Women Like Us: A Memoir

Product Information

It takes a brave person to open up the way Amanda has, and I truly applaud her. I would be giving her the hugest of hugs right now if she was in front of me. What a truly wonderful, heartbreaking, emotional, life affirming, funny and truly soul bearing book from one of my favourite authors! I only found Amanda Prowse in 2015 and since then have devoured every single book of hers as soon as they are published. She writes with such insight into normal lives dealing with extraordinary situations that I was intrigued to see how her autobiography fared, it certainly did not disappoint. Mrs Prowse is only a year older than me and her life and mine have some similarities, although I do not have her gift of words! This book only served to cement that I think she has a camera peering into my mind! The book was amusing and heartbreaking, sometimes in the same sentence but I could not put it down. It had me crying with sadness and crying with happiness, so I suggest anyone of a similar age keeps the tissues handy!

After this explanation of writing the narrator talks about what happens when the daughter shows her mother her writings for the first time. She describes the mother’s disappointment when her daughter explains that writing will be her life’s work. For the mother, the sacrifices she made were too great to be repaid with just writing. The narrator then explains the situation from the mother’s perspective. Where she’s from, writers are tortured and killed if they are men, or called “lying whores,” raped, and then killed if they are women. The only people who write where she’s from are politicians, and they almost always end up in prison eating their own waste. The mother thinks their family needs a nurse, not a prisoner. She reminds her daughter that there were 999 hardworking women that came before her daughter. 999 women who toiled and sacrificed, and her daughter comes with a ratty notebook? Unacceptable. A popular TV and radio personality, Amanda is well known for her insightful observations and infectious humour.

Customer reviews

Jenn Ashworth outside her former high school in Penwortham, Lancashire. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian I’ll be honest, I’m not a big nonfiction reader and that includes memoirs. The only other memoir I’ve read is Michelle Obama’s Becoming, so this should be a big deal. Haha! Ok, not really, but I had an added interest. This is someone I have met and respect, someone who I have plans to stay up all night talking to and ice cream with when I make a trip to England. Apparently, I need to rethink the ice cream thing though based on the confession in the book. But I wanted to learn how she has become the person and author she is.

While her life may be excellent and a dream in many ways, this book also shows that not everything has been so easy. She has lived through many trials and tribulations, some of which have almost broken her. Medical conditions, multiple surgeries, loss, abuse, and multiple miscarriages. An undiagnosed medical condition, loss, abuse, miscarriages, and that overwhelming feeling of never being good enough or thin enough. The author has battled many health concerns with courage. Also, the author describes her disappointments and how she reflects and learns from them. Amanda Browse also mentions how society portrays how women should look. After some attempts at “following” what is expected, the author does what is best for her. As the author ages, she mentions the pressures placed on women to look younger. The author uses wit to describe how she spent hours getting human hair extensions. When she and her husband started to think about who the hair belonged to, she spent hours having them removed. Women Like Us spoke to me on so many different levels and I devoured it. I have already pressed it into the hands of my friends telling them that at last someone has put into words how we are feeling now we are in our fabulous 50s. Beautifully written with poignant moments of emotional intensity, this is a must read for every single woman who has ever read an Amanda Prowse book and wondered how on earth she consistently delivers female characters we find relatable and fascinating-the answers are all here.Amanda also shares the joys in her life. Actually having a baby against all the odds. Finding her soul mate despite being convinced she wouldn’t bother with another partner. The difficult journey to getting her first book published in her forties. My thoughts: wow! What an raw, honest and simply stunning memoir that Amanda has gifted us. I hadn’t read any of her fiction titles but I knew I needed to read her story. I can relate to so much of what she battles through. Anxiety with food and struggling with acceptance has been tough for me as well and I felt that Amanda was reading my thoughts! I want to say thank you for being so brave to put your entire story out there for us to cheer you on and remind ourselves that we are enough and worth it. Regardless of what is increasingly experienced on social media - intrinsic value (popularity, self-worth, acceptance, - really anything that matters ) does not hinge on beauty, youth, or the size of your thighs. Even after I finished, I needed a couple of days to process it all. I normally jump right into my next book, and I didn’t open another one for a couple of days. (I know that may not sound like a long time, but for a reader, two days is an eternity.)

Grab the reader’s attention from the off You can’t hit us with everything at once. You don’t even need to start with a major episode. But you do have to draw us in, establish a voice and hint at what lies ahead. Amanda Prowse has built a bestselling career on the lives of fictional women. Now she turns the pen on her own life. For a long time I have been a fan of the books written by Amanda Prowse, so I grabbed this opportunity to read her biography and find out more about the person behind the books.

A Note From the Publisher

Give signposts Find ways to help the reader along, especially if you have a complex plot and a large cast list. You’re our guide and we need to be able to follow you – and to trust you to tell us the truth. Amanda’s story is heartbreaking and honest and brave and uplifting and makes me want to be better for myself. She offers up her lifelong journey here, and I have to be honest, it took me a couple of weeks to get through it. It made me reflect on my own struggles. Sometimes it was hard—really hard—and I couldn’t bring myself to keep reading. I needed a break to really appreciate what I felt. With kids to look after, an ailing mother and a neglected husband, life is full for Emma Fountain— toofull, she realises, when she wakes up in IKEA after falling asleep in one of the show beds. Only her crazy, funny best friend Roz keeps her sane. But when Roz climbs in through her bathroom window one day to deliver terrible news, Emma’s belief that she can find a way around any obstacle crumbles in the face of a problem she just can’t fix. Like Amanda, I have always loved to write. I love Amandas books as they are always written with love, emotion and from the heart. In this memoir we meet the woman behind the books and it is so interesting and surprising as I discovered that Amanda has had a challenging life. This is quite different to the life I imagined Authors to have, yet they are all normal people just with a fabulous talent for words, so I shouldnt have been surprised. The book made me realise that none of us are perfect and thats okay. Battles in life make us stronger and as long as we can accept who we are life can throw what it likes at us.

And yet, the narrator argues, it was the voices of these women, whispering and murmuring in her head, which pushed the daughter to write in the first place. These 999 women urged her to speak through the tip of her pencil. These 999 women wanted the daughter to tell her mother that women like them do speak, even if it’s in a language that’s hard to understand. These 999 women form an army around the daughter and are always with her. They boil in her blood and their names roll off of her tongue. And their transcribed stories become the daughter’s testament “to the way that these women lived and died and lived again” (Danticat 225). Analysis Amanda opens up completely about all the ups and downs in her life, helping her readers who are facing similar struggles. From her agony and numerous operations as a child with a crumbling pelvis, surviving cancer, through her first failed marriage, many miscarriages, issues with her weight and food addiction, dealing with a child with mental health issues, to the menopause and facing an ageing face and body with positivity. Other novels by Amanda Prowse include A Mother’s Story, which won the coveted Sainsbury’s eBook of the Year Award. Perfect Daughter was selected as a World Book Night title in 2016 and The Boy Between a World Book Night title in 2022. She has been described by the Daily Mail as ‘the queen of family drama’.Amanda Prowse, the author of “Women Like Us, A Memoir,” has written an honest and heartfelt story. I appreciate that the author shares her most intimate and revealing memories of her challenging life. Many women will be able to relate to many of the topics that are discussed. Amanda Prowse has been my favourite author since she started writing, because of how she writes. I have loved all her books, have met her, and until reading this book, thought I knew her! What I didn't know, was how much in awe of her, and how much I now admire the woman she is ! Amanda is a huge supporter of libraries and having become a proud ambassador for The Reading Agency, works tirelessly to promote reading, especially in disadvantaged areas. Amanda's ambition is to create stories that keep people from turning the bedside lamp off at night, great characters that ensure you take every step with them and tales that fill your head so you can't possibly read another book until the memory fades... I felt as if I was sitting across the table having a coffee with this remarkable woman. I love that her views are so similar to mine on so many things.