27 results for "Autobiography"

You'll grow out of it

Klein, Jessi
"YOU'LL GROW OUT OF IT hilariously, and candidly, explores the journey of the twenty-first century woman. As both a tomboy and a late bloomer, comedian Jessi Klein grew up feeling more like an outsider than a participant in the rites of modern femininity. In YOU'LL GROW OUT OF IT, Klein offers-through an incisive collection of real-life stories-a relentlessly funny yet poignant take on a variety of topics she has experienced along her strange journey to womanhood and beyond. These include her "transformation from Pippi Longstocking-esque tomboy to are-you-a-lesbian-or-what tom man," attempting to find watchable porn, and identifying the difference between being called "ma'am" and "miss" ("Miss sounds like you weigh ninety-nine pounds"). Raw, relatable, and consistently hilarious, YOU'LL GROW OUT OF IT is a one-of-a-kind book by a singular and irresistible comic voice"--
Grand Central Publishing 2016-07-12 291 pages

Coreyography: a memoir

Feldman, Corey
"A deeply personal and revealing memoir and Hollywood-survival story by The Lost Boys and Stand By Me star We all know Corey Feldman from such iconic movies as Stand by Me, Gremlins, The Goonies, and The Lost Boys. Growing up onscreen, he exuded tough guy edge with a heart of gold. And he lived the life that went along with his success: he palled around with Michael Jackson, dated Drew Barrymore, and was best friends with Corey Haim (aka "the other Corey"). But now that two of those close friends--Haim and Jackson--have passed away, along with others, Corey has decided that it's time to come clean about his past, a past that included physical, drug, and sexual abuse, a dysfunctional family from whom he was emancipated at age fifteen, and a stint in rehab. He will zone in on his close friendship with Haim: the two actors shared a darker story of abuse, which led to Haim's lifelong battle with various addictions and his eventual death. Through it all, Corey has overcome the worst traps that have ensnared so many others of his generation, others who have not made it to where he is today--still acting, a touring musician, and a loving father. At the same time, he still fights for his career and his health, every single day. Coreyography is a tale of survival and redemption"--
St. Martin's Press 2013 280 pages

Back to the prairie: a home remade, a life rediscovered

Gilbert, Melissa
"The New York Times bestselling author and star of Little House on the Prairie returns with a new memoir -- both hilarious and heartfelt -- chronicling her journey from Hollywood to a ramshackle house in the Catskills during the COVID-19 pandemic. Known for her childhood role as Laura Ingalls Wilder on the classic NBC television show Little House on the Prairie, Melissa Gilbert has spent nearly her entire life in Hollywood. From Dancing with the Stars to a turn in politics, she has always been on the lookout for her next project. She just had no idea that her latest one would be completely life-changing. When her husband introduces her to the wilds of rural Michigan, Melissa begins to fall back in love with nature. And when work takes them to New York, they find a rustic cottage in the Catskills to call home. But 'rustic' is a generous description for the state of the house, which requires a lot of blood, sweat, and tears from the newlyweds to make it habitable. Then the coronavirus pandemic descends upon the world, further nudging Melissa out of the spotlight and into the woods. She trades Botox treatments for DIY projects, power-lunching for gardening and raising chickens, and soon her life is once again rediscovered, in her own little house in the mountains." --
Gallery Books 2022-05-10 275 pages

All things aside: (absolutely correct opinions)

Shlesinger, Iliza,Cho, Margaret
From the razor-sharp mind of comedian Iliza Shlesinger comes a collection of hilarious and insightful essays about the exasperating issues of everyday life. All Things Aside is a punchy, honest, incisive book that shares a view of the world through the eyes of the inimitable Iliza Shlesinger. From the macro to micro, Shlesinger tackles it all with her no-bullshit comedic style. Throughout the book, Shlesinger dives from one subject into the next, making her hilarious asides the basis of her stories, much like she does in her stand-up comedy. Topics range from dissecting social expectations to the notion that products marketed specifically to women are scams, and all manner of things in between. She even dares to ask herself the all-important question that every woman is forced to consider at some point--Am I actually an annoying person? Shlesinger also shares intimate moments, including a devastating miscarriage, which she manages to navigate not only with grace but somehow with side-splitting humor. As Margaret Cho explains in the book's foreword, "Every woman has something to gain from the Everywoman Iliza presents in her hilarious and astute worldview...I've learned [from Iliza] that you don't have to quit when you are in pain, that you can write your way out of the suffering. That there is beautiful truth to be unearthed from the depths of despair. That the stupid can be smart and that we put ourselves through hell for nothing." All Things Aside offers unexpected insights, much-needed truths, and tons and tons of laughs.
Abrams Image 2022 242 pages

Slimed! an oral history of Nickelodeon's Golden Age

Klickstein, Mathew
"Slimed! is the first oral history to chronicle the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of Nickelodeon, the first kids' network. Compiled from hundreds of original interviews with writers, actors, producers, artists, and other Nick alumni, this is the incredible story of Nickelodeon straight from those who made it happen"--
Plume 2013-09-24 297 pages

How to succeed in business without really crying

Leifer, Carol
"For many years, television comedy was an exclusive all boys' club--until a brilliant comedian named Carol Leifer came along, blazing a trail for funny women everywhere. From Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live to Seinfeld, The Ellen Show, and Modern Family, Carol has written for and/or performed on some of the best TV comedies of all time. This hilarious collection of essays charts her extraordinary three-decade journey through show business, illuminating her many triumphs and some missteps along the way--and offering valuable lessons for women and men in any profession. Part memoir, part guide to life, and all incredibly funny,How to Succeed in Business without Really Crying offers tips and tricks for getting ahead, finding your way, and opening locked doors--even if you have to use a sledgehammer" --
Quirk Books 2014-04-08 239 pages

A curious mind: the secret to a bigger life

Grazer, Brian
"From Academy Award-nominated producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed business journalist Charles Fishman comes a brilliantly entertaining peek into the weekly "curiosity conversations" that have inspired Grazer to create some of America's favorite and iconic movies and television shows--from 24 to A Beautiful Mind. For decades, film and TV producer Brian Grazer has scheduled a weekly "curiosity conversation" with an accomplished stranger. From scientists to spies, and adventurers to business leaders, Grazer has met with anyone willing to answer his questions for a few hours. These informal discussions sparked the creative inspiration behind many of Grazer's movies and TV shows, including Splash, 24, A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, Arrested Development, 8 Mile, J. Edgar, and many others. A Curious Mind is a brilliantly entertaining, fascinating, and inspiring homage to the power of inquisitiveness and the ways in which it deepens and improves us. Whether you're looking to improve your management style at work or you want to become a better romantic partner, this book--and its lessons on the power of curiosity--can change your life"--
Simon & Schuster 2015 300 pages

Starstruck: my unlikely road to Hollywood

Maltin, Leonard
Hollywood historian and film reviewer Leonard Maltin invites readers to pull up a chair and listen as he tells stories, many of them hilarious, of 50+ years interacting with legendary movie stars, writers, directors, producers, and cartoonists. Maltin grew up in the first decade of television, immersing himself in TV programs and accessing 1930s and '40s movies hitting the small screen. His fan letters to admired performers led to unexpected correspondences, then to interviews and publication of his own fan magazine. Maltin's career as a free-lance writer and New York Times-bestselling author as well as his 30-year run on Entertainment Tonight, gave him access to Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery, Shirley Temple, and Jimmy Stewart among hundreds of other Golden Age stars, his interviews cutting through the Hollywood veneer and revealing the human behind each legend. Starstruck also offers a fascinating glimpse inside the Disney empire, and Maltin's tenure teaching USC's popular film course reveals insights into moviemaking along with access to past, current, and future stars of film, such as George Lucas, Kevin Feige, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo del Toro.
GoodKnight Books, an imprint of Paladin Communications 2021 307 pages

My journey

Karan, Donna
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY HARPER’S BAZAAR • In this candid memoir, featuring a foreword by Barbra Streisand, renowned designer Donna Karan shares intimate details about her lonely childhood, her four-plus decades in the fashion industry, her two marriages, motherhood, and her ongoing quest for self-acceptance and spiritual peace. Donna Karan was born into the fashion business—her father was a tailor, and her mother was a showroom model and Seventh Avenue saleswoman—yet Karan dreamed of becoming a dancer like Martha Graham or a singer like Barbra Streisand. Fashion was her destiny, though. My Journey traces Karan’s early days as an intern at Anne Klein, the creation of her Seven Easy Pieces (which forever changed the way working women dressed), and the meteoric rise of her company. Along with juicy industry stories, Karan candidly discusses her difficult mother and traumatic childhood, her turbulent romantic life, all the loved ones she has lost over the years, and the personal awakening that occurred just as she reached the height of professional and financial success. That awakening set Karan down a path of spiritual discovery and self-improvement. From est to Kabbalah, from silent retreats to leech therapy, Karan tried everything to find, as she writes, “calm in the chaos.” But she also reveals how a chaotic life, fueled by endless curiosity and childlike impulses, helped her design seminal collections season after season for global powerhouse brands Donna Karan New York and DKNY. She also details how she has channeled her creativity (and her urge to solve problems and nurture others) into philanthropic work, particularly her early outspoken advocacy for AIDS awareness and research, and the creation of her Urban Zen Foundation, focusing on integrated healthcare and education as well as preservation of culture, which led to her current efforts in Haiti. Karan’s life has been crowded with glamorous characters and adventures around the world. But she sometimes still feels like that awkward teen from Long Island who never fit in—which makes her all the more endearing. Brimming with Karan’s infectious energy, My Journey is about much more than the fashion world: It is the story of a young woman whose vision and hard work made her a role model for women everywhere—a woman who dreamed big, fought to have it all, broke the rules, and loved passionately along the way. Praise for My Journey “By turns moving, insightful, and hilarious, yet always, always heartfelt . . . When you’re a true force of fashion, nothing holds you back.” — Vogue “When Donna Karan stepped down . . . it was the end of an era, so consider this autobiography her parting gift. . . . Expect a holistic view of the woman behind one of the most influential American labels.” — StyleCaster “Donna’s creativity and passion as a committed philanthropist are matched only by her gift for friendship. Whether she’s making the world more beautiful or giving a Haitian artisan the tools to create a sustainable business, Donna has always led with great heart and wonderful humor.” —President Bill Clinton “What we take for granted often comes from the most revolutionary of sources. In New York in the 1980s, no one was more radical than Donna Karan. She created a way of dressing that was womanly, practical, and empowering.” —Anna Wintour “An extraordinary personal, professional, and spiritual life . . . defined by Donna’s incredible resilience, her inward search for calm in the midst of success, and her insistence on always following her heart.” —Arianna Huffington
Ballantine Books 2015-10-13 363 pages

My lunches with Orson: conversations between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

Jaglom, Henry
"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur. There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew--FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more--and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse--sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above-- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles--if such a creature ever existed. "--
Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt Books 2013-07-16 306 pages

Just kids from the Bronx: telling it the way it was : an oral history

Alda, Arlene
"A down-to-earth, inspiring book about the American promise fulfilled." -President Bill Clinton "Fascinating . . . . Made me wish I had been born in the Bronx." -Barbara Walters A touching and provocative collection of memories that evoke the history of one of America's most influential boroughs-the Bronx-through some of its many success stories The vivid oral histories in Arlene Alda's Just Kids from the Bronx reveal what it was like to grow up in the place that bred the influencers in just about every field of endeavor. The Bronx is where Michael Kay, the New York Yankees' play-by-play broadcaster, first experienced baseball; where J. Crew's CEO Millard ("Mickey") Drexler found his ambition; where Neil deGrasse Tyson and Dava Sobel fell in love with science; and where local music making inspired singer-songwriter Dion DiMucci and hip-hop's Grandmaster Melle Mel. The parks, the pickup games, the tough and tender mothers, the politics, the gangs, the food-for people who grew up in the Bronx, childhood recollections are fresh. Arlene Alda's own Bronx memories were a jumping-off point from which to reminisce with a nun, a police officer, an urban planner, and with Al Pacino, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell, Maira Kalman, Bobby Bonilla, Mary Higgins Clark, and many other leading artists, athletes, scientists, and entrepreneurs-experiences spanning six decades of Bronx living. Alda then arranged these pieces of the past, from looking for violets along the banks of the Bronx River to the wake-up calls from teachers who recognized potential, into one great collective story, a filmlike portrait of the Bronx from the early twentieth century until today.
Henry Holt and Company 2015-03-03 310 pages

Woody

Evanier, David
"In this first biography of Woody Allen in over a decade, David Evanier discusses key movies, plays and prose as well as Allen's personal life. Evanier tackles the themes that Allen has spent a lifetime sorting through in art: morality, sexuality, Judaism, the eternal struggle of head and heart. Woody will be the definitive word on a major American talent as he begins his ninth decade, and his sixth decade of making movies"--
St. Martin's Press 2015 384 pages

Revenge of the nerd, or, ... The singular adventures of the man who would be Booger: a memoir

Armstrong, Curtis
"Risky Business. Revenge of the Nerds. Better Off Dead. Moonlighting. Supernatural. American Dad. New Girl. What do all of these movies and television shows have in common? Curtis Armstrong. A legendary comedic second banana to a litany of major stars, Curtis is forever cemented in the public imagination as Booger from Revenge of the Nerds. A classically trained actor, Curtis began his incredible 40-year career on stage but progressed rapidly to film and television. He was typecast early and it proved to be the best thing that could have happened. But there's more to Curtis' story than that. Born and bred a nerd, he spent his early years between Detroit, a city so nerdy that the word was coined there in 1951, and, improbably, Geneva, Switzerland. His adolescence and early adulthood was spent primarily between the covers of a book and indulging his nerdy obsessions. It was only when he found his true calling, as an actor and unintentional nerd icon, that he found true happiness. With whip-smart, self-effacing humor, Armstrong takes us on a most unlikely journey--one nerd's hilarious, often touching rise to the middle. He started his life as an outcast and matured into...well, an older, slightly paunchier, hopefully wiser outcast. In Hollywood, as in life, that counts as winning the game"--
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press 2017 336 pages