Books like Strangers Assume My Girlfriend Is My Nurse

A humorous take on what it's like to be a disabled adult. I highly recommend this book to anyone. It discusses how to interact with someone with a disability and dives deep into diversity and how to communicate effectively with adults. Having read this book has made my journey with cerebral palsy much easier and I would definitely say that it has made me look at life in more humorous ways.

I know this book’s journalist co-author, so I may be a bit biased. But I’ve also had scary grizzly encounters—many during my arctic traverse—and few books capture the terror as does this account of a twenty-five-year-old blinded permanently in a bear attack.

Dan Bigley had not embarked on a grand adventure; he was on a trail through the woods, returning from a day of salmon fishing. Like me, Dan used to take troubled kids into the outdoors, so I easily identify with him. His true adventure, and true courage, shows in how he mended his life and even gave it new meaning.

After five reconstructive surgeries, he reconnected with a woman he’d fallen for just before the trauma and resumed his role as a caring member of his community.  

There’s something special about Kate Bowler. At 35, diagnosed with cancer, she started questioning our culture of positivity that emphasizes can-do achievement.

Her insights are beautiful, and her buoyant humor is icing on the cake. I feel like we’re soul sisters, my friend Kate and me (we’ve never met). Her words resonate with my belief that life is a mix of beauty and bummers, and sometimes there is even beauty within the bummers. I believe we should show up for life and appreciate all of it. So, I’m drawn to Kate Bowler’s account of how her hard-won uncertainty has shifted her perspective.

I’d like to thank this humorist for making brain surgery fascinating and bizarrely funny.

I couldn’t put it down. I was fascinated with how incredibly dark and awful it was, and yet he made me laugh. 

Normally, I could never read intense, graphic, bloody descriptions of early, risky, experimental brain surgery in the 1930s, when it was a frighteningly new technology. However, the author under the knife was one of the most sarcastic humorists of his time, so the resulting memoir is riveting, thrilling, shocking, horrifying, compelling, and weirdly humorous all the way along. I discovered there are no nerves inside the brain, and you have to be awake during brain surgery.

This writer recorded every scrape, every sound, everything. It is totally horrific, completely amazing, and highly recommended. 

This book at times feels like poetry and written with such profundity.

Grappling with deep physical pain, Jen Soriano, a daughter of a neurosurgeon, comes upon a hard truth about the origins of her physical pain; a history of generational trauma and her family’s absorption of a painful history of colonization of the Phillipines.

This poignant memoir helped me understand, at a personal level, how the body starts to give up when we carry the emotional wounds of the past, how neurodivergence intersects with historical trauma, and reminds us that freedom from pain is indeed possible.

As a trauma psychologist, it was both humbling and enlightening to receive the author’s personal accounts of intergenerational trauma and intergenerational healing.

This book gripped me with a host of difficult questions and sorrowful insights into women’s health, racism, science, and medical systems in the USA. It reveals the impact of a previously unknown woman, Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951, and whose cervical cancer cells were taken without her consent, and then, without any acknowledgement, used by researchers and laboratories to develop numerous treatments, drugs, and experiments.

It made me confront hard questions about class, race, gender, medical ethics, profit, and confidentiality. It is a brutal and detailed read, enhanced by the involvement of her family story, as they later discovered the theft and were to confront her immortality. A must-read by a plucky author. 

I must have been around thirteen or fourteen when I first read Brain on Fire. It changed me completely, giving me a new appreciation for life, health, and memory.

Cahalan’s account of her month of hospitalizations, diagnosis, and stigma sparked my passion for reading life stories, writing with empathy, and being more open about my own mental health struggles.

I was first introduced to Hornbacher’s classic memoir in 2007 by my little sister, who was desperate to help me understand the eating disorder that had plagued her for more than 15 years. The book was—is—a no-holds-barred account of life with an eating disorder, a terrifying narrative of a young woman's gradual and deliberate path towards self-destruction, and it left me in pieces for weeks afterward. And yet, despite the pain it caused, it really did help me understand my sister’s illness better, and in doing so helped reduce the divide that had begun to open between us. Seonaid died in the summer of 2016 after battling anorexia for over 20 years, but even through my grief, I remain grateful to this work for teaching me how to remain strong and patient in the face of this heartbreaking disease.

In individual chapters, this book describes every American President’s approach to health policy from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (it omits Gerald Ford). 

It describes their personal and familial interactions with health and medical care as well as their foibles and habits. It is a fascinating read, especially for those of an age who personally lived through some of these Presidents.

Jessica Wilson, an eating disorder dietitian and storyteller, makes the undeniable case for how the diet culture has preyed on and harmed Black women in particular.

I appreciate her excavation of diet culture, revealing how it is rooted in white supremacy and therefore needs to be systematically dismantled through intentional expressions of body love, joyful expression of Black culture, and embracing your food lineage.