Memoir Dysfunctional

This powerful and haunting memoir details the years Paula McLain and her two sisters spent as foster children after being abandoned by both parents in California in the early 1970s. As wards of the State, the sisters spent the next 14 years moving from foster home to foster home. The dislocations, confusions, and odd pleasures of an unrooted life form the basis of one of the most compelling memoirs in recent years - a book in the tradition of Jo Ann Beard's The Boys of My Youth and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club.

Growing up, Tiffany Rochelle had no reason to believe her mother was not who she claimed to be, but that all changed when she was nine. She learned her mother had been living under a false identity since before she was born, and that the name her mother had used on her birth certificate wasn't real. From that point, Tiffany's life was never the same. By the time she was 25, her mother had used 27 known aliases and had created just as many lives to go along with them.

In this darkly funny, surprising memoir, the original "Lit Girl" and author of the era-defining Slaves of New York considers her life in and outside of New York City, from the heyday of the 1980s to her life today in a tiny upstate town that proves that fact is always stranger than fiction.

In 1988, when Kimball is only four years old, her mother attempts suicide on Mother’s Day—and this becomes one of many things Kimball’s family never speaks about. As she searches for answers nearly thirty years later, Kimball embarks on a thrilling journey into the secrets her family has kept for decades. Using old diary entries, hospital records, home videos, and other archives, Margaret pieces together a narrative map of her childhood in an attempt to understand what no one likes to talk about: the fractures in her family.

If you gave me this book at age seven and told me the last couple of chapters would be my life one day, I would have said you were crazy and that you have the wrong family in mind. Because my mom and dad would still be married and living in a normal house with normal cars. We would have a golden retriever named Zach and a ginger cat named Ginger. A picture-perfect family. But that all came crashing down for me. No one should have to go through the things we did....

M.P. MacDougall is the youngest of twelve kids. He grew up surrounded by obnoxious cows, Big Meanies, perilous expeditions, ravenous Sasquatches, mindless herds of picnickers, and meals that would make Julia Child roll over in her grave.

Nyna Giles was picking up groceries at the supermarket one day when she looked down and saw the headline on the cover of a tabloid: "Former Bridesmaid of Princess Grace Lives in Homeless Shelter". Nyna was stunned, shocked to see her family’s private ordeal made so public - the woman mentioned on that cover, Carolyn Scott Reybold, was her mother. In this powerful memoir of friendship and motherhood, Nyna Giles uncovers her mother’s past to answer the questions she never knew to ask.

In the years just before the Santa Clara Valley morphed into Silicon Valley, it was a sleepy agricultural basin dotted with cherry orchards. Carol Sveilich’s youth in San Jose was a combo platter of glass walls, cool music, useless gadgets, groovy neighbors, and worry. And, oh yes—sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. In Reflections from a Glass House, the indelible memories of fumbling through school and the passage through adolescence near the “City of Love” are masterfully awash with comedic prose, amusing storytelling, and gut-wrenching recollections.

Jeri takes the listener on a deeply personal story of her experience being the daughter of a notorious drug-trafficking kingpin serving a life sentence in maximum security federal prison. With candor and courage, Jeri writes about how her childhood trauma of witnessing domestic violence and finding out at the age of 10 that her dad was in prison instead of away at school broke her in ways she didn’t fully understand. Hers is the story shared by millions of sons and daughters of the incarcerated across the country.

After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother’s mental illness a secret from the outside world, 20-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won’t leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words she’s not sure are normal.

The S Word is the raw and compelling true story of a girl coming of age raised by a mother with a mental illness, and who nearly suffocates in the silence she was taught to value above all else - until she finally finds the strength to break free of the secrets binding her and save herself. The S Word is a book for anyone who may be keeping secrets...for children too little to know they warrant a voice...for teenagers too confused to think they have a choice...for adults too overwhelmed to do what’s right.

Implosion: Memoir of an Architect’s Daughter delves into the life of visionary architect Woodie Garber and the collision of forces in the turbulent 1970s that caused his family to collapse. Soon after the family’s move into Woodie’s glass house, his need to control begins to strain normal bonds; and Elizabeth’s first love, a young Black man, triggers his until-then hidden racism.

With the advent of TV dinners in the 1950s, an intense and entrepreneurial father rises from poverty to build a multi-million-dollar trucking empire hauling frozen food throughout the Northwest. His determination, combined with generosity and strict punishment, leaves his family in a state of emotional paralysis. After his untimely death, his survivors implode in a maelstrom of brutal courtroom drama, illness, and dementia. The estate and family are destroyed.

Imagine, if you can, a shy, skinny young girl growing up in a small Southern Patriarchal town in the 1960s and '70s. All she wants is peace, love, normality, and freedom to dream and be who she wants to be. She also wants her mother and siblings to be safe and free from harm. When her alcoholic father - a member of the local KKK - beats the family into submission and demands silence about his ugly secret deeds, everyone is too frightened to cry out for help.

An only child, Deborah Burns grew up in prim 1950s America in the shadow of her beautiful, unconventional, rule-breaking mother Dorothy, a red-haired beauty who looked like Rita Hayworth and skirted norms with a style and flare that made her the darling of men and women alike. Married to the son of a renowned Italian family with ties to the underworld, Dorothy fervently eschewed motherhood and domesticity, turning Deborah over to her spinster aunts to raise while she was the star of a vibrant social life.

An urgent and timely memoir exploring the reality of childhood sexual abuse, a scourge on too many neighborhoods, often hiding in plain sight. Millions of victims remain silent, buried under the weight of their own guilt, shame, and addiction. Breaking the Ruhls will resonate deeply with many who have experienced similar trauma, boundary violations, and abuse within the family, and struggle with the emotional and psychological effect.

Fearful of prison time - or lynching - for violating Indiana’s anti-miscegenation laws in the 1940s, E. Dolores Johnson's Black father and White mother fled Indianapolis to secretly marry in Buffalo. Her mother simply vanished, evading an FBI and police search that ended with the declaration to her family that she was the victim of foul play, either dead or sold into white slavery.

With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country, to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They

A gripping and emotional but seriously flawed life of one family's will to survive alone together, off-the-grid, while braving the wilderness with courage to survive and with a desire to defy the odds to remain alive - all based on a true story. Beautiful Prison is a story of family suffering from domestic abuse by a manipulative and abusive father who isolates his family into the wild untamed Idahoan Mountains.

A brutal, frank, and extraordinary account of true-life stories by Nicole Flemming. Nicole was born into an Afghan/Irish family in London. Frequently, when people tell stories about their childhood, they remember happy memories playing in the park, their birthday parties, and even adventures with friends. Yet, such a reality is not part of everyone’s life...This audiobook takes you into the life of a British Afghan female where the male holds all the authority. She experienced abuse from the person who was supposed to look after her.