 1996.
  ­Thoughtful, helpful.

• **Writing From Life: Telling Your Soul's Story, by Susan Wittig Albert. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997.
  -Especially for women, a practical and inspiring guide to life-writing.

• Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest, by Christina Baldwin. Bantam, 1990.
  ­Simply the best journaling book in the world.

• Writing the Memoir: a practical guide to the craft, the personal challenges, and ethical dilemmas of writing your true stories, by Judith Barrington. Eighth Mountain Press, 1997.
  -Especially strong on the ethical dilemmas of memoir writing.

• The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan. Tarcher/Putnam, 1992.
  -A helpful guide to healing your creativity.

• The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart, by Julia Cameron. Tarcher/Putnam, 1996.
  ­Cameron's second book, going deeper into the soul of creativity.

• Roads Home: Seven Pathways to Midlife Wisdom, by Kathryn D. Cramer. William Morrow & Co., 1995.
  -Wonderful guide to thinking through your life physically, emotionally, spiritually, and relationally.

• Room to Write: Daily Invitations to a Writer's Life, by Bonni Goldberg. Tarcher/Putnam, 1996.
  ­An ideal writer's companion.

• Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg. Shambhala, 1986.
  ­The first of the "tell it like it is" life-writing books. A groundbreaker and still helpful.

• **Writing a Woman's Life, by Carolyn Heilbrun. Ballantine, 1988.
  -The best articulation of the "problem" of women's autobiographical writing.

• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott. Anchor Books, 1994.
  ­Provocative, open, vulnerable--written by a woman's who's been there.

• **The Heroine's Journey, by Maureen Murdock. Shambhala, 1990.
  -A thoughtful guide to understanding your life quest.

• Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story, by Linda Joy Myers

• Writing Family Histories and Memoirs, by Kirk Polking. Betterway Books,1995.
  -Good exercises, helpful organization.

• Your Life as Story: Writing the New Autobiography by Tristine Rainer. Tarcher/Putnam, 1997.
  -Thorough, deep, sometimes dense.

• New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time, by Gail Sheehy. Random House, 1995.
  -Good for suggesting how to think about your life.

• Everyday Creative Writing: Panning for Gold in the Kitchen Sink, by Michael C. Smith and Suzanne Greenberg. NTC Publishing Group, 1996.
  -Fun, self-propelling.

• Writing Yourself Home: A Woman's Guided Journey of Self Discovery, by Kimberley Snow. Conari Press, 1992.
  -Readings and exercises about your own life and women's issues designed to help you express your unique world.

Voices of Truth and Triumph: Some Remarkable Personal Stories by and for Women

"Writing is about telling the truth and paying attention." --Ann Lamott

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou. Random House, 1969.
  -The first of Angelou's marvelous memoirs.

• Composing a Life: Life as a Work in Progress--The Improvisations of Five Extraordinary Women, by Mary C. Bateson. Plume, 1989.
  -Women lead lives marked by discontinuity. Discover the thread.

• What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women, ed. by Beth Benatovich. St. Martin's, 1991.
  -Anthology of wise observations, arguments, sentiments by older women.

• Plain and Simple, by Sue Bender. 1989.
  -A quiet book that describes the ways of the Amish and the effect of their lives on the writer.

• Lives of Our Own: Secrets of Salty Old Women, by Caroline Bird. Houghton-Mifflin, 1995.
  -Speaking right up!

• Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition Within a Tradition, edited by Joanne M. Braxton. Temple University Press, 1989.
  -A strong collection of powerful and distinctive voices.

• After Great Pain, A New Life Emerges, by Diane Cole. Summit, 1992.
  -What courage! A mother's death, a lover's illness, a kidnapping, a miscarriage--but through the anguish comes a new vision of the self.

• Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women, edited by Jill Ker Conway. Vintage, 1992.
  -The first-person stories of over two dozen remarkable women.

• An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard, Harper & Row, 1987.
  -A childhood memoir by a writer who is able to capture the magic of life through a child's eager, open eyes.

• Journey Through Menopause: A Personal Rite of Passage, by Christine Downing. Crossroad, 1989.
  -A wonderful glimpse of a woman's midlife journey from the outward-turning view to the inner vision.

• Long, Quiet Highway: Waking Up in America, by Natalie Goldberg. Bantam, 1993.
  -A woman's spiritual journey by a writer who dares to seek the farthest truths.

• The Shadow Man, by Mary Gordon. Random House, 1996.
  -A woman's painful search for her father.

• Fierce Attachments: A Memoir, by Vivian Gornick. Simon & Schuster, 1987.
  -A blisteringly honest, deeply intimate story of a mother who is afraid to let go and a daughter who is compelled to hold on.

• The Last Gift of Time, by Carolyn Heilbrun. Dial, 1997.
  -Thoughtful memoir on her aging.

• The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods, by Julia Butterfly Hill. Harper, 2000.
  -The story of a woman who spent 738 days in a redwood tree in a protest against logging.

• Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir, by Erica Jong. HarperCollins, 1994.
  -Brash and forthright, of course.

• For She is the Tree of Life: Grandmothers through the Eyes of Women Writers, ed. by Valerie Kack-Brice. Conari Press, 1994.
  -Lovely reading; lovely giving as a gift.

• The Liar's Club: A Memoir, by Mary Karr. Viking, 1995.
  -Karr breaks all the rules about "making nice." A harshly passionate voice.

• Remembering the Bone House: An Erotics of Place and Space, by Nancy Mairs. Harper & Row, 1989.
  -A passionate and powerful exploration of the deepest recesses of mind and body.

• The Loony-Bin Trip, by Kate Millet. 1990.
  -A brilliant memoir by a woman who was diagnosed as "constitutionally psychotic" and spent 13 years using prescribed drugs that obscured her consciousness of her self.

• Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers, edited by Mary Morris. Vintage, 1993.
  -A delightful collection of writing by courageous and unconventional women travelers from the 17th through the 20th centuries.

• The Journey is Home, by Nelle Morton. Beacon, 1985.
  -Essays that reveal the personal transformations of a distinguished theologian who comes gradually to her feminist vision.

• Don't Call Me Mother, by Linda Joy Myers

• The Diary of Anais Nin, Vols 1-7, by Anais Nin. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967.
  -The foremost woman diarist of her time.
  1. Vol 1
  2. Vol 2
  3. Vol 3
  4. Vol 4
  5. Vol 5
  6. Vol 6
  7. Vol 7

• Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by Adrienne Rich. Norton, 1976.
  -This book will turn you upside down. Rich writes out of her personal experience, using her story to illuminate the stories of all daughters and mothers.

• Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton. Norton, 1977.
  -The first of Sarton's five journals, all records of a passionate life.

• Embracing Our Essence: Spiritual Conversations with Prominent Women, ed. by Susan Skog. Health Communications, 1995.
  -Strengthening and empowering.

• Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story, by Onnie Lee Logan as told to Katherine Clark. Plume, 1991.
  -Strength and common sense, along with an uncommon heart, comes through as a black woman in the South remembers delivering babies in primitive settings.

• If I Had My Life to Live Over, I Would Pick More Daisies, ed. by Sandra Martz. Papier-Mache Press, 1992.
  -Anthology of poems, stories, wishes, dreams of realization

• The Measure of My Days: One Woman's Vivid, Enduring Celebration of Life and Aging, by Florida Scott-Maxwell. Penguin, 1968.
  -A classic in memoir literature.

• View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, by Wislawa Szymborska. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1996.
  -Winner 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature by a 74-yr-old Polish woman.

• The Girls with the Grandmother Faces: A Celebration of Life's Potential for Those Over 55, by Frances Weaver. Hyperion, 1996.
  -A late-blooming, delightful author.

• Nobody Nowhere: The Extraordinary Autobiography of an Autistic, by Donna Williams. Times Books, 1992.
  -A remarkable voice, from the inside out.

• Nothing To Do But Stay: My Pioneer Mother, by Carrie Young. Delta Books, 1996.
  -A mother's story, a daughter's memoir. Storytelling at its best.

• A Wider Giving: Women Writing after a Long Silence, ed. by Sondra Zeidenstein. Chicory Blue Press, 1988.
  -Shows the talent of women even when their youthful writing was interrupted by life circumstances.

Links

"We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains." ---Ursula K. Le Guin

Please visit our Internet Resources page.

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