I’ve spent most of my life fascinated by what happens when women stop editing themselves. As a former television reporter, health educator, and memoirist, I’ve lived on both sides of the polished story and the private reckoning in my search for truth. Writing my own memoir forced me to confront how often women are encouraged to soften conflict, spiritualize pain, or tidy up the truth to make it more palatable. I’m drawn to books that refuse that impulse—stories where healing isn’t performative, and transformation isn’t neat.
I love this book because it refuses to sanitize childhood chaos.
I know Cea personally, and knowing what it took for her to tell this story makes the book even more powerful. Her upbringing was wildly unconventional—often unsafe—and she doesn’t soften that truth to make it more inspirational or digestible.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the extremity of her early life, but the clarity with which she tells it: no victimhood, no theatrics, no moral clean-up. This book reminded me that resilience doesn’t come from pretending things weren’t messy—it comes from looking directly at what was, and choosing consciousness anyway.
Sex, drugs, and . . . bug stew? In the vein of The Glass Castle and Wild, Cea Sunrise Person’s compelling memoir of a childhood spent with her dysfunctional counter-culture family in the Canadian wilderness—a searing story of physical, emotional, and psychological survival.
In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea’s family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness. But unlike most commune dwellers of the time, the Persons weren’t trying to build a new society—they wanted to escape civilization altogether. Led by Cea’s grandfather Dick, they lived…
I loved this book because it was Glennon Doyle before she became “Glennon Doyle.”
This book still has dirt under its nails. Her honesty about addiction, self-sabotage, marriage, and spiritual confusion felt genuinely risky at the time, and you can feel that on the page.
What stayed with me was her willingness to admit how lost she was without trying to rush the reader toward wisdom or resolution. It reminded me that transformation doesn’t start with clarity—it starts with telling the truth about how bad things actually feel.
WHAT CAME BEFORE HER NEW #1 BESTSELLER UNTAMED ...
'IT'S AS IF SHE REACHED INTO HER HEART, CAPTURED THE RAW EMOTIONS THERE, AND TRANSLATED THEM INTO WORDS THAT ANYONE WHO'S EVER KNOWN PAIN OR SHAME CAN RELATE TO' OPRAH WINFREY, Oprah's Book Club
'EPIC' ELIZABETH GILBERT | 'BLEW ME AWAY' BRENE BROWN
... Just when Glennon Doyle was beginning to feel she had it all figured out - three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times bestseller list - her husband revealed his…
Are you tired of feeling tired? In a world that never stops, Drowning Lifeguards is a compassionate, down-to-earth guide for anyone struggling with exhaustion, burnout, or chronic fatigue.
Written by Ruth Hull, homoeopathic doctor, herbalist, counsellor, and author of five health-science textbooks, it offers a fresh, human approach to healing.…
I loved this book because it tells the truth about illness and addiction without sentimentality.
Henriette Ivanans writes about kidney failure, substance abuse, and marriage with an honesty that feels earned, to say the least, not performative. I was deeply moved by the way love is portrayed here—not as something glamorous or easy, but as something that stays.
Her writing is emotionally grounded, and the book never asks for pity. It reminded me that some of the most profound transformations happen quietly inside relationships that endure far more than they should have to.
What if your husband gave you a kidney and you chugged a beer with your painkillers the next day?
What if your loving marriage became a tortured threesome? Husband, Wife and Pills?
Meet Henriette and Kevin. As newlyweds, they move to LA to conquer Hollywood. When the dream begins to fade, Henriette delves into a secret life of Pills. Diagnosed with a rejecting kidney transplant, she becomes crippled by fear. Convinced Kevin can never understand, her part-time narcotic trysts explode into a full-blown pharmaceutical affair.
She is in love. Fiorinal, Vicodin, Morphine...All of them. Until one backstabbing day, Pills lead…
I love this book because Laura Lentz writes with a rare combination of emotional honesty and generosity.
Her essays are deeply personal without ever becoming self-centered, and she has an extraordinary ability to hold chaos, grief, illness, love, and humor in the same breath. What I admire most is how she tells the truth about real people—flawed, complicated, difficult—without turning anyone into a villain, including herself. Her writing feels musical and awake, and rooted in the body.
Having worked with Laura as my writing coach for years, her work reminds me not to shy away from brutal honesty and to leave my full humanness on the page.
Freeing the Turkeys, is the much anticipated collection of essays by Laura Lentz. Each essay has a poetic, musical quality, speaking directly to the soul, awakening a sleeping part of ourselves as we go through life facing physical and emotional challenges, losing people we love and celebrating with those who are beside us now.Laura invites us to find the magic in our own lives by regaling us with surprising stories — dead lovers delivering important messages, a stranger who falls out of a tree and lands outside her bedroom window, and a dance with illness that inspires a trip to…
Fourteen is a coming-of-age adventure when, at the age of 14, Leslie and her two sisters have to batten down the hatches on their 45-foot sailboat to navigate the Pacific Ocean and French Polynesia, as well as the stormy temper of their larger-than-life Norwegian father.
I loved this book because it gave language to instincts I didn’t yet trust.
I read it long ago, and its stories stayed with me—not intellectually, but somatically. This book doesn’t explain women; it remembers us. Through myth and archetype, Clarissa Pinkola Estés reclaims the wild, intuitive self that so many women are trained to domesticate.
It taught me that messiness isn’t a flaw—it can be the sign of something alive trying to return.
First published three years before the print edition of Women Who Run With the Wolves made publishing history, this original audio edition quickly became an underground bestseller. For its insights into the inner life of women, it established Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes as one of the most important voices of our time in the fields of Jungian psychology, myth, and women's mysteries.
Drawing from her work as a psychoanalyst and cantadora ("keeper of the old stories"), Dr. Estes uses myths and folktales to illustrate how societies systematically strip away the feminine spirit. Through an exploration into the nature of the…
The Mother Vine is a deeply personal memoir about motherhood, marriage, and spiritual reckoning in midlife. Set against the backdrop of family life, the book traces my journey through plant medicine, emotional inheritance, and the quiet truths women are often taught to bury in order to keep the peace.
Rather than offering a polished redemption arc, the story explores what happens when a woman stops performing her healing and begins telling the truth—about love, loss, responsibility, and becoming. At its heart, The Mother Vine is an exploration of what it means to mother others without abandoning oneself.
