September 2024: What All the Badass Women are Reading, Watching and Listening to this Month
As we move into the busiest publication time of the year, I’ve pulled together for you a curated collection of the best badass books coming out this month! Plus, I’ve got new (and returning!) shows and more - all FOR badass women, BY badass women!
Named “Ketanji Onyika,” meaning “Lovely One,” Justice Jackson learned from her educator parents to take pride in her heritage since birth. She describes her resolve as a young girl to honor this legacy and realize her dreams: from hearing stories of her grandparents and parents breaking barriers in the segregated South, to honing her voice in high school as an oratory champion and student body president, to graduating magna cum laude from Harvard, where she performed in musical theater and improv and participated in pivotal student organizations. Here Justice Jackson pulls back the curtain, marrying the public record of her life with what is less known. She reveals what it takes to advance in the legal profession when most people in power don’t look like you, and to reconcile a demanding career with the joys and sacrifices of marriage and motherhood.
Elizabeth Arden was a household name on six continents and a millionaire several times over before her death in 1966. Arden counted British royalty and social elites from the overlapping worlds of New York, Hollywood, London, and Paris among her clients. She revolutionized skin care and cosmetics, making it acceptable for all women to embrace glamour and wear makeup—not just actresses and prostitutes. She created a successful international business empire before women gained the vote and at a time when virtually no woman owned or ran a national company. She developed the first luxury spa and insisted on a holistic understanding of health and beauty. Unconventional and driven, Arden fervently believed that every woman could be beautiful. In an astounding rags-to-riches tale, Cordery delivers a compelling picture of a modern CEO whose career provides a model for aspiring businesses to this day.
This is for those of you who didn’t get enough Bama Rush TikTok. Or maybe too much Bama Rush TikTok lol…
It’s been ten years since Priscilla and her Zeta Phi Zeta sorority sisters graduated college. Ten years since they were all in the same room together. Ten years since one of them died. And now the killer has been released from prison on a technicality, days before their ten-year reunion. Priscilla decides that the party must go on; and besides, an epic reunion bash might be the perfect distraction. Back together, the Zetas party like it’s 2012, and it’s wild. Maybe too wild. When one of them doesn’t return home after the party, Priscilla begins to realize that there might be more to their sister’s murder and that someone is out for blood.
Kelly Bishop’s long, storied career has been defined by landmark acting and performing achievements, but it is probably her iconic role as matriarch Emily in the modern classic Gilmore Girls that cemented her legacy. Now, Bishop reflects on her remarkable life and looks towards the future with The Third Gilmore Girl. She shares some of her greatest stories and the life lessons she’s learned on her journey. From her early transition from dance to drama, to marrying young to a compulsive gambler, to the losses and achievements she experienced—among them marching for women’s rights and losing her second husband to cancer—Bishop offers a rich, genuine celebration of her life.
A delightfully subversive essay collection from Laci Mosley, host of the award-winning “Scam Goddess” podcast, about the frauds, cons, and schemes that make up our world—and how the scammer mindset has affected her own upbringing, career, friendships, love life, and more.
In She-Wolves, award-winning historian Paulina Bren tells the story of how women infiltrated Wall Street from the swinging sixties to 9/11―starting at a time when “No Ladies” signs hung across the doors of its luncheon clubs and (more discretely) inside its brokerage houses and investment banks. If the wolves of Wall Street made a show of their ferocity, the she-wolves did so with subtlety and finesse. Research analysts signed their reports with genderless initials. Muriel “Mickie” Siebert, the first woman to buy a seat on the NYSE, threatened she’d have port-a-potties delivered if the exchange didn’t finally install a ladies’ room near the dining room. The infamous 1996 Boom-Boom Room class action lawsuit, filed by women at Smith Barney, pulled back the curtain on a bawdy subculture where unapologetic sexism and racism were the norm. As engaging as it is enraging, She-Wolves is an illuminating deep dive into the collision of women, finance, and New York.
The women of the Cohen family are in crisis. Triggered by the death of their patriarch, Rudy, the glue that held them all together, everyone’s lives soon take a dramatic turn. Shelly, the younger of the two Cohen sisters, runs off to the West Coast to immerse herself in the emerging (and lucrative) world of technology. Her sister, Nancy, gets married at the age of twenty-one to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle, while their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami, trying to forget the past even as it haunts her. But they each learn in different ways that running from the past can’t save you—and then must make life-altering decisions about what they want their family to be and what they need to move forward.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined. For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude―a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
This next one is a much better (more badass!) alternative to Hillbilly Elegy…
In Bone of the Bone, Sarah Smarsh brings her graceful storytelling and incisive critique to the challenges that define our times—class division, political fissures, gender inequality, environmental crisis, media bias, the rural-urban gulf. Smarsh, a journalist who grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas and was the first in her family to graduate from college, has long focused on cultural dissonance that many in her industry neglected until recently. Now, this thought-provoking collection of more than thirty of her highly relevant, previously published essays from the past decade (2013–2024)—ranging from personal narratives to news commentary—demonstrates a life and a career steeped in the issues that affect our collective future.
And, finally, this is one for all of us book lovers who also love good design. It is brimming with photos of cozy places to read and creative ways to display books at home!
And here are some new (and returning) show I think you’ll enjoy!
In The Perfect Couple – based on the novel by the same name by author Elin Hildebrand - the prestigious Winbury family is gathering at their Nantucket home to celebrate the wedding of one of the three Winbury sons. The gaiety goes awry when the bridal party finds the bride's best friend, Merritt, drowned, and all signs point to foul play. You can watch the trailer here.
I love Elin Hildebrand’s books! But is she retiring from authoring beach reads? It’s complicated. Read more about it here.
Season 4 of Only Murders in the Building is back on Hulu! Check out the trailer here. There’s a really fun twist in store for this season!
Speaking of murder, it’s almost spooky season! Marvel’s Agatha All Along premieres on Disney+ next week! You can watch the trailer here.
I am addicted to the Notes app in my phone! In fact, that’s where I keep most of my ideas for this newsletter! So, I enjoyed this article suggesting ways the app can make me happier and more organized! I already added one of the suggested folders!