Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches and sleeping with her "head-for-the-hills bag". In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father's junkyard.Her father forbade hospitals, so Tara never saw a doctor or nurse. Gashes and concussions, even burns from explosions, were all treated at home with herbalism. The family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent.Then, lacking any formal education, Tara began to educate herself. She taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to be admitted to Brigham Young University, where she studied history, learning for the first time about important world events like the Holocaust and the civil rights movement. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge. Only then would she wonder if she'd traveled too far, if there was still a way home.Educated is an account of the struggle for self-invention. It is a tale of fierce family loyalty and of the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties. With the acute insight that distinguishes all great writers, Westover has crafted a universal coming-of-age story that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one's life through new eyes and the will to change it.

    She was one year out of college and severely depressed. Summoned by Julie's incoherent phone call, her mother raced from Ohio to New York and took her home.Psychiatrists, therapists and family tried to intervene, but nothing reached her until the day she decided to do one hopeful thing: adopt a Golden Retriever puppy she named Bunker.Dog Medicine captures in beautiful, elegiac language the anguish of depression, the slow path to recovery, and the astonishing way animals can heal even the most broken hearts and minds.

    However, most betraying spouses are completely unprepared for the ensuing tumult, emotional roller-coaster, and trauma reactions by the injured partner. They often make terrible mistakes in their efforts to calm their spouses and stop the earthquake that has shaken their marriages to the core, inadvertently hastening the path to divorce. As an infidelity specialist for 23 years, Linda J. MacDonald has identified certain behaviors on the part of unfaithful spouses that determine the success or failure to save their marriages. "How to Help Your Spouse Heal From Your Affair" provides a practical road map for unfaithful spouses who wish to have another chance with their partners. Find out for yourself what the difference is between those who blow up their marriages in the aftermath of affairs and those who successfully manage to repair and rebuild their marriages into better-than-ever relationships. “I regularly provide copies of How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair to my clients who are facing this challenge. Unanim-ously they report, ‘That [book] was very helpful.’ I notice they continue to use it. I believe the expanded version will be even more helpful.” —Earl D. Wilson, Ph.D., Licensed Psychologist, Portland, OR Author of Steering Clear, and coauthor of Restoring the Fallen“Your material on helping spouses heal from an affair was absolutely excellent. I have counseled for twenty-five years and found it well-done, balanced, and accurate.” —Jim Velez M.S., M.A., L.P.C., Portland, Oregon

    Caroline Knapp describes how the distorted world of her well-to-do parents pushed her toward anorexia and alcoholism. Fittingly, it was literature that saved her: she found inspiration in Pete Hamill's 'A Drinking Life' and sobered up. Her tale is spiced up with the characters she has known along the way. A journalist describes her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic, explaining how she used alcohol to escape personal relationships and the realities of life until a series of personal crises forced her to confront her problem.

    Clara, a sensitive and reclusive personality, is immediately drawn to Jeff’s freewheeling, push-the-envelope nature. Within a few days of knowing one another, they embark on a 21-day travel adventure—from Istanbul to London, with zero luggage, zero reservations, and zero plans. They want to test a simple question: what happens when you welcome the unknown instead of attempting to control it?Donning a single green dress and a small purse with her toothbrush and credit card, Clara travels through eight countries in three weeks. Along the way, Clara ruminates on the challenges of traveling unencumbered, while realizing when it comes to falling in love, you can never really leave your baggage behind.

    But there comes a point in her preteen years - maybe it's the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once - when Cupcake's story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark, deeply disturbing journey through hell.Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. At just 16 she stumbled into the terrifying world of the gangsta, dealing drugs, hustling and only just surviving a drive-by shooting. Ironically, it was Cupcake's rapid descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine addiction that finally saved her. After one four-day crack binge she woke up behind a dumpster. Half-dressed and half-dead, she finally realized she had to change her life or die on the streets - another trash-can addict, another sad statistic.Astonishingly, Cupcake turned her life around and this is her brutally frank, startlingly funny story. Unlike any memoir you will ever read, A Piece of Cake is a redemptive, gripping tale of a resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary urban life and survived it. It is also the most genuinely affecting rollercoaster ride through hell and back that you will ever take.

    It's caused alopecia, bulimia, and drug dependency. And Bryony is sick of it. Keeping silent about her illness has given it a cachet it simply does not deserve, so here she shares her story with trademark wit and dazzling honesty.A hugely successful columnist for the Telegraph, a bestselling author, and a happily married mother of an adorable daughter, Bryony has managed to laugh and live well while simultaneously grappling with her illness. Now it's time for her to speak out. Writing with her characteristic warmth and dark humour, Bryony explores her relationship with her OCD and depression as only she can.Mad Girl is a shocking, funny, unpredictable, heart-wrenching, raw and jaw-droppingly truthful celebration of life with mental illness.

    In 1887, 23-year-old reporter Nellie Bly had herself committed to a New York City asylum for 10 days to expose the horrific conditions for 19th-century century mental patients.

    1911: Inside an asylum at the edge of the Yorkshire moors, where men and women are kept apart by high walls and barred windows, there is a ballroom vast and beautiful. For one bright evening every week they come together and dance. When John and Ella meet It is a dance that will change two lives forever.Set over the heatwave summer of 1911, the end of the Edwardian era, THE BALLROOM is a tale of unlikely love and dangerous obsession, of madness and sanity, and of who gets to decide which is which.

    The joys and travails of building a home in Baja California.

    This is the hilarious and touching real-life diary she kept during that fateful year - with characters like her evil friend Bethany, Bethany's besotted boyfriend, and the boys from the grammar school up the road (who have code names like Haddock and Battered Sausage).My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary evokes a vanished time when Charles and Di are still together, the Berlin wall is up, Kylie is expected to disappear from the charts at any moment and it's £1 for a Snakebite and Black in the Vaults pub. My Fat, Mad Teenage Diary will appeal to anyone who's lived through the 1980s. But it will also strike a chord with anyone who's ever been a confused, lonely teenager who clashes with their mother, takes themselves VERY seriously and has no idea how hilarious they are.

    He finds some solace in his talent for piano playing but slowly comes to realise that the incontrollable sniffs, coughs, and faces night not just be a funny, little habit.

    With the television network furious and knowing she's let everyone down, she attempts suicide and ends up in a psychiatric facility. With persistence, her therapists begin to help her examine the source of her pain and unhappiness. this is a raw and honest look at a woman's journey of survival--based on the author's own life.

    Approaching the land that was once home, memories of her childhood merge with the recent events that have set her on this journey.Amy was shaped by the cycle of the seasons, birth and death on the farm, and her father’s mental illness, which were as much a part of her childhood as the wild, carefree existence on Orkney. But as she grew up, she longed to leave this remote life. She moved to London and found herself in a hedonistic cycle. Unable to control her drinking, alcohol gradually took over. Now thirty, she finds herself washed up back home on Orkney, standing unstable at the cliff edge, trying to come to terms with what happened to her in London.Spending early mornings swimming in the bracingly cold sea, the days tracking Orkney’s wildlife—puffins nesting on sea stacks, arctic terns swooping close enough to feel their wings—and nights searching the sky for the Merry Dancers, Amy slowly makes the journey toward recovery from addiction.The Outrun is a beautiful, inspiring book about living on the edge, about the pull between island and city, and about the ability of the sea, the land, the wind, and the moon to restore life and renew hope.A Guardian Best Nonfiction Book of 2016Sunday Times Top Ten BestsellerNew Statesman Book of the Year

    In this extraordinarily moving exploration of his parents' lives, his mother's inexplicable suicide in her late fifties and his own bouts of depression, Tim Lott conjures up the pebble-dashed home of his childhood and the rapidly changing landscape of postwar suburban England. It is a story of grief, loss and dislocation, yet also of the power of memory and the bonds of family love.