Here are 79 books that The Ugly Truth fans have personally recommended if you like
The Ugly Truth.
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I am a 1.5-generation Filipina who migrated to Australia in 1977 at the age of 17. As a migrant, I know the challenges of moving to a new country without friends and extended family. I have a PhD in history from the University of Michigan and am a professor of History at the University of New South Wales in Australia. I have written five books mostly on Filipino women’s history. My book on Filipino migration, which won the NSW Premier’s General History Prize (Australia) in 2022, analyses the migrant's heroic narrative—an account that resonates with my own migration story.
I recommend this book because it is a rare diary of a 12-14-year-old young girl living in the sugar plantations of Hawaii in the 1920s. As one of the few females in the predominantly Filipino male population in racially segregated America, which had anti-miscegenation laws, she confides that she has many suitors of men in their 20s.
She wrote: ‘Gosh, and I am only 12 years old—and already somebody is telling me about love’ (p. 45). I was surprised to read Angela discovers her mother had a lover, although this attests to women’s power because they are a minority. But I was horrified to read Angela’s very detailed account of the domestic violence her father inflicts on her mother when he catches the lovers.
Angeles Monrayo (1912-2000) began her diary on January 10, 1924, a few months before she and her father and older brother moved from a sugar plantation in Waipahu to Pablo Manlapit's strike camp in Honolulu. Here for the first time is a young Filipino girl's view of life in Hawai'i and central California in the first decades of the twentieth century - a significant and often turbulent period for immigrant and migrant labor in both settings. Angeles' vivid, simple language takes us into the heart of an early Filipino family as its members come to terms with poverty and racism…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am a writer and advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. Since 1998, I have encouraged them to find their voice and use it through my organization, Time To Tell. Being isolated is foundational to our experience, and our culture perpetuates the isolation by often refusing to address it, acknowledge it, or expose it, as well as not listening to–nor believing–survivors. This forces us to remain silent. I am certain that telling is healing. I lead writing circles for survivors to experience community and get support and encouragement. I recommend all these books not only for the wisdom offered but also the direct experience of not being alone in the reading.
Writing, journaling, writing my memoir and play, and writing morning pages (handwriting three pages as soon as I wake up) have all contributed greatly to my healing.
DeSalvo's book has helped me again and again when I get stuck and need a boost to get back to writing. Most pages have highlights I've made in blue marker that jump out at me, reminding me to write, such as "recover the person or self we lost." Amen!
In this inspiring book, based on her twenty years of research, highly acclaimed author and teacher Louise DeSalvo reveals the healing power of writing. DeSalvo shows how anyone can use writing as a way to heal the emotional and physical wounds that are an inevitable part of life. Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won't help you; in fact, there's abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging.
DeSalvo's program is based on the best available and most recent scientific studies about the efficacy of using writing as a restorative tool. With insight and…
The topic of immigration is deeply in my heart because I am an immigrant myself. I came from El Salvador to the United States when I was 14 years old. Now, I am a teacher in an elementary school. Most of my students are immigrants or children of immigrants. Children and families immigrate around the world looking for better opportunities. These books were written by immigrant authors or authors who had lived closely with immigrants. The stories are real and describe the authentic journey, and experiences of children and families traveling from their native countries to the United States.
Journals are important to write our feelings, hopes, and dreams. In this wonderful book, Amada uses her journal to write about her journey from Mexico to Los Angeles. Amada records her fears, hopes, and dreams for their new life in her diary. What if she can’t learn English? How can she leave her best friend? Along the way, Amada learns that with her family's love and her belief in herself, she can weather any change.
One night, Amada overhears her parents whisper about moving from Mexico to Los Angeles, where greater opportunity awaits. As she and her family make the journey north, Amada records her fears, hopes, and dreams for their new life in her diary. What if she can’t learn English? How can she leave her best friend? Along the way, Amada learns that with her family's love and her belief in herself, she can weather any change. With humor and insight, Pérez recounts the story of her family’s immigration to America. Maya Christina Gonzalez' vibrant artwork captures every detail of their journey.
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I am a historian, and I am fascinated by the interplay and tensions between our moral and material lives. In my books, I try to recover how people in earlier periods thought about good and bad and why they acted the way they did. I try to understand how norms and customs change over time and how we came to think of our own as “normal,” which was all but normal not so long ago. I do not believe historians should play being prophets, but I do believe history can help us make better sense of the present.
As a historian, I constantly try to get into the hearts and minds of people in the past.
For socialist East Germany, these diaries by the writer Brigitte Reimann let us see what it meant to be a woman in the GDR, to live and love, to build socialism, and then, in 1961, to see the Berlin Wall close off one’s world suddenly.
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men.
Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author's love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state's call for artists…
I wrestled with big questions as a child, particularly concerning gender inequality. I was aware of the issue as young as 7 years old. I didn’t even feel comfortable challenging the way things were until I was a young adult. Thus began my journey of researching, studying, and embracing women’s rights and gender equality. I feel very passionate about presenting those big questions earlier in the lives of girls, so they start feeling comfortable challenging the places where things don’t make sense, or the areas where inequality still exists. There is a need for more books like these in the market, but I hope you enjoy this list!
Ratchet, the main character, goes against all the stereotypical norms: she doesn’t like fashion, she works on cars and understands mechanical concepts, and, by virtue of her dad, gravitates toward environmentalism.
There’s so much to love about this book: it blends poetry and prose, the supporting characters (including Ratchet’s dad) are often hilariously entertaining, and the story is one of Ratchet finding herself and learning to accept her own unique self.
This heartwarming, coming of age story is the perfect book for middle school girls. Featuring a strong female character named Ratchet, who identifies as a motherless daughter, this relatable story with its illustrated format is particularly suited for 9-12 year old kids who love graphic novels.
If only getting a new life were as easy as getting a new notebook. But it's not.
It's the first day of school for all the kids in the neighborhood. But not for me. I'm homeschooled. That means nothing new. No new book…
I have been passionate about making, reading, and studying comics for my whole life. When I first encountered autobiographical comics, they were all by women who I looked up to for their ability to tackle their lives with both words and images. This is a small list and biased towards the cartoonists I first encountered in the world of female autobiographical comics. There is so much more out there. I love how the flexibility and history of the comic form have allowed for so much blending of genres and styles.
This slightly fictionalized but largely autobiographical book is adapted from the author’s childhood diary pages and reconfigured into a sharp, beautiful, and honest narrative about a fifteen-year-old’s coming of age.
Gloeckner treats her protagonist with the kind of respect and dignity that young women are rarely afforded, and the result is an incredible account of youth, sexuality, abuse, and growing up that honors teenage girls and all they are capable of.
First released in 2002, this provocative, critically acclaimed novel is now a major motion picture starring Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, and Alexander Skarsgård.
“I don't remember being born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I guess it was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness.” So begins the wrenching diary of Minnie Goetze, a fifteen-year-old girl longing for love and acceptance and struggling with her own precocious sexuality. After losing her virginity to her mother's boyfriend, Minnie pursues a string of sexual encounters (with both boys and girls) while experimenting with…
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
In second grade my teacher told me I should be a writer—I haven’t wavered in my path since. I was a voracious reader as a child and regularly snatched books off my mom’s night table. My love for flawed characters grew with each book I devoured. I felt a connection with these characters, which fueled my dream to become a writer. When I was twenty-one years old and studying writing, I wrote in my journal, “I want to write books that make people cry.” I love to explore the gray areas in life, and I’m honored that readers have told me my books do make them cry (and laugh).
I love this book because I love imperfect, flawed heroines…and as a fifty-something woman, Nan spoke to me.
How many times do we think of running away—even if just for a bit—but responsibilities and maybe even fear keep us from acting? Not Nan—she takes off, simply leaving an abrupt note for her husband, Martin (which takes place before the book opens). The narrative alternates between letters to Martin and journal entries (Nan spills her thoughts into a turquoise leather tooled journal with a black string fastener and a silver button—I love that detail).
The lyrical descriptions of each place Nan visits are so vivid I felt like I was riding shotgun. And I loved taking that journey with Nan and living in her head, because honestly…being in her head felt a lot like being in my own head, flaws and all.
“This is not a novel about a woman leaving home but rather about a human being finding her way back.”—Chicago Tribune
In the middle of her life, Nan decides to leave her husband at home and begin an impromptu trek across the country, carrying with her a turquoise leather journal she intends to fill. The Pull of the Moon is a novel about a woman coming to terms with issues of importance to all women. In her journal, Nan addresses the thorniness—and the allure—of marriage, the sweet ties to children, and the gifts and lessons that come from random encounters…
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!
More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway.
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…
As one of Australia’s bestselling observational comedy authors, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to write about the fact that I’ve recently become my parents’ go-to expert on just about everything. From solving technological dilemmas to coaching through society’s ever-changing correctness and reminding them to eat their greens, the elders in my life have inspired me to look at the funny side to aging, and to explore how a middle aged child sometimes crosses over from being helpful to just plain interfering.
Okay, so this book is predominantly about the struggles of a boy going through puberty but its depiction of the magnetic older characters of Bert and Queenie in the Alderman Cooper Sunshine Home are among the funniest scenes in the book.
Of every book I’ve ever read, it remains one of the most hilarious and if you’ve read it previously, it’s well worth another visit.
I pride myself on my independence and sense of adventure. I started traveling the world with my family when I was 3 and I haven’t stopped since. When you travel, you have to cope with new situations on a daily basis and navigate different obstacles to meet your needs. An interest in adventure and how people cope with new situations are the biggest reasons why I have a passion for books dealing with overcoming obstacles. Before I retired to Spain, I was a teacher of students between 10 and 15 years old. I chose two of the books I recommended to read to my students when I was a teacher.
This book captured me from start to finish. Like my book, this story is told in a gripping journal format. A meteor knocks the moon off its orbit and this causes catastrophic consequences on earth. Summer turns to a bitterly cold winter and Miranda and her two brothers and mother must figure out how they will survive in such harsh conditions. Having enough food to survive is a constant concern. This book helps us realize that when things get really awful, all that matters is food, water, staying warm, and remaining together as a family. All other concerns fall away.
New York Times bestseller! A heart-stopping post-apocalyptic thriller that's "absorbing from first to last page."*
When a meteor knocks the moon closer to earth, Miranda, a high school sophomore, takes shelter with her family.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, Life as We Knew It chronicles the human struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.
As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited…
