Sure, she knew Mormons didn't drink caffeine (cough), and they never swore (double cough), but life with family-centered folks would be cozy and wonderful. She could smell the fresh-baked bread just thinking about it. Join her as she honestly, humorously, and lovingly describes her quest to find someone with a real panty line problem, requests her LDS friends baptize her-after she dies-and considers her dad's suggestion to become a Jack Mormon. Although not a convert, Chrisy develops an understanding and respect for a widely misunderstood religion and has found a comfortable spot in her town, the community and the culture.

    The secret, though, that surrounded my parents’ unhappy life together, was divulged to me by accident . . .’ Hidden under some papers in his father’s bureau, the sixteen-year-old Derek Malcolm finds a book by the famous criminologist Edgar Lustgarten called The Judges and the Damned. Browsing through the Contents pages Derek reads, ‘Mr Justice McCardie tries Lieutenant Malcolm – page 33.’ But there is no page 33. The whole chapter has been ripped out of the book. Slowly but surely, the shocking truth emerges: that Derek’s father, shot his wife’s lover and was acquitted at a famous trial at the Old Bailey. The trial was unique in British legal history as the first case of a crime passionel, where a guilty man is set free, on the grounds of self-defence. Husband and wife lived together unhappily ever after, raising Derek in their wake. Then, in a dramatic twist, following his father’s death, Derek receives an open postcard from his Aunt Phyllis, informing him that his real father is the Italian Ambassador to London . . . By turns laconic and affectionate, Derek Malcolm has written a richly evocative memoir of a family sinking into hopeless disrepair. Derek Malcolm was chief film critic of the Guardian for thirty years and still writes for the paper. Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he became first a steeplechase rider and then an actor after leaving university. He worked as a journalist in the sixties, first in Cheltenham and then with the Guardian where he was a features sub-editor and writer, racing correspondent and finally film critic. He directed the London Film Festival for a spell in the 80s and is now President of both the International Film Critics Association and the British Federation of Film Societies. He lives with his wife Sarah Gristwood in London and Kent and has published two books – one on Robert Mitchum and another on his favourite 100 films. He is a frequent broadcaster on radio and television and a veteran of film festival juries all over the world.

    In a large, romantic house in Amherst, Massachusetts, Leslie Garis, her two brothers, and their parents and grandparents aimed to live a life that mirrored the idyllic world the elder Garises created nonstop. But inside The Dell--where Robert Frost often sat in conversation over sherry, and stories appeared to spring from the very air--all was not right. Roger Garis's inability to match his parents' success in his own work as playwright, novelist, and magazine writer led to his conviction that he was a failure as father, husband, and son, and eventually deepened into mental illness characterized by raging mood swings, drug abuse, and bouts of debilitating and destructive depression. "House of Happy Endings "is Leslie Garis's mesmerizing, tender, and harrowing account of coming of age in a wildly imaginative, loving, but fatally wounded family.

    Domestic violence, thriving after abuse

    It wasn’t long before hardships left them unable to provide.Soon, four-year-old Phyllis is plucked off her front porch, ripped away from the only family she knows, and sent to live with her grandmother Lula on an Alabama farm with no electricity, plumbing, or running water.Heartbroken by her mother’s abandonment, Phyllis struggles to acclimate to her new surroundings. Thanks to the unconditional love of Grandma Lula and the healing powers of an old, tattered quilt, she is finally able to adjust to her new life.In Quilt of Souls, Lawson documents her childhood growing up with the incredible woman who raised her and the powerful family heirloom that served as the cloth that would forever stitch their lives together.With its tales of family, despair, freedom and hope, the true story behind this deeply personal memoir serves as the inspiration for http://www.quiltofsouls.com, where individuals share relics and stories from their own family histories.

    

    From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of enduring and ultimately overcoming the social, economic, and health legacies of colonialism.As a child, Chacaby learned spiritual and cultural traditions from her Cree grandmother and trapping, hunting, and bush survival skills from her Ojibwa stepfather. She also suffered physical and sexual abuse by different adults, and by her teen years she was alcoholic herself. At twenty, Chacaby moved to Thunder Bay with her children to escape an abusive marriage. Abuse, compounded by racism, continued, but Chacaby found supports to help herself and others. Over the following decades, she achieved sobriety; trained and worked as an alcoholism counselor; raised her children and fostered many others; learned to live with visual impairment; and came out as a lesbian. In 2013, Chacaby led the first gay pride parade in her adopted city, Thunder Bay, Ontario.Ma-Nee Chacaby has emerged from hardship grounded in faith, compassion, humor, and resilience. Her memoir provides unprecedented insights into the challenges still faced by many Indigenous people.

    No, you’re not. Yes, I am. Of what? What if I can’t do it? What if you can? When the call came, when the letter arrived, when the sunlight finally fell on your face—the struggle fell away, and you only remembered the beauty. It was like childbirth, but constantly, for your whole life. Every day we brought forth our future, every choice we made determined what raw materials would be in the hands of tomorrow. Some days took years and were times of transition where we thought we might die, and some years were full of euphoria or rushing release. Most years were slightly uncomfortable until we remembered how to breathe. Everything didn’t always work out. Sometimes things were just hard. Sometimes life hurt too much, and people did break. Sometimes, you had to wait for a long time for the sun to rise. While it’s true the sun always rose, not everyone lived through the night, and the stars didn’t give a damn. The Burning Point will be available from By Common Consent Press on July 1, 2017.

    Ron Hubbard—begins in Brooklyn's working-class Bensonhurst neighborhood, where she was introduced to the religion by her mom. More than three decades later, Leah summoned the courage to leave the church—something few celebrities at her level of fame have ever done before and almost none have ever talked about. This People Spotlight Story explores Leah Remini and her escape from Scientology.

    No bikinis, despite the Queensland heat. No boys, unless he's Muslim. And no life insurance, not even when her father gets cancer.Soos is trying to balance her parents' strict decrees with having friendships, crushes and the freedom to develop her own values. With each rule Soos comes up against, she is forced to choose between doing what her parents say is right and following her instincts. When her family falls apart, she comes to see her parents as flawed, their morals based on a muddy logic. But she will also learn that they are her strongest defenders.

    Each year, on his birthday - the 8th of December, Feast of the Immaculate Conception - he and his mother would journey by train to the capital city, passing frosted pink fields at dawn, to arrive at Westland Row and the beginning of a day's adventures that included much-anticipated trips to Clery's and the Palm Beach ice-cream parlour. The aspiring writer first came to live in the city when he was eighteen. In a once grand but now dilapidated flat in Upper Mount Street, he wrote and dreamed and hoped. It was a cold time, for society and for the individual - one the writer would later explore through the famed Benjamin Black protagonist Quirke - but underneath the seeming permafrost a thaw was setting in, and Ireland was beginning to change.Alternating between vignettes of Banville's own past, and present-day historical explorations of the city, Time Pieces is a vivid evocation of childhood and memory - that 'bright abyss' in which 'time's alchemy works' - and a tender and powerful ode to a formative time and place for the artist as a young man. Accompanied by images of the city by photographer Paul Joyce.

    We are then forced to re-live the moments we have spent decades burying beneath amicable smiles and a false sense of security. This is my story; one shrouded in as much truth as my mind can tolerate. My story may mean nothing to you, but I believe, that if these words were to fall into the right hands, then they could have the potential to change someone’s life, someone’s mind. At a young age I learned what it meant to carry the scorching secrets of a fiery hell. For years I allowed the flames to consume my mind as I proceeded to live a life devoted to destruction and chaos. I blamed my mother. I blamed the men that raped me. I blamed the woman that refused to love me back. But when the smoke cleared, the mirror on the wall only painted a single reflection, that of myself. So, when the big bad wolf no longer blows, yet the house still falls, who will I have to blame then? Only me.

    I hated working for him and I hated being around him. I hated it when he walked through the front door at home. And we feared him from the moment he pulled up in front of the house in his car.” So writes conservative firebrand and popular radio host Larry Elder. For ten years Elder and his father did not talk to each other. When they finally did, the conversation went on for eight hours—eight hours that took Elder on his father’s journey from the Jim Crow South, to service in the Marine Corps, to starting a business in Southern California. Elder emerged not just reconciled with his dad, but admiring him, and realizing that he had never fully known him or understood him.  Heartfelt, beautifully written, compulsively readable, A Lot Like Me—originally published as Dear Father, Dear Son—is both a powerfully affecting memoir and a personal, provocative slice of American history.

    Instinctively we feel we should dim the lights, pull the curtains, and speak softly. But on a remote island off the coast of Ireland's County Mayo, death has a louder voice. Each day, along with reports of incoming Atlantic storms, the local radio runs a daily roll call of the recently departed. The islanders go in great numbers, young and old alike, to be with their dead. They keep vigil with the corpse and the bereaved company through the long hours of the night. They dig the grave with their own hands and carry the coffin on their own shoulders. The islanders cherish the dead--and amid the sorrow, they celebrate life, too. In My Father's Wake, acclaimed author and award-winning filmmaker Kevin Toolis unforgettably describes his own father's wake and explores the wider history and significance of this ancient and eternal Irish ritual. Perhaps we, too, can all find a better way to deal with our mortality -- by living and loving as the Irish do.

    This is Girl on the Net's true story - of falling in love and falling apart. From the honeymoon days of sex whenever and wherever, to the everyday issues that comes with a solid relationship. This is more than a memoir, this is a must-read for all of us who have ever wondered...can great sex and real love ever go hand in hand?