Childhood Memoir

The author shares her story of childhood incest, abuse , rape, and domestic violence. She tells of her ability to overcome these events. Adult content.

This is a summary with key takeaways and analysis of Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, television star Trevor Noah's memoir about growing up as a mixed-race child.

Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit.

A simple car accident changed the path of six-year-old Sean Rogers’ life forever. His single mother checked into the hospital as a vibrant young woman and checked out as a full-blown opioid addict. From that day forward, Sean’s life became a silent nightmare of abuse, neglect, chronic hunger, and slow, helpless withdrawal from everything and everyone he loved.

Nowhere Like This Place is a coming-of-age memoir set against the backdrop of the weirdness of an enclave with more PhDs per capita than anywhere else on Earth. It’s steeped in thinly-veiled sexism and the searing angst of an artsy child trapped in a terrarium full of white-bread nuclear scientists and their nuclear families. Everything happens, and nothing happens, and it all works out in the end. Maybe.

Long before he starred on some of television’s most beloved and long-running series such as Taxi and Who’s the Boss? and went on to distinguish himself in a variety of film and stage roles, Tony Danza was a walking contradiction: an indifferent student who dreamed of being a teacher. Inspiring a classroom of students was an aspiration he put aside for decades until one day it seemed that the most meaningful thing he could do was give his dream a shot. What followed was a year spent teaching 10th-grade English at Northeast High - Philadelphia’s largest high school with 3,600 students....

Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night - and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki's notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards - ordinary and extraordinary - of her life.

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak. Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left.

Adopted at six months old by Dubliners Sean and Helen Gallagher, PJ spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents' northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when - having lost the pub - Helen took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them 'care in the community'. Now it was a household of ten - PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever. Madhouse is PJ's riotous life story.

Jonathan Franzen arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. The Discomfort Zone is his intimate memoir of his development from a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person", through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions.

Giuliana Rancic is best known for interviewing A-listers on the red carpet and E! News, skewering their shocking style choices on Fashion Police, and giving viewers a front-row seat to her marriage and family life on her reality show, Giuliana & Bill. What fans may not know is that she learned English from Eddie Murphy, got her American citizenship so she could be a beauty queen, and used to have a bad habit of stealing cars for fun.

Aké. Los años de la niñez es el relato en primera persona de la infancia de Soyinka en una aldea de Nigeria llamada Aké, en los años en torno a la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Allí el pequeño Wole, un muchacho de una curiosidad infinita, amante de los libros y propenso a meterse en líos y aventuras, crece con la doble influencia de los aires occidentales y de las antiguas tradiciones espirituales youruba.

As a neurodivergent child in a hundred-year-old house, Zaji Cox collects grammar books, second-hand toys, and sightings of feral cats. She dances and cartwheels through self-discovery and doubt, guided by her big sister and their devoted single mother. Through short essays that evoke the abundant imagination of childhood, Plums for Months explores the challenges of growing up mixed race and low-income on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon.

Pat Conroy's memoirs and autobiographical novels contain a great deal about his life, but there is much he hasn't revealed to readers and listeners - until now. My Exaggerated Life is the product of a special collaboration between this great American author and oral biographer Katherine Clark, who recorded two hundred hours of conversations with Conroy before he passed away in 2016. In the spring and summer of 2014, the two spoke for an hour or more on the phone every day. No subject was off limits, including aspects of his tumultuous life he had never before revealed.

In this follow-up to Billy's first international best seller, an autobiography set largely in Thailand's infamous prison system, Billy sets out to explore his experience of childhood abuse that would lead to a life of drug addiction and near-constant incarceration. After Billy's sentence in Klong Prem prison was commuted as a result of his extraordinary success as a Muay Thai boxer, he returned to the UK. In this vividly told story, Liverpudlian Billy contrasts his first-hand experience of one of the cruellest prison systems in the world with his experience of UK prisons.

For all the roads we choose to travel, and even those we don't, Fred Rogers has an observation, a story, some insights to share. Whether you're facing graduation, a new job, a new baby, marriage, any change in your life, expected or not, the wisdom that Mister Rogers offers can contribute mightily to the grace with which you handle the change. It all comes down to knowing we're valuable, and that we're worthy of that value. As Fred would say, "You don't have to be anything more than who you are right now."

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.

In terms of drama, my childhood memoir appears sadly lacking. It starts promisingly, Mum and Dad arguing just after my birth, but deteriorates thereafter into eighteen years of relative wellbeing. The working title 'Nothing Much Happened' always seemed appropriate and yet?

Much is written about children's infancy and toddler years, which is good, since children will never remember those times themselves. It is ages four to 14 that make up the second act, as Catherine Newman puts it in this delightfully candid, outlandishly funny new memoir about the years that "your children will remember as childhood". Following Newman's son and daughter as they blossom from preschoolers into teenagers, Catastrophic Happiness is about the bittersweet joy of raising children and the ever-evolving landscape of issues parents traverse.

'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.