Books like Adult Child of Hippies — picked by fans

Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled. 

From my eleventh-grade term paper about life after death, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of reincarnation.

This extremely insightful book only fueled that interest. It explores the idea that our souls pre-plan the challenges in each lifetime with purpose.

This book made me look at the struggles I’ve experienced much differently. Now the question I always ask myself is, “What was I supposed to learn from that?”

This helpful book digs into the stigma of suicide, how it has been viewed as taboo, and how the bodies of people who committed suicide have traditionally even been denied burial. The people left behind find themselves isolated by their shame and the fear that others will shy away from a topic considered sinful in most religions. This was certainly my experience. Had my father died of cancer or a heart attack, I would have talked openly of his death and received a lot of support. But I felt his mental illness, addiction, and suicide too dark a topic to impose on anyone.

Happy, functional families don’t go through things like this. It was an extension of the shame I’d internalized as a child growing up with socially divergent parents who struggled with mental health issues. Alexander, who lost her own mother to suicide, gives links to survivor support groups,… show more.

Although this book isn’t about suicide, I include it because families with mental health issues, often exacerbated by the “anything goes” ethos of hippy culture, can suffer from confused or “enmeshed” parent/child boundaries. It was one of the first, and I think best self-help books I ever read. With great clarity, it showed me what was destructive in my family of origin. Enmeshment or “parentification,” basically using a child to meet the emotional needs of an adult, is not widely understood and often goes undetected (versus more obvious physical or sexual abuse).

Dr. Love’s book gave me straightforward guidelines for being a non-destructive parent myself, something I think I did achieve due to much self-education and counselling prior to having kids. It’s always been obvious to me that my father’s mental illness and substance abuse took root in his very unhappy childhood. I think my father would be glad that… show more.

I recommend this amazing book because it will truly help bring you out of hiding. When we are always trying to be in self-protection mode, from what we experienced in childhood, we’re going to a place of hiding.

Through her honesty and revelations, this book will free you from wherever you’re hiding and what you need freedom from.

Terry Lynn Johnson has written many books on sled dogs. Dog Driven does a great job of sharing what a junior race is like: the competitiveness, the setbacks, and the thrill of the sport. It also addresses facing an issue head-on. In this book, the main character is struggling with worsening eyesight. I think middle grade readers will relate to feeling apprehensive when facing something difficult. 

This is a classic in rural education.

A highly respected rural education researcher, Corbett documents the educational practices that, while well-intentioned, may contribute to rural depopulation: if rural schools do their jobs well, they are often preparing rural youth for an adult life lived elsewhere.

Still, though, for many rural youth, college remains elusive. As Corbett writes, with typical eloquence, “Higher education remains ‘invisible’ training for invisible jobs in an elsewhere economy…”

With complexity and nuance, this book captures the many dilemmas facing rural youth, families, and teachers, as well as the high costs of higher education for rural communities. My copy is a rainbow of sticky notes and highlights: I consulted it often when writing my book.

Who would have thought that a novel about a ninety-year-old woman determined to avoid being put into a nursing home would become required reading for high school and university students? And yet this novel has been listed by several sources as one of the greatest Canadian novels ever written. Laurence’s writing style inspired me and gave me the assurance to write about Western Canadian history. It demonstrates one of the reasons why Laurence was named posthumously as “A Person of National Historic Significance” by the Canadian government in 2018.

I was completely hooked by this book—it’s the kind of story that crawls under your skin and refuses to leave.

I love when a thriller explores the fine line between love, guilt, and obsession, and this one does it brilliantly. Sloan isn’t a typical heroine; she makes one impulsive mistake and suddenly her entire world tilts off balance. I found myself torn between rooting for her and shouting at her, which is my favorite kind of reading experience.

Nelle Lamarr’s writing is sharp, funny, and full of energy, but beneath the humor lurks something darker—an obsession that spirals in the very best way. 

I love a twisty book that makes me shiver.

This thriller flips between viewpoints and timescales as we follow Bonnie, who struggles to survive not only the elements, but her deceitful husband Steffan and creepy Annalise, who may or may not be the white witch of the Alps.

This gave me feelings of claustrophobia, and, although it requires a bit of stretch of the imagination, it was a quick and easy page-turner.