Until one day, aged 18, she went on a diet. That didn’t stop. Then couldn’t stop. That trapped her in ‘a secret world of eating-related happiness and unhappiness’. And saw her weight swiftly drop to below six stone. A grippingly honest account of life with anorexia nervosa, Thin is Grace’s heartbreaking, shocking and, finally, inspirational story. A memoir that is in part insider’s exposé and in part survivor’s testimony, it explains the struggle for self-discovery, and chronicles the devastating battles waged for control over mind and body. Breaking secrets, Grace shatters the myths surrounding this widely misunderstood illness, helping those bound within the rules of anorexia to find a way out, and those on the outside to understand more.Thin also has resonance beyond the world of eating disorders. For in daring to tell the truth, Grace reveals her extraordinary story to be a common one, reflected in the shape of many of our lives. She draws on the universal themes of female self-image and self-determination, which have inspired such classics as The Bell Jar and A Room of One’s Own, to shatter the myths surrounding anorexia. And the powerful insights she brings to overcoming addiction make this an invaluable narrative for all those looking to find hope and renewal in the acceptance of change and growth.Thin is the most eloquent account of anorexia yet.

    In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth and Beauty, the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest to surgical wards to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined--and what happens when one is left behind.

    Taking up issues including depression, genetics, sexuality, sports, religion, fashion and family, these essays examine the role anorexia plays in a young person's search for direction. Powerful and immensely informative, this collection makes accessible the mindset of a disease that has long been misunderstood. With essays by Priscilla Becker, Francesca Lia Block, Maya Browne, Jennifer Egan, Clara Elliot, Amanda Fortini, Louise Glück, Latria Graham, Francine du Plessix Gray, Trisha Gura, Sarah Haight, Lisa Halliday, Elizabeth Kadetsky, Maura Kelly, Ilana Kurshan, Joyce Maynard, John Nolan, Rudy Ruiz, and Kate Taylor. www.anchorbooks.comwww.goinghungry.com

    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.

    During that year of physical recovery, Runyon began to question what he’d done, undertaking the complicated journey from near-death back to high school, and from suicide back to the emotional mainstream of life.In the tradition of Running with Scissors and Girl, Interrupted, The Burn Journals is a truly remarkable book about teenage despair and recovery.

    Joan Didion explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage–and a life, in good times and bad–that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later–the night before New Year's Eve–the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma.This powerful book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."

    There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsy-turvy world of conditional love?Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a child’s life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her father’s home in South East Asia—an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leve—relationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields clarity of what was missing.In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a child’s developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.

    A deeply moving and emotional read, STRUNG OUT challenges our preconceived ideas of what addiction looks like.”—Stephanie Land, New York Times bestselling author of MaidIn this deeply personal and illuminating memoir about her fifteen-year struggle with heroin, Khar sheds profound light on the opioid crisis and gives a voice to the over two million people in America currently battling with this addiction.Growing up in LA, Erin Khar hid behind a picture-perfect childhood filled with excellent grades, a popular group of friends and horseback riding. After first experimenting with her grandmother’s expired painkillers, Khar started using heroin when she was thirteen. The drug allowed her to escape from pressures to be perfect and suppress all the heavy feelings she couldn’t understand.This fiercely honest memoir explores how heroin shaped every aspect of her life for the next fifteen years and details the various lies she told herself, and others, about her drug use. With enormous heart and wisdom, she shows how the shame and stigma surrounding addiction, which fuels denial and deceit, is so often what keeps addicts from getting help. There is no one path to recovery, and for Khar, it was in motherhood that she found the inner strength and self-forgiveness to quit heroin and fight for her life.Strung Out is a life-affirming story of resilience while also a gripping investigation into the psychology of addiction and why people turn to opioids in the first place.

    A new mother is admitted with incessant visions of harming her child. A recent graduate, dressed in a tunic and declaring that love emanates from everything around him, is brought to A&E by his alarmed girlfriend. These are among the patients new physician Christine Montross meets during rounds at her hospital’s locked inpatient ward – and who we meet as she struggles to understand the mysteries of the mind, most especially when the tools of modern medicine are failing us. Beautifully written and deeply felt, Falling into the Fire is an intimate portrait of psychiatry and a moving reminder, in the words of the New York Times, of 'our fragile, shared humanity'

    You've seen him on the street, in bars, on the subway, at restaurants: a twenty-something guy, nice suit, works in advertising. Regular. Ordinary. But when the ordinary person had two drinks, Augusten was circling the drain by having twelve; when the ordinary person went home at midnight, Augusten never went home at all. Loud, distracting ties, automated wake-up calls, and cologne on the tongue could only hide so much for so long. At the request (well, it wasn't really a request) of his employers, Augusten landed in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Robert Downey, Jr., are immediately dashed by the grim reality of fluorescent lighting and paper hospital slippers. But when Augusten is forced to examine himself, something actually starts to click, and that's when he finds himself in the worst trouble of all. Because when his thirty days are up, he has to return to his same drunken Manhattan life and live it sober. What follows is a memoir that's as moving as it is funny, as heartbreaking as it is real.

    Ten years later, she is a psychologist running her own clinic, an award-winning writer, and happily married. The transformation in her life was brought about by Prozac. Prozac Diary is Lauren Slater's incisive account of a life restored to productivity, creativity, and love. When she wakes up one morning and finds that her demons no longer have a hold on her, Slater struggles with the strange state of being well after a lifetime of craziness. Yet this is no hymn to a miracle pharmaceutical. It is a frankly ambivalent quest for the truth of self behind an ongoing reliance on a drug. Slater also addresses Prozac's notorious "poop-out" effect and its devastating attack on her libido. This is the first memoir to reflect on long-term Prozac use, and reviewers agree that no one has written about Prozac with such beauty, honesty, and insight.

    Her journey there began when, overwhelmed by anxiety as she completed her doctoral studies in London, England, she found relief by dosing herself with alcohol and tranquillizers. She then embarked on what would turn out to be a decades- long psychoanalysis.The analysis dredged up acutely painful memories of an unhappy and confusing childhood back in Saskatoon. As Taylor struggled to cope with these, she would twice be re-admitted to Friern. She took refuge in day-care institutions and a psychiatric hostel, all the while continuing her therapy, which eventually put her on the road to recovery.This searingly honest, beautifully written memoir is the narrative of the author’s madness years, set inside the wider story of our treatment of psychiatric illness: from the great age of asylums to the current era of community care, ‘Big Pharma’, and quick fixes. It is a meditation on her own experience as well as that of millions of others – both in Europe and in North America – who have suffered, are suffering, and will suffer from mental illness.

    It begins with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.

    "The disease I have is loving him." Their love affair was dramatic, urgent, overwhelming--an intoxicating antidote to the long, lonely days of early motherhood. But soon after they get together, K starts using again, and years of relapses and broken promises follow. Even as his addiction deepens, she stays, convinced she is the one who can get him sober. If she leaves him, has she failed? After an adolescence marred by family trauma and addiction, Nina can't help but feel responsible for those suffering around her. How can she break this pattern?In prose at once unflinching and acrobatic, Aron delivers a piercing memoir of romance and addiction, drawing on intimate anecdote as well as academic research to crack open the long-feminized and overlooked phenomenon of codependency. She shifts between visceral, ferocious accounts of her affair with K and introspective analysis of the part she plays in his addictions, as well as defining moments in the history of codependency, from temperance to the formation of Al-Anon to more recent research in the psychology of addiction. Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls is a blazing, big-hearted book, one that illuminates and adds nuance to the messy tethers between femininity, enabling, and love.

    Jacobs tackles his most challenging experiment yet: a yearlong mission to radically improve every element of his body and mind—from his brain to his fingertips to his abs.From the bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically and The Know-It-All comes the true and truly hilarious story of one person’s quest to become the healthiest man in the world. Hospitalized with a freak case of tropical pneumonia, goaded by his wife telling him, “I don’t want to be a widow at forty-five,” and ashamed of a middle-aged body best described as “a python that swallowed a goat,” A.J. Jacobs felt compelled to change his ways and get healthy. And he didn’t want only to lose weight, or finish a triathlon, or lower his cholesterol. His ambitions were far greater: maximal health from head to toe. The task was epic. He consulted an army of experts— sleep consultants and sex clinicians, nutritionists and dermatologists. He subjected himself to dozens of different workouts—from Strollercize classes to Finger Fitness sessions, from bouldering with cavemen to a treadmill desk. And he took in a cartload of diets: raw foods, veganism, high protein, calorie restriction, extreme chewing, and dozens more. He bought gadgets and helmets, earphones and juicers. He poked and he pinched. He counted and he measured. The story of his transformation is not only brilliantly entertaining, but it just may be the healthiest book ever written. It will make you laugh until your sides split and endorphins flood your bloodstream. It will alter the contours of your brain, imprinting you with better habits of hygiene and diet. It will move you emotionally and get you moving physically in surprising ways. And it will give you occasion to reflect on the body’s many mysteries and the ultimate pursuit of health: a well-lived life.