Memoir

Lorraine Bracco's character on HBO's The Sopranos has the unenviable job of psychoanalyzing mob boss Tony Soprano. Bracco's career has plenty of mob connections: She received an Academy Award nomination for her performance in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. Now she has written a memoir, On the Couch.

Woodson won the National Book Award for young people's literature in 2014 for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, and is a finalist for another NBA this year. Originally broadcast Dec. 20, 2014.

The 1960s show Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In turned actress Goldie Hawn into a star. Later, she starred in the films Cactus Flower, Swing Shift, and Private Benjamin. Hawn's autobiography, written with Wendy Holden, is Goldie: A Lotus Grows in the Mud.

Patti Niemi has been a percussionist for the San Francisco Opera Orchestra since 1992. She speaks with Fresh Air's Sam Briger about performance anxiety, muscle memory and her memoir, Sticking it Out.

As the wife of a Navy fighter pilot, memoirist Rachel Starnes has had much of her life — including where she lives and how often she gets to live with her husband — determined by his career.

After starring in Broadway shows like The Music Man and Candide, Cook struggled with addiction, then staged a successful second career as a cabaret singer. Her new memoir is Then and Now.

In Susan Faludi's new memoir In The Darkroom she investigates the enigma that always has been her father, and considers the various strains of gender, ethnicity, religion and family that, perhaps, go into making someone who they are.

Writer Claire Hoffman describes her childhood living in a community devoted to Transcendental Meditation. She was meditating at the age of 3.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.