This audio book is beautifully and emotively read by Amanda herself, as are all of her audio books. I giggled with her, I cried big fat tears for her. Best known for writing about fictional women, I wasn't too sure what to expect from Amanda Prowse's new book, her own memoir.

Women Like Us: A Memoir is an emotionally uplifting and relatable true memoir of one of my favourite authors life and this book has only made me love her even more. The motives for writing memoir vary widely, from greed (celebs can command lucrative advances) to propaganda (the author’s experiences set down in the hope of effecting social change) to catharsis (a healing of one’s own – and others’ – wounds) to memorialising (to preserve a story that would otherwise be lost). Whatever their motive, most of the life-writing students I’ve worked with over the years are level-headed. They write to make sense of their lives or to narrate a piece of family history. Sometimes they embargo what they’ve written, because the material is too sensitive; sometimes they publish it privately, for family and friends; sometimes it goes out into the world. The potential impact on others is an increasing consideration. All universities now have ethics committees, and life writing is treated much as sociology or anthropology would be, with consent a major issue: have the “participants” (ie any living person who appears in the memoir) given their permission to be written about? 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 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.This memoir was a rollercoaster to say the least, incredibly raw and real - the author really laid everything bare. It’s a story of real life, success, struggles and mainly hope for everything to come right in the end. It’s not all rainbows and unicorns, but I think that’s what makes it a really special read. 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. But most of the times, I was in love with everything else the author has to tell about her life as if it's someone else's story all over again. Reading such memoirs gave me a lot to think about but I came to realise that even though we humans are miles apart, our lives are interconnected through similar experiences and the things we feel and go through.

The only thing that I disagreed with is where Amanda refers to her readers as strangers. However to her millions of fans around the world, we all already feel that Amanda is a friend. She and her husband always take the time to reply to her fans in her own down to earth fashion, and I challenge anyone to finish this book and not want to count Amanda as a friend. An undiagnosed medical condition, loss, abuse, miscarriages, and that overwhelming feeling of never being good enough or thin enough. We live in a world where, how others perceive us and the way we live our lives impacts on the way we feel about ourselves, making us mostly insecure. Amanda finally (after many years and much soul searching) overcame that pressure. It wasn’t easy, and it meant facing some difficult conversations with loved ones, things that had been left unsaid for far too long.However, there have been events and situations that have tested her and almost broken her at times. Use the same storytelling devices that novelists use – plot, character, voice, motif and structure There has to be development, a reason to read on. A sense of style, too: just because it’s non-fiction doesn’t mean it can’t be “literary”. She has always come across as a true, down to earth, 'real' woman, who has had her fair share of struggles, including being an army wife, battling cancer, and how her family coped with the depression her son Josiah went through due to them both writing about it.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious and alwaysentirely relatable, Prowse details her early struggles with self-esteem and how she coped with the frustrating expectations others had of how she should live. Most poignantly, she delves into her toxic relationship with food, the hardest addiction she has ever known, and how she journeyed out the other side. This memoir got really close to my heart as I was able to relate to the author's family when she was growing up, got so crazy about books and reading, how the experiences and the people we meet during our developmental stages leave an impact on us for the rest of our lives. 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.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.