In Carrie and Me, Carol Burnett shares her personal diary entries and correspondence revealing her anguish as a mother of a troubled teenager, the epiphanies that helped her help her family, and the grief and then the hope she felt after Carrie's death. Through Burnett's inimitable voice, we get a portrait of an unforgettable young woman that will bring hope to anyone struggling with raising or losing a child.

"Award-winning actresses and mother-daughter duo Laura Dern and Diane Ladd are the kind of women who draw strength from their lifelong friendships with other women, and most of all, from each other. Ever since Laura was born, the two have leaned on each other through the trials of everyday life and the tribulations that come with even the most storied Hollywood careers. They were always close, but when Diane developed a sudden illness, their relationship...

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America.
Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington....

Wagner's mother, Natalie Wood, was a child actress who became a legendary movie star. She and Natasha's stepfather, actor Robert Wagner, were a Hollywood it-couple. But Natalie's sudden death by drowning off Catalina Island at the age of forty-three devastated her family, made her stepfather a person of interest, and turned a vibrant wife, mother, and actress into a tragic figure. Here Wagner shares her memories of her warm, loving, and slight chaotic...

"At nineteen Trethewey's world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma. Here she explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a 'child of miscegenation' in Mississippi,...

"Thirty years after her death, Alice Eve Cohen's mother appears to her, seemingly in the flesh, and continues to do so during the hardest year Alice has had to face: the year her youngest daughter needs a harrowing surgery, her eldest daughter decides to reunite with her birth mother, and Alice herself receives a daunting diagnosis. As it turns out, it's entirely possible for the people weve lost to come back to us when we need them the most" --

The founder of the Heritage Home Foundation nonprofit documents her secret abuse-marked childhood in and out of foster care and what she discovered while investigating the story of her mother's own harrowing past. No one outside her immediate family would have guessed that Plymale's childhood was fraught with every imaginable hardship: a mentally ill mother who was in and out of jails and psych wards throughout Stephanie's formative years, neglect,...

"The acclaimed actress and author of Jesse: A Mother's Story tells the story of her outspoken, frequently outrageous Italian immigrant mother. Marianne Leone's Ma is in many senses a larger-than-life character, one who might be capable, even from the afterlife, of shattering expectations. Born on a farm in Italy, Linda finds her way to the United States under dark circumstances, having escaped a forced marriage to a much older man, and marries a good...

"When Laura Trujillo's mother jumps off a ledge in the Grand Canyon and falls to her death, Laura sets out to discover what drove her mother's actions, and begins to explore the painful secrets they shared. As a young girl, Laura was happy that her mother, divorced and remarried, seemed happy again, and so she hides it when her stepfather begins to abuse her. Now grown up with a family of her own, after her mother dies, Laura goes in search of the...