Childhood Memoir

When Jill Sitnick sat on her therapist’s couch trying to stop the panic attack that had lasted for months, she didn’t know she would eventually heal her deeply embedded childhood trauma with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. In Rescuing Jill, Jill shows you why it took a year, and multiple journeys, to fully heal. By describing how MDMA let her view her father’s beatings and mother’s suicide attempts from her adult perspective, she gives you a front-row seat into how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy healed her trauma and transformed her life.

Kid on the Go! is Neill McKee's third work of creative nonfiction. It's a standalone prequel to his award-winning Finding Myself in Borneo. In this new audiobook, McKee takes listeners on a journey through his childhood, adolescence, and teenage years, from the mid-40s to the mid-60s in the small, then industrially-polluted town of Elmira, Ontario, Canada.

"We live so far in the backwoods, we have to pump sunshine through hollow logs," young Susanette's daddy says, when asked where the Howell family lives. Their cracker house, which has never been slapped by a loaded paintbrush, sits on a small tobacco farm near the Suwannee River in North Florida, 18 miles from the small town of Live Oak - a town that was, at the turn of the 19th century, the fifth largest town in Florida and the largest inland city in the state.

When Julia Scully was seven years old, her father committed suicide, and she and her sister were sent to an orphanage. Julia sought comfort in the rituals of the orphanage - learning to knit, roller-skating after dinner, listening to One Man's Family on the radio - and tried to adapt. But two years later, emotionally damaged by the isolation and brutality of the orphanage, the girls followed their mother to the near-wilderness of the gold-mining territory north of Nome, Alaska.

'I have just had one of those absolutely mad mornings when you go out to have a browse at tagines and end up coming home with a brand-new gas ring expander. I think I was probably as surprised as anybody. Sometimes life is just like that, isn't it?' Award-winning food writer Damien Trench takes you on a journey through his childhood and his early inspirations - culinary and otherwise - with occasional diversions to the present.

As a child, Luiz Schwarcz knew little about his grandfather and namesake, Lajos. Only later did he learn that Lajos, a devout Hungarian Jew, had been put on a train to a Nazi death camp with his son André, whom he ordered to leap to freedom at a rail crossing while he himself was carried on to death. What young Luiz did know was that his father, André, who had emigrated to Brazil, was an unhappy and silent man. Luiz blossomed into the family prodigy, becoming a groundbreaking literary publisher. He found a home in the family silence—a home that he filled with reading.

This is an engaging account of childhood years lived in the famous religious and socialist commune in upstate New York (1848-1880) dedicated to sharing property, work, and love. It is full of sketches of many community members and of their employees. It conveys the look and feel of the communal home, the Mansion House, and the surrounding world.

Opened on February 17, 1929, the Mississippi State Preventorium operated continuously until 1976. The Mississippi Preventorium, like similar hospitals throughout the country, was an institution for sickly, anemic, and underweight children. It was established on the grounds of the Mississippi State Tuberculosis Sanitorium in the early years of the twentieth century when tuberculosis was a dreaded disease worldwide. The TB Sanitorium hospital housed those with tuberculosis, offering refuge for patients of all ages afflicted with the pernicious and contagious disease.

After a 30-year absence Agnes is returning to Australia, the country of her birth, at the request of her aging, narcissistic mother. Having undergone a long period of psychotherapy she now entertains a hope that burning questions will be answered, haunting mysteries solved, and buried memories encouraged into the light. Something has blighted her life since childhood. Something has cast a long shadow over her existence, affecting her ability to grasp at life fully, to develop sustained relationships and to appreciate her own sense of self-worth.

"No big deal"...for 15 years, these words kept Torey Ivanic from telling her parents, friends, and boyfriends about her interactions with the gymnastics coach who utterly confused her young mind, body, and soul - who had, she eventually came to understand, sexually violated her. In this memoir, Torey transparently and brilliantly shows how the abuse started, the collateral damage it created in her young life, her realization that it was a big deal, and her journey of healing and justice.

Until he was 17, Brett Preiss lived in the dusty outback of Australia, where he was one of four siblings in a dysfunctional family. He learned how to survive under the most bizarre and extraordinary circumstances. In this book, he shares the trials and tribulations of his youth through anecdotes that will leave you in tears of joy or sorrow. Travel back to the ’60s and ’70s and watch Brett transform from a sperm to adolescence.

For Kim Woodburn, finding fame in her 60s in the smash-hit television series How Clean is Your House? with fellow dust-buster Aggie Mackenzie is like living a fairytale. Often, however, she has simply wished that she had never been born, for Kim has overcome horrific emotional and physical abuse, both at the hands of her alcoholic mother and her philandering, abusive father.

Andrea Kott thought of herself as “the welfare Jew.” The daughter of a single mother whose depression and drinking pitched them into poverty, her stormy life looked nothing like that of the Jewish kids she knew: It defied every stereotype she associated with being Jewish—having an intact family and material wealth, and becoming a bat mitzvah. Alienated and ashamed, Kott felt ineligible to be Jewish, yet hungered for connection to the tradition and to God. It took a near-fatal accident, her mother’s death, marriage and motherhood, and losing a beloved brother for her to find her Jewish home.

Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world. But money itself is not the source of happiness. In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

Buried beneath the weight of insecurities and a hunger for acceptance, one woman's life becomes an electrifying tale of love, betrayal, and redemption. In a world where deceit and desire collide, she is thrust into a labyrinth of lies and chaos that transforms her into the very monster she has always feared. From Forbidden desires to shattered vows, Black Sheep, White Lies an unflinching exploration of resilience, takes you on a heart-stopping journey of power plays and toxic love.

From battling a devastating childhood illness to unearthing untold trauma, this healing memoir is one of resilience and transformation.

This is the true story of a unique man who lived among the Indians in the early 1800's, and who in his twenties learned to read and write this book. He was a favorite in Europe. He spent time with Thomas Jefferson, shortly thereafter Mr. Hunter was assassinated in Texas while attempting to establish a home for numerous Indian tribes.

A childhood holiday inspires an exploration into the family history of a ten year old Irish girl. Tales of peculiar neighbours; exploring a deserted cottage; visiting Grandad at work on the Donegal turf moors; ghost stories; turn of the century life in the Inishowen homestead; grasping family members; inoculation; emigrating on the 'Cattle Boat' to 'no dogs, no Irish, no children; lodgings in England; the Irish workmen in England; living in a Halfway house; 1950s convalescence; a convent education and performing in a bagpipe band.

These are the exotic, funny and sometimes bittersweet family stories and photos of an overseas childhood told by the daughter of a State Department diplomat about her family's travels and experiences living overseas from 1957 to 1972. She and her six brothers spent their childhoods in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and Ethiopia. Through her stories, the listener can begin to appreciate the adaptability of children to other cultures and the fortitude and courage of parents trying to raise their children to be good citizens of the world as well as good Americans.

Frank and funny, these stories, written originally for the Bengali children's magazine Sandesh, are an essential listen for all Ray enthusiasts as well as those who want to know Ray, the writer and filmmaker, better. In this volume, Ray also shares some of his experiences while shooting Pather Panchali - his epic debut, and subsequent films, particularly for children.