Books like Secrets of the flesh by Judith Thurman

On Writing blends Stephen King’s memoir with practical guidance, offering a personal look at his path to success and essential lessons for aspiring writers.

Dave Eggers' 2000 memoir chronicles his struggles and resilience after the cancer-related deaths of his parents, as he assumes responsibility for his younger brother and confronts the challenges of growing up alone.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

In Tehran, Azar Nafisi secretly hires seven female students each week to read banned Western classics, revealing the personal and political struggles of women under Iran’s revolutionary regime.

Elizabeth Alexander, a celebrated African‑American poet, chronicles the profound grief and renewal she finds after her husband’s sudden death, offering a moving memoir of loss, family, and the search for meaning.

A LITERATURE OF THEIR OWN quickly set the stage for the creative explosion of feminist literary studies that transformed the field in the 1980s. Launching a major new area for literary investigation, the book uncovered the long but neglected tradition of women writers and the development of their fiction from the 1800s onwards. It includes assessments of famous writers such as the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Drabble and Doris Lessing, but also presents critical appraisals of Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton and Sarah Grand --- to name but a few of those prolific and successful Victorian novelists - --once household names, now largely forgotten.

Natalie Barney, a celebrated New York socialite turned Parisian salonnière, defied Victorian constraints as a lesbian author and cultural icon of the Belle Époque, entwining her life with the era’s most eminent writers and artists.

In this account of the scandalous life and the violent times of the Marquis de Sade, novelist, essayist, and biographer Francine du Plessix Gray resurrects this legendary man's relationship with his family - his devoted wife, his iron-willed mother-in-law, and his three children. Gray draws on thousands of pages of letters exchanged by the two spouses, few of which have been published in English, to explore in the fullest historical and psychological detail what it was like to be the Marquise de Sade, a decorous, upright woman married throughout the decades preceding the French Revolution to one of the most maverick spirits of recent times. In the vast literature inspired by the marquis's fictional and real-life libertinism, relatively little attention has been given the two women who were closest to him: Renee-Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife for more than a quarter of a century, and his powerful mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. Gray brings to life these two remarkable women and their complex relationship with Sade as they dedicated themselves, each in her own way, to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses, and ultimately confining him. After years of indulging a variety of sexual aberrations, experiences he used in novels such as Justine, Philosophy in the Boudoir, and The 120 Days of Sodom, Sade was imprisoned on the basis of an arrest warrant issued by Louis XVI at his mother-in-law's instigation. Throughout his thirteen years in jail, Madame de Sade was her husband's principal solace and his only lifeline to reality. It was only upon the onset of the French Revolution, when Sade was finally freed from the Bastille, that Pelagie made a sudden about-face from her decades of abject devotion. In the course of telling this remarkable story, Gray vividly re-creates the extravagant hedonism of late eighteenth-century France; the ensuing terror of the French Revolution, when her protagonists lived in fear of imminent destruction; and the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which Sade spent his last decade.

"In a pioneering study of the three best-known French women writers of the twentieth century, Bethany Ladimer examines the ways in which the aging process shaped their creativity and their lives. Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, and Marguerite Duras all lived long lives and were prolific writers until the end. Ladimer's developmental approach to their creativity takes into account literary analysis and also discusses their work and lives from the standpoint of history and the social sciences, a conjunction that considers age, gender, and a culture that depends on the ideas of sexual difference for its national identity. She incorporates the work of Betty Friedan, Carolyn Heilbrun, and Margaret Gulette, among others, into her study."--BOOK JACKET.

When Mrs. Pargeter and a friend visit Brotherton Hall health spa, the former uncovers a young woman's death and begins an investigation that pulls her into a web of mystery.