Rosalie Lightning: A Graphic Memoir


Tom Hart - 2016
    His heart-breaking and emotional illustrations strike readers to the core, and take them along his family's journey through loss. Hart uses the graphic form to articulate his and his wife's on-going search for meaning in the aftermath of Rosalie's death, exploring themes of grief, hopelessness, rebirth, and eventually finding hope again. Hart creatively portrays the solace he discovers in nature, philosophy, great works of literature, and art across all media in this expressively honest and loving tribute to his baby girl. Rosalie Lighting is a graphic masterpiece chronicling a father's undying love.

Diary of Indignities


Patrick Hughes - 2007
    With full-color photo essays, the author guides readers past good taste, sense and even logic into the magical, mayhem-ridden world known as his life.

An Impossible Life: The Inspiring True Story of a Woman's Struggle from Within


Rachael Siddoway - 2019
    Wife of a CEO, mother of three, living in a beautiful suburb, Sonja’s life appears ideal. How did she get here?In a gripping and breathtaking narrative that makes the reader feel as though they are listening in on a private conversation, Sonja tells the compelling real account of her struggle with marriage, motherhood, and mental illness.An Impossible Life is an unforgettable true story of perseverance when all hope seems lost. Intriguing and heartfelt, Sonja’s personal account of her mental health journey shines a beacon of hope to all who feel overwhelmed by the specter of mental illness.

The Dog Stays in the Picture: Life Lessons from a Rescued Greyhound


Susan Morse - 2014
    David’s acting jobs keep him away from home for long stretches of time, the last two teenagers are on their way to college, and this time it’s Susan’s turn to pick the dog. She probably should have thought a little more carefully before falling for a retired racing greyhound. Enter Lilly, who lands like a disoriented neutron bomb in Susan’s comfortable suburban home after living the first three years of her life in the rugged and ruthless world of the racetrack. Instantly lovable but hopelessly inept at domesticity, Lilly turns out to be more than Susan bargained for, throwing all Susan and David’s plans for their long-anticipated, footloose empty-nest years into complete disarray.In The Dog Stays in the Picture, Susan Morse tells the hilarious and moving story of how an anxious dog and a high-strung woman find tranquility together.

My Life


Isadora Duncan - 1927
    Denis, Agnes de Mille, and Martha Graham.Documenting Duncan's own life as a dancer and as a woman—from her enchantment with classical music and poetry as a child in San Francisco and her intense study of classical Greek art in Athens, through the great strides she made in teaching, founding schools, performing, and collaborating with international artists, to her notorious love affairs and the tragic deaths of her own children—My Life reissued here is still as extraordinary as the woman who wrote it more than sixty years ago.

The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven: A Remarkable Account of Miracles, Angels, and Life beyond This World


Kevin Malarkey - 2010
    I did not go to Heaven. [...] I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible."The publisher of this book, Tyndale, released this statement: “We are saddened to learn that Alex Malarkey, co-author of ‘The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven,’ is now saying that he made up the story of dying and going to heaven. Given this information, we are taking the book out of print.”In 2004, Kevin Malarkey and his six-year-old son, Alex, suffered an horrific car accident. The impact from the crash paralyzed Alex--and medically speaking, it was unlikely that he could survive. "I think Alex has gone to be with Jesus," a friend told the stricken dad. But two months later, Alex awoke from a coma with an incredible story to share. Of events at the accident scene and in the hospital while he was unconscious. Of the angels that took him through the gates of heaven itself. Of the unearthly music that sounded just "terrible" to a six-year-old. And, most amazing of all . . . Of meeting and talking to Jesus. "The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven" is a story of an ordinary boy's most extraordinary journey. As you see heaven and earth through Alex's eyes, you'll come away with new insights on miracles, life beyond this world, and the power of a father's love.

A Very Easy Death


Simone de Beauvoir - 1964
    The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (The Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is ever likely to forget.

Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy


Ira Sukrungruang - 2010
    In this lively, entertaining, and often hilarious memoir, he relates the early life of a first-generation Thai-American and his constant, often bumbling attempts to reconcile cultural and familial expectations with the trials of growing up in 1980s America.            Young Ira may have lived in Oak Lawn, Illinois, but inside the family’s bi-level home was “Thailand with American conveniences.” They ate Thai food, spoke the Thai language, and observed Thai customs. His bedtime stories were tales of Buddha and monkey-faced demons. On the first day of school his mother reminded him that he had a Siamese warrior’s eyes—despite his thick glasses—as Aunty Sue packed his Muppets lunch box with fried rice. But when his schoolmates played tag he was always It, and as he grew, he face the constant challenge of reconciling American life with a cardinal family rule: “Remember, you are Thai.”            Inside the Thai Buddhist temple of Chicago, another “simulated Thailand,” are more rules, rules different from those of the Southside streets, and we see mainstream Western religion—“god people”—through the Sukrungruang family’s eyes. Within the family circle, we meet a mother who started packing for her return to Thailand the moment she arrived; her best friend, Aunty Sue, Ira’s second mother, who lives with and cooks for the family; and a wayward father whose dreams never quite pan out.            Talk Thai is a richly told account that takes us into an immigrant’s world. Here is a story imbued with Thai spices and the sensibilities of an American upbringing, a story in which Ira practices English by reciting lines from TV sitcoms and struggles with the feeling of not belonging in either of his two worlds. For readers who delight in the writings of Amy Tan, Gish Jen, and other Asian-Americans, Talk Thai provides generous portions of a still-mysterious culture while telling the story of an American boyhood with humor, playfulness, and uncompromising honesty.

Choose Your Own Disaster


Dana Schwartz - 2018
     Join Dana Schwartz on a journey revisiting all of the awful choices she made in her early twenties through the internet's favorite method of self-knowledge: the quiz. Part-memoir, part-VERY long personality test, Choose Your Own Disaster is a manifesto about the millennial experience and modern feminism and how the easy advice of "you can be anything you want!" is actually pretty fucking difficult when there are so many possible versions of yourself it seems like you could be. Dana has no idea who she is, but at least she knows she's a Carrie, a Ravenclaw, a Raphael, a Belle, a former emo kid, a Twitter addict, and a millennial just trying her best. This long-form personality quiz manages to combine humor with unflinching honesty as one young woman tries to find herself amid the many, many choices that your twenties have to offer.

An Honest Look at a Mysterious Journey


John Stumbo - 2011
    You've stumped us all."They didn't see it coming.They would never be the same.You'll find their story...AuthenticPowerfulHumorousMovingInsightfulRivetingYou may even find it intersecting with your own story.John and Joanna Stumbo have been married twenty-eight years--some great, some not so great. They have three grown children--all great. Joanna grew up in Ohio and Florida and a few other places; John in Minnesota and Montana. They have spent their adult lives figuring out what it means to be pastor and wife in churches from Pennsylvania to Oregon. John has a lifetime love for most anything outdoors and athletic. Joanna loves family and home. John never planned on spending seventy-seven days in the hospital. Joanna never had aspirations of being a caregiver. Neither of them ever planned on writing a book such as this. They are both the better for the journey they've been on, confusing though it be.

A Life Stolen: My Father's Journey Through Alzheimer's


Vanessa Luther - 2014
    It’s an inside look into the day-to-day challenges facing not only the patient, but also the caregivers. For many years, her father exhibited signs of dementia, eventually becoming too significant to ignore. Everything culminated during an incident one night, after which her father was taken away, never to return to his home again. The disease changed him every day until he was a stranger. Then, it stole his life. Through the initial days at home to hospital stays, living in a memory care unit, rehab stints and eventually hospice care, this book reveals many of the struggles encountered while facing Alzheimer’s in a world not quite ready for it. It is based on actual events depicted exactly as they happened while travelling the heartbreaking and harrowing road through this horrific illness. Its purpose is to give guidance and insight to others caring for loved ones with this terrible affliction, whether it is in providing helpful information, feelings of support or simply words of encouragement. Most importantly, the hope is that it will make the road for others an easier one to travel. May the many tears in this journey be the fortitude that helps others deal with the adversity from this overwhelming disease.

Socs and Greasers: Behind The Scenes of The Outsiders from Rob Lowe's Stories I Only Tell My Friends


Rob Lowe - 2012
    

Bough Down


Karen Green - 2013
    In this profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament, artist and writer Karen Green conjures the inscrutable space of love and loss, clarity and contradiction, sense and madness. She summons memory and the machination of the interior mind with the emotional acuity of music as she charts her passage through the devastation of her husband's suicide. In crystalline fragments of text, Green's voice is paradoxically confessional and non-confessional: moments in her journey are devastating but also luminous, exacting in sensation but also ambiguous and layered in meaning. Her world is haunted by the unnameable, and yet she renders that world with poetic precision in her struggle to make sense of not only of death but of living. In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, each made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world-pages torn from books, bits of paper refuse, drawings and photographs, old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Each collage — and the creative act of making it — evinces the reassembling of life. A breathtaking lyric elegy, Bough Down uses music and silence, color and its absence, authority of experience and the doubt that trembles at its center to fulfill a humane artistic vision. This is a lapidary, keenly observed work, awash with the honesty of an open heart.

The White Mouse


Nancy Wake - 1985
    Nancy Wake, a New Zealander who became one of the most highly decorated women of WW II, here she tells her own story.

Climbing Higher


Montel Williams - 2004
    He was struck with denial, fear, depression, and anger, and now he's battling back. Graced with strong values, courage, and hard-won wisdom, he shares his insights in this powerful book on the divergent roads a life can take, and recounts how he rose to meet the challenges he's faced. Surprising, searing, and deeply personal, Climbing Higher is as honest and inspiring as its author.