Rules for being a man:Don't Cry; Love Sport; Play Rough; Drink Beer; Don't Talk About FeelingsBut Robert Webb has been wondering for some time now: are those rules actually any use? To anyone?Looking back over his life, from schoolboy crushes (on girls and boys) to discovering the power of making people laugh (in the Cambridge Footlights with David Mitchell), and from losing his beloved mother to becoming a husband and father, Robert Webb considers the absurd expectations boys and men have thrust upon them at every stage of life.Hilarious and heartbreaking, How Not To Be a Boy explores the relationships that made Robert who he is as a man, the lessons we learn as sons and daughters, and the understanding that sometimes you aren't the Luke Skywalker of your life - you're actually Darth Vader.

    Told in a succession of short and powerful poems, it takes us deep into the cyclone of the narrator’s emotions: despair, anger, guilt, resentment, and ultimately, acceptance.

    Plagued with fear that her friends and family will be taken from her if she's not watching--that her mother will die, or forget she has children and just move away--Stern treats every parting as her last. Shuttled between a barefoot bohemian life with her mother in Greenwich Village, and a sanitized, stricter world of affluence uptown with her father, Stern has little she can depend on. And when Etan Patz disappears down the block from their MacDougal Street home, she can't help but believe that all her worst fears are about to come true. Tenderly delivered and expertly structured, Stern's memoir is a document of the transformation of New York City and a deep, personal, and comedic account of the trials and errors of seeing life through a very unusual lens.

    Why did she leave and what did she do for twenty years out of the spotlight before returning to television? This is her funny and inspiring memoir of fame, heartache, resilience--and the reboot of a lifetime . . .When Kimmy Gibbler burst into the Tanners' home on Full House in 1987, audiences immediately connected with the confident and quirky pre-teen character, played by ten-year-old actress Andrea Barber. During an eight-season run on one of the most popular series of the '80s and '90s, Andrea came of age in front of millions. But she was as far removed from her character as a girl can get. The introverted young star was plagued with self-doubt, insecurities, and debilitating anxieties that left her questioning her identity after the show's cancelation. Andrea wouldn't return to the public eye until 2016, for Fuller House. So what happened in those intervening decades that Andrea jokingly calls "the lost years"?For starters, Andrea never stopped working. But it was on a series of life-changing transitions: earning a college degree, then a Master's, building a career in international education, getting married, and starting a family. She also faced some unforeseeable transitions: navigating a sudden divorce after nearly twelve years of marriage, and second-guessing her capabilities as a single mother. But it was her devastating bout with post-partum anxiety and depression that derailed Andrea's life--and became a crucial turning point. Full Circle is a raw, refreshingly honest look into the life of a celebrity who has never been fully comfortable in the spotlight. Here Andrea shares her deeply personal struggles with mental health in a way she has never done before. She opens up about fighting her way back and finding solace--while finding herself--all before her life came full circle with her costars and lifelong friends on Fuller House. Sharing her journey from child star, to champion of mental health, and back to stardom, Andrea writes in a way that feels like catching up with an old friend.You'll laugh, reminisce, and finally get to know the woman behind the zany next door neighbor.

    Her painful early life, however, was quite different. Regina and her four siblings survived an abusive and painful childhood only to find themselves faced with the challenges of the foster-care system and intermittent homelessness in the shadows of Manhattan and the Hamptons.

    Gorman State is one of the nation's largest forensic mental hospitals, dedicated to treating the criminally insane. Unit C, where Seager was assigned, was reserved for the 'bad actors', the mass murderers, serial killers, and the real-life Hannibal Lecters of the world.Against a backdrop of surreal beauty - a campus-like setting where peacocks strolled the well-kept lawns - is a place of remarkable violence, a place where a small staff of clinicians are expected to manage a volatile population of prison-hardened ex-cons, where lone therapists lead sharing circles with psychopaths, where homemade weapons and contraband circulate freely, and where patients and physicians often measure their lives according to how fast they can run.Behind the Gates of Gomorrah affords an eye-opening look inside a facility to which few people have ever had access. Honest, reflective, and at times darkly funny, Seager's gripping account of his experiences at Gorman State hospital give us an extraordinary insight into a unique and terrifying world, inhabited by figures from

    Carr's investigation of his own history reveals that his odyssey through addiction, recovery, cancer, and life as a single parent was far more harrowing -- and, in the end, more miraculous -- than he allowed himself to remember. Over the course of the book, he digs his way through a past that continues to evolve as he reports it.That long-ago night he was so out of his mind that his best friend had to pull a gun on him to make him go away? A visit to the friend twenty years later reveals that Carr was pointing the gun.His lucrative side business as a cocaine dealer? Not all that lucrative, as it turned out, and filled with peril.His belief that after his twins were born, he quickly sobered up to become a parent? Nice story, if he could prove it.The notion that he was an easy choice as a custodial parent once he finally was sober? His lawyer pulls out the old file and gently explains it was a little more complicated than that.In one sense, the story of "The Night of the Gun" is a common one -- a white-boy misdemeanant lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding, and a support group that will go unnamed. But when the whole truth is told, it does not end there. After fourteen years -- or was it thirteen? -- Carr tried an experiment in social drinking. Double jeopardy turned out to be a game he did not play well. As a reporter and columnist at the nation's best newspaper, he prospered, but gained no more adeptness at mood-altering substances. He set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded all too well, including two more arrests, one that included a night in jail wearing a tuxedo.Ferocious and eloquent, courageous and bitingly funny, "The Night of the Gun" unravels the ways memory helps us not only create our lives, but survive them.

    The author of Escape, which detailed her escape along with her eight children from the cult she had been raised in, the extremist Mormon sect the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, follows up on the 2008 raid on the Yearning for Zion Ranch, which her ex-husband ran for Warren Jeffs on a sprawling 1,700-acre ranch near Eldorado, Texas.

    Kevin has an Ivy League degree, a winning smile, and throughout his adult life, he has been engaged in an ongoing battle with a person that doesn't exist to anyone but him: the Director.Kevin suffers from what doctors are beginning to call the "Truman Show" delusion, a form of psychosis named for the 1998 movie, where the main character is trapped as the star of a reality TV show. When the Director commands Kevin to do things, the results can lead to handcuffs, hospitalization, or both. Once he nearly drove a car into Boston Harbor. His girlfriend, now wife, was in the passenger seat.In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, journalist Mary Pilon's The Kevin Show reveals the many-sided struggle by Kevin, his family, and the medical profession to understand and treat a psychiatric disorder whose euphoric highs and creative ties to pop culture have become inextricable from Kevin's experience of himself. Interweaving his perspective, journals, and sketches with police reports, medical records, and interviews with those who were present at key moments in his life, The Kevin Show is a bracing, suspenseful, and eye-opening view of the role that mental health plays in a seemingly ordinary life.Edit

    Through her music and performing, this beloved Australian artist has touched hundreds of thousands of lives. But what of the stories she used to tell herself? That 'real life' only begins once you're thin or beautiful, that good things only happen to other people.YOUR OWN KIND OF GIRL reveals a childhood punctuated by grief, anxiety and compulsion, and tells how these forces shaped Clare's life for better and for worse. This is a heartbreaking, wise and at times playful memoir. Clare's own story told raw and as it happened. A reminder that even on the darkest of nights, victory is closer than it seems.With startling candour, Clare lays bare her truth in the hope that doing so will inspire anyone who's ever done battle with their inner critic. This is the work of a woman who has found her true power - and wants to pass it on. Happiness, we discover, is only possible when we take charge of the stories we tell ourselves.

    Confidant, champion, sympathizer, friend, Theo supported Vincent as he struggled to find his path in life. They shared everything, swapping stories of lovers and friends, successes and disappointments, dreams and ambitions. Meticulously researched, drawing on the 658 letters Vincent wrote to Theo during his lifetime, Deborah Heiligman weaves a tale of two lives intertwined and the love of the Van Gogh brothers.

    Then, in the space of a night, everything that was normal about her life changed. Her police officer father, John, was driving to his midnight shift when someone pulled up alongside and leveled a shotgun at his window. The blasts that followed tore through his face and left him clinging to life. Overnight, the Busbys went from being the "family next door" to one under twenty-four-hour armed guard, with police escorts to and from school and no contact with friends. Worse, the shooter was still on the loose, and it seemed only a matter of time before he'd come after John-or someone else in the family-again. With their lives unraveling around them and few choices remaining for a future that could ever be secure, the Busby family left everything and everyone they had ever known...and simply disappeared.As told by both father and daughter, this is a harrowing, at times heartbreaking, account of a shooting and its aftermath-even as it shows a young girl trying to make sense of the unthinkable and the triumph of a family's bravery in the face of crisis.

    their doctors."It was the dog who found me."Such is the stark confession launching the harrowing scene that begins The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls as Emilie Autumn, a young musician on the verge of a bright career, attempts suicide by overdosing on the antipsychotics prescribed to treat her bipolar disorder. Upon being discovered, Emilie is revived and immediately incarcerated in a maximum-security psych ward, despite her protestations that she is not crazy, and can provide valid reasons for her actions if someone would only listen.Treated as a criminal, heavily medicated, and stripped of all freedoms, Emilie is denied communication with the outside world, and falls prey to the unwelcome attentions of Dr. Sharp, head of the hospital's psychiatry department. As Dr. Sharp grows more predatory by the day, Emilie begins a secret diary to document her terrifying experience, and to maintain her sanity in this environment that could surely drive anyone mad. But when Emilie opens her notebook to find a desperate letter from a young woman imprisoned within an insane asylum in Victorian England, and bearing her own name and description, a portal to another world is blasted wide open.As these letters from the past continue to appear, Emilie escapes further into this mysterious alternate reality where sisterhoods are formed, romance between female inmates blossoms, striped wallpaper writhes with ghosts, and highly intellectual rats speak the Queen's English.But is it real? Or is Emilie truly as mad as she is constantly told she is?The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls blurs harsh reality and magical historical fantasy whilst issuing a scathing critique of society's treatment of women and the mental health care industry's treatment of its patients, showing in the process that little has changed throughout the ages.Welcome to the Asylum. Are you committed?

    Running ten miles a day and taking in as little as 800 calories, she fell from 146 pounds to 100 in three months and was at serious risk of cardiac arrest. What Friedman suffered from was exercise bulimia--a newly diagnosed and rapidly spreading eating disorder that affects some 400,000 American women, and which gyms and colleges across America are beginning to take seriously. In Diary of an Exercise Addict Friedman recounts her descent into a life-threatening illness, her remarkable recovery, and the setbacks along the way. With refreshing candor she lays bare her relationships with family, friends, and lovers and the repressed desire that finally surfaced as she found her own way back to health.

    After spending the first twenty years of her adult life in a mental hospital, she gradually emerged from the terror of the back wards, eventually to attend graduate school at Harvard University and become a leading champion for the mentally ill.