Bea Appleton

Female | Unspecified | over 10 minutes
Starts on page 1

EXTRACT: Pretty much everyone has it wrong about happiness. Everyone's always talking about happiness like it's something complete and whole and distinct, like you'd notice it if it happened to come by. But it's not like that. Happiness is ordinary misery without extraordinary fear. Or in a nutshell: Happiness is the temporary illusion that nothing is about to change for the worse. That's happiness.

Pearl Avalon/ Patsy Cline

Female | Unspecified | over 10 minutes
Starts on page 5

EXTRACT: In this country, people are always talkin' about dreams. You can be your dream. You can have your dream. You can live the dream. But that's just a clever way of gettin' people to shut up and stop complainin'. If people think they can have their dream, they stop makin' trouble. And then one day they wake up to the fact that not very many people live a dream. And that the best advice is not: Follow Your Dream. It's Adjust Your Dream.

Edith Piaf/ Edie Delamotte

Female | Unspecified | over 10 minutes
Starts on page 11

EXTRACT: In my library I see nineteen-year-old boys with fashionable holes all over their body, smelling of marijuana, listening to iPods playing music by rap singers calling their women bitches. At the same age, my father sat in a concentration camp, having blown up a bridge in defence of his country. Only a few years earlier, he'd been a little boy playing hopscotch in the summer dust of the Bois de Boulogne.

Billie Holiday/ Too Junior Jones

Female | Unspecified | over 10 minutes
Starts on page 17

EXTRACT: This great big silence descended over us. It drowned out the tinkling of the bar music and the low hubbub from the booth seats. It was the biggest, longest silence I ever heard. It was a silence that seemed to stretch way into the future to the very point at which a preacher intoned over my coffin: 'We are here to farewell Too Junior Jones. Let it be noted that no-one wrote about brassieres the way she did.'

Maria Callas/ Orla McDonagh

Female | Unspecified | over 10 minutes
Starts on page 25

EXTRACT: I'd seen her in the magazines, of course I had, who hadn't? All that yelling at people and hijinks, elevated her from being more than a voice, she was a celebrity. And that was in the day when it took more than glamorous liaisons with playboys and strapless Mainbocher evening gowns, to garner celebrity status, it took, shocking though it may be to modern ears, talent. Outsized talent, talent for beauty or imagination or elegance or wit.

Beatrice/Judy Garland

Female | Unspecified | 5 to 10 minutes
Starts on page 1

EXTRACT: Pretty much everyone has it wrong about happiness. Everyone's always talking about happiness like it's something complete and whole and distinct, like you'd notice it if it happened to come by. But it's not like that. Happiness is ordinary misery without extraordinary fear. Or in a nutshell: Happiness is the temporary illusion that nothing is about to change for the worse. That's happiness.