After the loss of my first baby, I became obsessed with understanding the emotions I was feeling and how to find myself again. I began reading memoirs during this time as a way to connect and find myself. While each story carries its own merits and uniqueness, I found I could take away bits of wisdom from each. How does one figure out who they are when they have lost something so important to themselves? How does one reconcile relationships within their own family? And how does one deal with the mental health toll that inevitably life can take? These questions are my focus when I read and write.
I went into reading this book to help me learn about memoir writing, and I left the book in awe of how raw and real it was when dealing with a topic like the death of a loved one. It is a great example of how memoirs can reach every reader through the relatability of experiences, even when our experiences can never (and will never) be exactly the same.
Didion made me feel the deep grief with her over the loss of her husband, yet she also pulled me into her shifting cognitions and beliefs about how life carries on after a great loss.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were just…
I love this book because it took me on a surprise adventure through the life of a black boy (and young man) raised in the South. I met Laymon at a writing workshop a few months prior to this book’s release date, and I heard him read an excerpt from it.
I was immediately hooked on his storytelling ability. The language is so authentic to him and his experiences, and he holds nothing back. I love the vulnerability that saturates each page as I follow him through his addictions and struggles. While his life is so different from mine, the idea of finding one’s identity in society could not be more relatable.
*Named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Buzzfeed (Nonfiction), The Undefeated, Library Journal (Biography/Memoirs), The Washington Post (Nonfiction), Southern Living (Southern), Entertainment Weekly, and The New York Times Critics*
In this powerful, provocative, and universally lauded memoir—winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal and finalist for the Kirkus Prize—genre-bending essayist and novelist Kiese Laymon “provocatively meditates on his trauma growing up as a black man, and in turn crafts an essential polemic against American moral rot” (Entertainment Weekly).
In Heavy, Laymon writes eloquently and honestly about growing up a hard-headed black son…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
Manguso’s book was the first memoir I read that delved into what it is like to live with a serious health condition. Her first-person account was vulnerable, yet she used the formatting of short chapters (vignette style) to carry the story through.
I learned so much about the struggle of long-term illness, but I also found moments within her book to breathe and find hope. Her book really helped me shape my own writing in how she conveys profound topics in a way that can buoy the human spirit.
A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice
The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names.
There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities.
But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening.
I love learning about real-life things that are not as talked about in popular media, and Hernández’s book does just that. I fell in love with her through the memoir parts and how she tried so earnestly to learn about the disease that was killing her beloved aunt.
I was impressed by Hernández’s expert weaving of family stories and researched information. She allowed me to learn about Chagas Disease through her reportage, but she also pulled me into the emotional side of the disease and the devastation it causes.
National Book Foundation Science + Literature Selection
Finalist for New American Voices Award and Lammy Award for Bisexual Nonfiction
A TIME, NPR, Chicago Public Library, Science for the People, WYNC, WBUR Radio Boston, and The Stacks Podcast Best Book of the Year
Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award
As heard on Fresh Air
Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of…
Gifts from a Challenging Childhood
by
Jan Bergstrom,
Learn to understand and work with your childhood wounds. Do you feel like old wounds or trauma from your childhood keep showing up today? Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed with what to do about it and where to start? If so, this book will help you travel down a path…
I went into this book wanting to see how to write about the loss of a child in a delicate and artistic way, and I was delighted to find that Comfort balanced those things beautifully. Through the loss of a five-year-old child from illness, Hood danced me right through the shock and then grief she felt.
I felt how overwhelming it was for her to carry on, and it normalized that for me, too, as a person who also had a related experience. The brevity of the book was perfect for me—a bite-sized way of glimpsing into this world, feeling this grief, and then finding a way out.
In 2002, Ann Hood's five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood-an accomplished novelist-was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter-"the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang 'Eight Days a Week.'" One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and…
This is a story of exploration and self-identification, of grief, relationships, tackling mental health, and how to walk through difficult times when there is nowhere else to go. The story follows Laura and her husband as they embark on having a baby. Over this time, Laura learned the hard truth about pregnancy loss, the medical field, and how to negotiate unforeseen difficulties. She persevered through four high-risk pregnancies, with the last one being more successful than the rest.
Yet, it posed many tribulations, launching Laura and her husband into the world of an unpredictable birth, fetal abnormalities, their premature baby, the NICU, and breath-holding. Mosaic explores how to use challenges to change us into better versions of ourselves.
