Archive – Books

Beloved (1987)

Beloved is Toni Morrison’s masterpiece, a novel that confronts the afterlife of slavery with unflinching emotional power. It follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of her baby.
Read more: Beloved (1987)
The Color Purple (1982)

The Color Purple is one of the most quietly powerful novels of the twentieth century. First published in 1982, it tells Celie’s story through letters written in her own unpolished voice. She writes to God because she has no one else to listen.
Read more: The Color Purple (1982)
Open Book (2020)

Jessica Simpson was never supposed to be the one who told the truth. She was the punchline, the reality-TV blonde, the pop star treated as a brand more than a person.
Read more: Open Book (2020)
The Vixen Manual (2009)

Written after the shockwaves of Confessions of a Video Vixen and The Vixen Diaries, it turns lived experience into strategy. Where the earlier books focused on what happened to Steffans, this one tries to answer a harder question: how do you move through the same dangerous terrain on your own terms?
Read more: The Vixen Manual (2009)
The Vixen Diaries (2007)

The Vixen Diaries is the story of what happens after a woman tells the truth in public and survives the impact. It follows the emotional and cultural fallout of Confessions of a Video Vixen, shifting the focus from revelation to consequence.
Read more: The Vixen Diaries (2007)
I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022)

I’m Glad My Mom Died opens with a title that provokes, but the memoir itself is quiet, controlled, and emotionally exact. Jennette McCurdy writes about a childhood shaped by pressure, fear, and obedience. What drives the narrative is not the shock of the events, but the calm precision in how she remembers them. The story…
Read more: I’m Glad My Mom Died (2022)
The Woman in Me (2023)

The Woman in Me arrives as a long-delayed correction, a memoir written in clipped, steady fragments that feel like someone finally taking control of her own paper trail. Its emotional engine isn’t scandal but reclamation. And beneath the celebrity context, the book sits firmly inside the motif of Silence as Survival: what it costs to…
Read more: The Woman in Me (2023)
Push (1996)

Push is one of those novels that feels less like a story and more like a raw record of survival. Told in the voice of Precious Jones, an illiterate, abused teenager in Harlem, the book refuses distance. It drops you into her world without a safety rail and lets you hear her language before anyone…
Read more: Push (1996)
Confessions of a Video Vixen (2005)

Some memoirs arrive with a kind of jolt, the sense that they have been waiting for the culture to finally hear them. Confessions of a Video Vixen is one of those books. Karrine Steffans writes from inside a world that rewards a woman’s shine but ignores her pulse, exposing how the body becomes both invitation…
Read more: Confessions of a Video Vixen (2005)