She had seized the one aspect of her life that she seemed able to control, and struck different foods from her diet one by one until she was starving. But even at her lowest point, the one appetite she never lost was her love of reading.As Laura battled her anorexia, she gradually re-discovered how to enjoy food - and life more broadly - through literature. Plum puddings and pottles of fruit in Dickens gave her courage to try new dishes; the wounded Robert Graves' appreciation of a pair of greengages changed the way she thought about plenty and choice; Virginia Woolf's painterly descriptions of bread, blackberries and biscuits were infinitely tempting. Book by book, meal by meal, Laura developed an appetite and discovered an entire library of reasons to live.The Reading Cure is a beautiful, inspiring account of hunger and happiness, about addiction, obsession and recovery, and about the way literature and food can restore appetite and renew hope.

    Then one day, running in Central Park, she lost all sensation in her legs. Two days later she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.Caro was no stranger to tragedy. Her father Richard contracted polio at the age of twenty and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Dignified, undaunted and ingenious, he was determined to make every day count, not least seducing his nurse while still confined to an iron lung, then marrying her.But when Caro was herself blindsided by illness, cut loose from everything she depended on, she couldn’t summon any of the grace and courage she’d witnessed growing up. She was furious, toxic, humiliated. Only by looking back at her father’s extraordinary example was she able to rediscover her own grit and find a way forward, rebuilding her life shard by shard.An emotionally brutal memoir of family, vulnerability and purpose, Diving into Glass is a searing, often funny portrait of the realities of disability and an intimate account of two lives filled with vigour and audacity.'Caro Llewellyn's portrait of her father is a tour de force. It is entirely unpredictable and consistently exhilarating. I read it in one transfixed sitting.’ Janet Malcolm‘Disturbing, compelling, portentous, obsessive, repetitious, persistent, prophetic, packed with shocks of recognition.’ Annie Proulx‘Indefatigable and unsinkable, Llewellyn keeps her story on pace as if her very life, and her father’s legacy, depended on it. Inspiring and uplifting.’ Mary Norris, author of Between You & Me‘Llewellyn has landed herself alongside the great memoirists of our time. A riveting marvel.’ Elizabeth Flock, author of The Heart is a Shifting Sea

    After her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury, the couple worked together as he recovered--and they learned to love again. When Abby Maslin's husband, TC, didn't make it home on August 18, 2012, she knew something was terribly wrong. Her fears were confirmed when she learned that her husband had been beaten by three men and left for dead mere blocks from home, all for his cell phone and debit card.The days and months that followed were a grueling test of faith. As TC recovered from a severe traumatic brain injury that left him unable to speak and walk, Abby faced the challenge of caring for--and loving--a husband who now resembled a stranger.Love You Hard is the raw, unflinchingly honest story of a young love left broken, and the resilience required to mend a life and remake a marriage. Told from the caregiver's perspective, this book is a daring exploration of true love: what it means to love beyond language, beyond abilities, and into the place that reveals who we really are.At the heart of Abby and TC's unique and captivating story are the universal truths that bind us all. This is a tale of living and loving wholeheartedly, learning to heal after profound grief, and choosing joy in the wake of tragedy.

    For Alix Kates Shulman, it happened on July 22, 2004, at two a.m. on a coastal Maine island in a remote seaside cabin with no electricity, running water, or road to reach it--where the very isolation that makes it a perfect artist's retreat renders it as risky as life itself. She woke to find that her beloved seventy-five-year-old husband had fallen the nine feet from their sleeping loft and was lying on the floor below, naked and deathly still. Though Scott would survive, he suffered an injury that left him seriously brain impaired. He was the same--but not the same. Each of us has imagined with dread the occurrence of just such an event outside our control that will permanently alter the course of our lives. In this elegant memoir, Shulman describes life on the other side: the ongoing anxieties and risks--and surprising rewards--she experiences as she reorganizes her world and her priorities to care for her husband and discovers that what might have seemed a grim life sentence to some has evolved into something unexpectedly rich.

    A cultural phenomenon by age twenty-six, she had fame, money, respecteverything she had always wanted except that one, true thing: happiness. For all of her professional success, Wurtzel felt like a failure. She had lost friends and lovers, every magazine job she'd held, and way too much weight. She couldn't write, and her second book was past due. But when her doctor prescribed Ritalin to help her focus-and boost the effects of her antidepressants -- Wurtzel was spared. The Ritalin worked. And worked. The pills became her sugar...the sweetness in the days that have none. Soon she began grinding up the Ritalin and snorting it. Then came the cocaine, then more Ritalin, then more cocaine. Then I need more. I always need more. For all of my life I have needed more... More, Now, Again is the brutally honest, often painful account of Wurtzel's descent into drug addiction. It is also a love story: How Wurtzel managed to break free of her relationship with Ritalin and learned to love life, and herself, is at the heart of this ultimately uplifting memoir that no reader will soon forget.

    In Happy Fat, comedian Sofie Hagen shares how she removed fatphobic influences from her daily life and found self-acceptance in a world where judgement and discrimination are rife.From shame and sex to airplane seats, love and getting stuck in public toilets, Sofie provides practical tips for readers – drawing wisdom from other Fat Liberation champions along the way.Part memoir, part social commentary, Happy Fat is a funny, angry and impassioned look at taking up space in a culture that is desperate to reduce.

    He has kept a blog of his daily working life since 2003 and his award-winning writing is, by turn, moving, cynical, funny, heart-rending, and compassionate. From the tragic to the hilarious, the stories Tom tells give a fascinatingand at times alarming picture of life in inner-city Britain, and the people who are paid to mop up after it.

    In a life filled with risk-taking and injuries, this was the most serious accident yet. It spurred Dunn to question her inclination toward carelessness, and she learned that a pattern of accidents often indicates deeper issues bubbling below the surface. This last near-fatal episode was a wake-up call; she had been looking away, not only from her horse, who had shown clear signs of panic, but also from her complicated past and troubled marriage. "Not by Accident" follows the stages of Dunn's long and painful recovery, during which the emotional healing process proved even more challenging than the physical one.

    Susan Wicklund chronicles her emotional and dramatic twenty-year career on the front lines of the abortion war. Growing up in working class, rural Wisconsin, Wicklund had her own painful abortion at a young age. It was not until she became a doctor that she realized how many women shared her ordeal of an unwanted pregnancy—and how hidden this common experience remains. This is the story of Susan's love for a profession that means listening to women and helping them through one of the most pivotal and controversial events in their lives. Hers is also a calling that means sleeping on planes and commuting between clinics in different states—and that requires her to wear a bulletproof vest and to carry a .38 caliber revolver. This is also the story of the women whom Susan serves, women whose options are increasingly limited.Through these intimate, complicated, and inspiring accounts, Wicklund reveals the truth about the women's clinics that anti-abortion activists portray as little more than slaughterhouses for the unborn. As we enter the most fevered political fight over abortion America has ever seen, this raw and powerful memoir shows us what is at stake.

    When Jamie Bérubé was born with Down syndrome in 1991, he was immediately subject to the medical procedures, insurance guidelines, policies, and representations that surround every child our society designates as disabled. In this wrenching yet ultimately inspiring book, Jamie's father, literary scholar Michael Bérubé, describes not only the challenges of raising his son but the challenge of seeing him as a person rather than as a medical, genetic, or social problem.

    I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the recognition that a life cannot matter.The award-winning poet Claudia Rankine, well known for her experimental multigenre writing, fuses the lyric, the essay, and the visual in this politically and morally fierce examination of solitude in the rapacious and media-driven assault on selfhood that is contemporary America. With wit and intelligence, Rankine strives toward an unprecedented clarity-of thought, imagination, and sentence-making-while arguing that recognition of others is the only salvation for ourselves, our art, and our government.Don't Let Me Be Lonely is an important new confrontation with our culture, with a voice at its heart bewildered by its inadequacy in the face of race riots, terrorist attacks, medicated depression, and the antagonism of the television that won't leave us alone.

    But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an anti-depressant drug. Overwhelmed by her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, her mania takes hold. She quits her job to become an artist, only to be hospitalized by her parents against her will. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she tries to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.

    Unfortunately, 83 percent of people who have this terrible disease are undiagnosed or misdiagnosed—suffering through years of pain and misunderstanding. Award-winning actress Jennifer Esposito was one of those 83 percent, receiving an accurate diagnosis only after decades of mysterious illnesses and myriad misdiagnoses.Now Jennifer shares her riveting personal journey—from her earliest memories of her childhood in Brooklyn to her years as a young actress, all the while suffering from unexplained, devastating ailments. Jennifer's struggle to finally receive an accurate diagnosis is one that anyone who has a chronic disease will share. But this is more than a story of suffering. It is the story of one woman's valiant journey to take charge of her health and rebuild her life. Not only will you learn from Jennifer's personal story, the book also guides you through early diagnosis, sharing the steps that helped Jennifer heal. Plus, you'll find recipes she uses at home, along with recipes for some of the delicious treats she offers at her own gluten-free bakery, Jennifer's Way, in New York.For anyone struggling with a chronic illness, Jennifer's Way is proof that you can find an answer to what is wrong with you, that you shouldn't stop until you find it, and that you can learn how to truly live again.

    A neurologist's insightful and compassionate look into the misunderstood world of psychosomatic disorders, told through individual case histories

    A successful journalist and mother to four children, she had spent her whole life feeling as if she were running a different operating system to those around her. This book charts a year in her life and offers a unique insight into the autistic mind and the journey from diagnosis to acceptance. Drawing on personal experience, research and conversations with experts, she learns how 'different' doesn't need to mean 'less' and how it's never too late for any of us to find our place in the world. Laura explores how and why female autism is so under-diagnosed and very different to that seen in men and boys and explores difficulties and benefits neurodiversity can bring.