The Magic of Memoir is a memoirist’s companion for when the going gets tough. Editors Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner have taught and coached hundreds of memoirists to the completion of their memoirs, and they know that the journey is fraught with belittling messages from both the inner critic and naysayers, voices that make it hard to stay on course with the writing and completion of a book.

In The Magic of Memoir, 38 writers share their hard-won wisdom, stories, and writing tips. Included are Myers’s and Warner’s interviews with best-selling and widely renown memoirists Mary Karr, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dr. Azar Nafisi, Dani Shapiro, Margo Jefferson, Raquel Cepeda, Jessica Valenti, Daisy Hernández, Mark Matousek, and Sue William Silverman.

This collection has something for anyone who’s on the journey or about to embark on it. If you’re looking for inspiration, The Magic of Memoir will be a valuable companion.

How are women transforming the practice of leadership in the 21^st century?  Enlightened Power is a first-of-a-kind book that answers this question–and forever changes the traditional notions involving women in leadership. The book features the accumulated wisdom of 40 influential men and women who represent the most compelling voices in the field, including:

•  Dynamic business leaders such as Eileen Fisher (founder, Eileen Fisher, Inc.), Barbara Corcoran (founder and chairman, The Corcoran Group), and Pat Mitchell (president and CEO, PBS)
• Trailblazing women from other arenas such as politics (Ambassador Swanee Hunt), the military (Rear Admiral Deborah A. Loewer, USN), and sports (U.S. Olympian Marilyn King)
• Renowned thought leaders such as Riane Eisler, Rayona Sharpnack, Sally Helgesen, Peggy Klaus, Bruce Patton, Nancy J. Adler, and Gail Evans
• Leading-edge academics, activists, executives, entrepreneurs, and practitioners

From the time I was a teenager and all through my college years, my father wrote me letters. In them, he’d express his deep and abiding love, and always reinforce my goodness, my character, and the gifts he saw in me. His letters were heartwarming in their simplicity, and they inspired me to strive toward his vision of the adult he dreamed I would become. I kept them all. In response, I sometimes wrote and sometimes called, but never did I write the one letter I wish I had. I just didn’t know how. Wherever he is, I trust he can still hear me.

An older lesbian reflects on same-sex marriage in Michigan, and rushing to the county clerk’s office to get married before the attorney general appealed the case.

I take the flowers and arrange them one by one in the blue crystal vase that my mother loves; today is her day. I have plotted and planned for months and enlisted five of my closest friends to create a surprise birthday party in honor of her 80th year.

For much of her life, Carol E. Anderson struggled not to be herself. She struggled against her attraction to women, where she found her deepest emotional connections, and celebrated with relief every time she fell for a man, one of whom she nearly married.

In her new memoir, You Can’t Buy Love, Carol Anderson writes of growing up gay — and fundamentalist — in the 1960s and trying to establish a queer family a decade later. Read an exclusive excerpt

I didn’t want to be gay. Entering adolescence in the late 1950s, it was not a popular thing. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household made it even less so.