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Hello, fellow bookworms!

I hope everyone is ready, because we are about three weeks away from the Mary Jane McCord Planned Parenthood Book Sale! Held from September 10-20, this treasured annual event will feature not only books but also vinyl, CDs, DVDs, games and puzzles, and more, as well as a special after-hours event! Don’t miss this chance to support the amazing work of Planned Parenthood, which provides access to much-needed healthcare, and also pick up your next favorite read. I’ll see you there!

This week, Tiana Molony brings us a collection of memoirs by women that remind us of the power of resilience. From earth-shattering divorce to a famous sexual assault trial to unlearning the pervasive power of religious conditioning, these three women battled extreme circumstances and lived to tell the tale.

Happy reading!

—Tessa, allbooked@independent.com

As mentioned in my previous All Booked review, I prefer to read nonfiction. I can’t quite pinpoint the reasoning; I suppose true stories strike a certain chord. I suppose I feel a kind of connection to the author, knowing that what I’m reading is true, especially when those books include anecdotes so wild and truly insane that I question their validity.

Such was the case with the three memoirs below, all by women authors. So often, while reading each one, I found myself wondering how some of these stories actually happened to real women, and how on earth those women made it out the other end.

Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden

We start first with Strangers by Belle Burden, a raw and gut-wrenching tale of divorce, with an all-too-familiar plot: husband cheats with a younger woman, takes the money, leaves the children, and starts anew.

It goes like this: One evening, Burden receives a call from her husband’s mistress’s husband (classic), who says something along the lines of, “Our spouses are sleeping together,” which sets everything off.

She confronts her husband, Henry P. Davis, whom she calls James in the book, and he confirms the affair. She is unsure what to do, and before she can decide, he tells her he is leaving and wants nothing to do with his kids. Oh, and did I mention this is all happening during lockdown?

Not long after walking out, he returns from New York — where he’s been cozied up with his mistress — back to the pair’s home on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where they were quarantining during lockdown, to tell the children that they are separating. Oh, but not before asking Burden if she can “make him a sandwich.” (The fucking audacity.) The book is full of endless, fist-clenching encounters like that.

Perhaps what draws so much attention to her story — as of this writing, it has spent a whopping 30 weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list — is the fact that Burden is an heiress, a Vanderbilt descendant, and granddaughter of socialite and magazine editor Babe Paley.

Unlike many other single mothers in the midst of a divorce, Burden is well-off financially. However, throughout the book, she talks about financial trouble and the prenup she and her husband signed, which stated that anything earned during the marriage would not be split 50/50 and would belong to the earner.

A New Yorker investigation found her financial claims to be exaggerated. Some were simply false. Still, given that the core of the book is focused on her shit ex-husband, her fans — me included — don’t seem all that perturbed.

Because, really, in the end, it doesn’t really matter how much money she has. Her story is not about that. It’s about betrayal. It is about misplaced shame. About how she picked herself up and put herself back together again.

Here’s one of my favorite lines to sum up this review: “I felt in my bones an acceptance of men behaving badly,” writes Burden, “a value in not calling them out, in protecting a man’s belief in his own importance, and a premium placed on keeping such things private.”

Know My Name by Chanel Miller

It was January 2015 when a Stanford University student, 19-year-old Brock Turner, sexually assaulted an unconscious 22-year-old Chanel Miller. Not too far into the assault, he is caught and chased down by two Swedish students, who pin Turner to the ground and call the police.

Miller wakes up in the hospital the next morning, pine needles in her hair, utterly oblivious to the events of the night before. She is told that she was found passed out and half naked. She is told by police that they have reason to believe she was assaulted.

In her book, Miller reflects on the one-and-a-half-year criminal trial that follows. How she could not work. How she had panic attacks and nightmares. How she was faced with accusations of lying. How people cared more about what she wore the night of the assault and how much she drank than the assault itself.

“I didn’t know that money could make the cell doors swing open,” writes Miller. “I didn’t know that if a woman was drunk when the violence occurred, she wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

In the end, she would read a 7,000-word victim impact statement heard around the world, inspiring survivors everywhere, only for Judge Aaron Persky to sentence Turner to just six months in county jail and three years of probation. A sentence Miller describes as a slap in the face.

With sharp, witty prose and unflinching clarity, in Know My Name, Miller tells her story. She doesn’t shy away from the details; she lays it all on the table, forcing the reader to confront the realities of her assault. In doing so, she casts shame away from her and to where shame should always lie: on the rapist, on Turner.

Educated by Tara Westover

Multiple times while reading Educated by Tara Westover, I had to remind myself that most of the events took place in the 1980s and ’90s, even though her family’s living conditions and sordid beliefs felt almost entirely anachronistic, belonging more to the 100 years that preceded them.

Born and raised in rural Idaho, Westover comes from a survivalist Mormon family. Due to her father’s paranoia and complete distrust of the government, neither she nor her siblings receive proper schooling or medical care. They have no birth certificates, and they spend their days working on the family’s scrap metal farm or mixing tinctures for her mother’s herbal medicine business.

To give you an example of just how archaic the family’s beliefs are, here is just one story she recalls in her book. One day, her brother Luke, working on the scrap metal farm and, while wearing gasoline-soaked jeans, catches fire. His burns are severe. He is in agonizing pain. In lieu of going to the hospital, her parents nix modern pain medication and “treat” the burns with a mix of herbal remedies.

“I believed hospital drugs were an abomination to God,” Westover writes, “but if I had morphine that night, I’d have given it to Luke.”

Eventually, Westover begins to see through the cracks in her father’s claims. She takes matters into her own hands and teaches herself math and grammar using the textbooks available to her. She is 17 years old when she leaves home and enters school for the first time, where she learns that everything she’s been taught is a lie. Eventually, miraculously, she earns her PhD from the University of Cambridge.

In all, it’s an extraordinary story of success and resilience despite the meager cards she was dealt.

—Tiana Molony

FROM OUR PAGES

We’ve had some great author visits and interviews recently, so don’t miss out. Here is some of our book-related coverage from the last two weeks! Read all this and more at Independent.com.

“History with Hulse: Former Santa Barbara News-Press Reporter Jane Hulse Releases Third Novel, Spanktown Papers” by Meaghan Clark Tiernan

“Santa Barbara Author Shares Lessons from Caring for Brother After His Traumatic Brain Injury” by Tiana Molony

UPCOMING BOOK EVENTS

Below, you will find a few bookish events coming up in Santa Barbara. If you are hosting a bookish event in Santa Barbara, be sure to submit the event to our online events calendar.

Chaucer’s Book Talk and Signing: Terrell JA Winder, Shameless: The Making of Black Gay Identities in L.A .

Tuesday, August 18, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books

Drop-In Nature Journaling: Birds, Blooms, and Bugs
Wednesday, August 19, 2 p.m. | S.B. Museum of Natural History

Poetry Reading with Latine Poets Carlos Andrés Gomez & Brent Ameneyro
Wednesday, August 19, 5:30 p.m. | S.B. Central Library

Community Workshop: Shape the Future of the Library
Thursday, August 20, 4 p.m. | Montecito Library

Chaucer’s Book Talk and Signing: Jeffrey Hoelle, Cultivated: Plants, Hair, and the Aesthetic of Control
Tuesday, August 25, 6 p.m. | Chaucer’s Books

Library Services Orientation for Teens
Wednesday, August 25, 5 p.m. | S.B. Central Library

Launch Pad 2026 Summer Reading Series
Thursday, August 27, 4 and 8 p.m. | The New Vic, Ensemble Theatre Company

Sensory Friendly Storytime
Friday, August 28, 4:45 p.m. | S.B. Central Library

S.B. SPOTLIGHT

We at the Independent get many books sent to us by area authors, sometimes too many! It’s practically impossible for us to read and review them all, but just because we are busy bees does not mean that they aren’t worth the attention. In an attempt to not completely drop the ball, we have compiled a list of books here that are either written by a Santa Barbara author, feature someone in our community, or have another tie to Santa Barbara. I urge you to look through this list. Perhaps you will find your new favorite read!

The following are the most recent titles that have been sent to us.

The Future Is Short: Contemporary Short Plays for High School and College Students, edited by Mitchell Thomas

If you are a local author and would like us to feature your book in this section, please email allbooked@independent.com with the subject line “S.B. Spotlight.”

Book Reviews Courtesy of CALIFORNIA REVIEW OF BOOKS*

Thanks to the generous contributions of David Starkey, Brian Tanguay and their team of reviewers at California Review of Books, we are able to provide a steady stream of book reviews via our content partnership. Recent reviews at Independent.com include:

Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old by Mary Beard; review by David Starkey

Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive: Stories by Alison Gadsby; review by Brian Tanguay

*At the present time, all of the Independent’s book reviews are provided in collaboration with California Review of Books (calirb.com).