Biography & Memoir Audiobooks

Choose some amazing biography and memoir audiobooks that inspire, fascinate and change lives. Our diverse selection of biography and memoir audiobooks narrate the captivating stories of both famous figures and everyday people who triumph over life’s adversities. Put in your earbuds for intimate access to real-life stories of some of the world’s most impressive subjects.

Choose some amazing biography and memoir audiobooks that inspire, fascinate and change lives. Our diverse selection of biography and memoir audiobooks narrate the captivating stories of both famous figures and everyday people who triumph over life’s adversities. Put in your earbuds for intimate access to real-life stories of some of the world’s most impressive subjects.

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Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting
Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting
Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting
Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting
Audiobook

Roxane Gay & Everand Originals: Built for This: The Quiet Strength of Powerlifting

byJulia Turshen

Introducing Roxane Gay & Everand Originals, a new series from Everand and the beloved bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. For the series launch, renowned cookbook author Julia Turshen writes with moving honesty about her years of disordered eating and exercising and how she freed herself from the poisonous cultural conversations about weight, discipline, and how women should look. For most of her life, Julia Turshen has been at war with her body. Raised in a family obsessed with counting calories, she measured self-worth by the numbers on her bathroom scale. As the New York Times bestselling author of beloved cookbooks, including Small Victories and Simply Julia, she loved food and celebrated its social and cultural value, yet like so many women, she was convinced her own value would increase if only she lost ten, twenty, or however many pounds she arbitrarily believed kept her from the best version of herself. She worked out obsessively, using exercise as one more way to maintain control over her body and unruly appetites. Julia’s attitude began to shift during the pandemic when she took a break from writing and book promotion to work on a small local farm in upstate New York. Months spent outdoors, harvesting vegetables and carrying heavy bushels of produce, transformed her body, making it bigger yet stronger. To her surprise, Turshen reveled in her new physique; she reveled in the emotional freedom physical labor gave her to eat without harsh restrictions or self-recrimination. Finally, she was breaking free of the tyranny of unrealistic body image and disordered eating. But when the farm job ended, Julia felt herself slipping back into destructive thought patterns. Determined not to resume her relentless internal battles, she looked for activities that might replicate the joy and strength building farm work gave her. And that is how she discovered powerlifting. Through powerlifting — the precise and careful art of hoisting increasingly heavy weights — Turshen learned to listen to her body and what it needed, be it rest, water, another plate on the barbell, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she found a community of people, women especially, who embraced the unadultered joy of being physically strong. “I lift for my younger self and wear my singlet now to make up for all the times I wore a T-shirt over a swimsuit,” she writes, “I lift to show people what it looks like to opt out of trying to erase oneself. I lift to show that to myself.” Both a critique of society’s obsession with weight and a beguiling memoir of self-acceptance, Built for This is a timely reminder that all bodies are powerful and deserve celebration.  

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About Biography & Memoir

The biography and memoir genre casts a light on the inner workings of real people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings. Though grouped together, biography and memoir do diverge. Although they share common themes — both are nonfiction accounts of someone’s life — memoir relies on a writer’s personal experiences, documented in their own words, while biography is an account of a person’s life as written by someone else. Both biographies and memoirs have long histories, as our societal desire to document our lives and the lives of those around us is seemingly innate. Memoir and biography can grapple with a wide variety of people, themes, settings, and ideas. The genre is far-reaching, encompassing the memoirs of celebrities alongside deeply moving personal accounts of war or illness; Anne Frank’s diary is just as much a memoir as Anthony Bourdain’s travels across the world. David Sedaris, Frank McCourt, Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, and many other voices have shaped the genre, while others have worked to expand the definition, like Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel takes on the form. Adventure, family, sexuality, art, history, LGBTQIA+ experience, medical struggles, sports, the military — all of these topics and more find home in the biography and memoir audiobook genre.

The biography and memoir genre casts a light on the inner workings of real people’s lives, thoughts, and feelings. Though grouped together, biography and memoir do diverge. Although they share common themes — both are nonfiction accounts of someone’s life — memoir relies on a writer’s personal experiences, documented in their own words, while biography is an account of a person’s life as written by someone else. Both biographies and memoirs have long histories, as our societal desire to document our lives and the lives of those around us is seemingly innate. Memoir and biography can grapple with a wide variety of people, themes, settings, and ideas. The genre is far-reaching, encompassing the memoirs of celebrities alongside deeply moving personal accounts of war or illness; Anne Frank’s diary is just as much a memoir as Anthony Bourdain’s travels across the world. David Sedaris, Frank McCourt, Roxane Gay, Joan Didion, and many other voices have shaped the genre, while others have worked to expand the definition, like Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel takes on the form. Adventure, family, sexuality, art, history, LGBTQIA+ experience, medical struggles, sports, the military — all of these topics and more find home in the biography and memoir audiobook genre.