Books like The Trauma Cleaner

Strayed’s personal transformation through nature and challenge is what I loved in this memoir.

Wild starts off in crisis. The gritty detail throughout doesn’t shy away from the depths of human experience like grief, addiction, and loss (of unconditional love). The narrator has an incredible plan to get herself out of the mess of her current life. Could she do it?

I love a story of someone who is lost, in despair, and goes on a mission to change herself through a connection with nature. Wild delivers. Strayed’s writing brilliantly weaves together her journey in nature with her backstory of how she came to crisis.

This memoir made me fall in love with California’s topography all over again.

How does one transform from a rural, home-schooled environment in Utah to earning a PhD at the University of Cambridge? Tara’s immersive writing style takes us with her as she strives to learn about life and family and her place within it.

Through her tender eyes of innocence, her innate sense of integrity, and the slow trusting of her intuition, the veils of deception slowly disappear, and Tara is forced to make choices none of us should ever have to make. Sometimes self-preservation is the precursor to transformation and unconditional love.

Haruki writes in a humble, conversational tone to tell his tales of how he became a writer and a runner, like any of us could do it (or whatever it is we set out to do).

Haruki never high notes himself, but quietly explains how he transformed his life from being a jazz nightclub owner who smoked and stayed up all night to a novelist and runner who got up early, wrote and ran, then to bed early. Haruki teaches all kinds of things about life without setting out to teach us anything.

His easy-going, truth-telling style shows how transformation comes by making decisions, being determined, and knowing oneself. To me, running serves as a metaphor for his approach to life, and anyone of us can opt in or not.

This book completely changed the way I thought about aging and death. I listened to this book whilst walking along the Cornish Coastal Path in January. I was in the process of writing my own book about aging and had been focusing on biology but not humanity.

The warmth of the writing, the emotional journey that Gawande undergoes, the brilliant advice, and the wisdom from an expert all combine to make a wonderful life (and death) changing book.

What does it mean to be human, and what happens to us when we don’t receive unconditional love?

The two main characters in this Gothic novel, a human and a "monster," are presented in such a way that I questioned which main character was more human. There’s a warning of what can happen when we deny the basic human need for unconditional love.

Shelly’s use of a frame story pulled me in from the first page.

This is a surprising book because while it is certainly macabre, it’s not morbid (at least not for me) and is strangely entertaining. It demystifies the human body and the process of death and dying. 

Even as the author delves into every aspect of dead bodies, she does so with compassion and humor. Rooted and backed up with science, this book held my interest from beginning to end, and I read it non-stop for over a day and a half. Despite its grave subject matter, this book is not dark or scary. It’s matter-of-fact and very educational.

This book contains questions posed by kids but we are all kids when it comes to death.

Scared kids with unanswered questions that creep up on us at three in the morning. This book combines that heavy morbid curiosity with the easy breezy comforting tones of Caitlin Doughty, my death hero.

She is expert, funny, reassuring, and keen for us all to embrace death so that we can live life better. Her enthusiasm for this is infectious and you walk away from any of her books or youtube videos happier to be mortal.

The questions kids asked got me thinking that writing for children about death is an excellent idea, starting that journey early. It's something I am toying with doing for book two after a friend's kid couldn't sleep because they were scared of becoming nothing.

This is the heaviest of light reading, in a good way.

This will look like nepotism because Richard is a dear friend who provided a quote for my book cover, however I am mainly friends with him because we are of the same mind about most things, including death.

We both deal with it using a good dose of sarcasm and humour whilst also being big old existential softies who have our moments.

His book about his cancer diagnosis sees his coping mechanism of humour balanced with the honest sadnesses of potentially leaving behind young children who might forget him, before returning to humourous disapproval at his wife's imagined new man.

My own firmly held belief that you can't live well without the shadow of death also comes through as he starts to live better and healthier in recovery, thanks to his brush with the reaper. 

When Chris, the main character of this novel, dies, he teeters between a majestic heaven and the depths of hell when he can’t let go of his life because of his wife’s descent into depression.

This is a love story about a spirit that cannot move on because his soul is so deeply connected to his wife in the human world even though the peace heaven offers is tempting. This is the first novel opened my mind to the connections between souls on earth and those in the afterlife.

Mitch Albom creates a heavenly world for the main character, Eddie, who has just ascended from earth after saving someone at the carnival where he worked; thus, meeting his own tragic demise.

What strikes me most in this story are the seemingly irrelevant connections we make in life and how those connections could have a deep and lasting impact. Every single thing we do or say or the people we touch is purposeful here, and drives us, our souls, to seek grace in all that we do.