Childhood Memoir

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.

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.

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.

When Constance was 13, her mother simply moved out, leaving her daughter to fend for herself. There was no gas, no electricity, and no food. But somehow Constance found the courage to survive her terrible start in life. This is her heartrending, and ultimately triumphant, story.

One of the most important figures in the Scots revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is Billy Kay. Through radio, television, plays, creative writing and especially his hugely influential book Scots The Mither Tongue, Kay’s work helped change people’s negative perception of Scots and paved the way for its acceptance as a key element in Scottish cultural identity.

In this “vivid...lovely and inviting” (The New York Times) coming-of-age memoir - the “best piece of nature writing since H Is for Hawk” (Neil Gaiman) - a young man saves a baby magpie as his estranged father is dying, only to find that caring for the bird saves him.

This is the tale of a girl who sets out on a moving journey toward womanhood in the quiet corners of an ever-changing world. Her footsteps mirror the tides of a time when political unrest and the ominous threat of war ruled the day. Life takes on shades of gray, never completely happy nor sad, as she makes her way through the byway of life. Witness the gradual transformation of not just one life but an entire landscape molded by the permanent traces of history through the prism of her changing viewpoint. Let her take you on a journey filled with love, sacrifice and resilience.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

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.

In Outside the Box, you will listen to chapters written by nine contributing authors, each of whom is a female entrepreneur, mom, and world traveler. Authors have committed to sharing their families journeys in the hopes of educating and inspiring other travel-loving moms.

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?

In this memoir of a lost America, Hal Borland tells the story of his family's migration to eastern Colorado as homesteaders at the turn of the twentieth century. On an unsettled and unwelcoming prairie landscape, the Borlands build a house, plant crops, and eke out a meager existence. While life is difficult—and self-reliance is necessary with no neighbors for miles—the experience brings the family close and binds them closer to the terrible and beautiful natural patterns that govern their lives.

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.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

Ally was at a breaking point when she woke up in a psych ward at the age of 18. She couldn't put a sentence together, let alone take a shower, eat a meal, or pick up a phone. What had gone wrong? In recent years, she had produced a feature film, a popular reality show for a major network, and had acted in an off-Broadway play. But now Ally was pushed to a psychotic break after struggling since she was seven years old with physical symptoms that no doctor could explain - everything from joint pain to night sweats, memory loss, nausea, and brain fog.

Carla Funk grew up in a place of logging trucks and God, pellet guns and parables. Every Sunday, she sat with her mother and brother in the same pew at the Mennonite church while her dad stayed home with his cigarettes and a fridge full of whiskey. In these tender, humorous stories, Funk stitches together the wondrous and the mundane: making snow angels and carrying sacks of potatoes, tossing pig bladders like footballs, and vying for the Christmas pageant spotlight.

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.

One of the best-loved men in Britain, Alan Titchmarsh brilliantly recalls his childhood in 1950s Yorkshire. Alan Titchmarsh grew up and developed his passion for nature in the wild and beautiful landscape of Yorkshire. A real treat for his millions of fans, the ever-popular presenter vividly depicts a childhood of simple pleasures like climbing trees and fishing in streams in a time of post-war austerity.

In 1972, Patty Bear’s father, Robert Bear, was excommunicated from their church and subsequently shunned by members including Gale, his wife. For Amish and Old Order Mennonites, known as “Plain People”, shunning is a biblical practice meant to bring wayward members back into the community’s fold.