Parenting Memoir

Letters From My Sister began with a simple letter about a bad job interview or a bad hair day, seeking comfort from hundreds of miles away. One letter plus its response became two, two became four, and four became one hundred and twenty over the course of a year in which Faye approaches college graduation in Chicago while Eve establishes her career in New York City.

In July 1965, teenagers Sylvia and Jenny Likens were left in the temporary care of Gertrude Baniszewski, a middle-aged single mother, and her seven children. The Baniszewski household was overrun with children. There were few rules and ample freedom. Sadly, the environment created a dangerous hierarchy of social Darwinism where the strong preyed on the weak. What transpired in the following three months was both riveting and chilling.

Trystan and Biff had been dating for just a year when the couple learned that Biff's niece and nephew were about to be removed from their home by Child Protective Services. Immediately, Trystan and Biff took in one-year-old Hailey and three-year-old Lucas, becoming caregivers overnight to two tiny survivors of abuse and neglect. From this unexpected start, the young couple built a loving marriage and happy home - learning to parent on the job.

When a scandalous news story splashed across mainstream media about an elite escort agency in Las Vegas, people were shocked to learn there was a tiny mastermind behind the company: a small town girl from Oregon named Jami Rodman who went by the pseudonym Haley Heston.

Motherhood So White is the story of Nefertiti's fight to create the family she always knew she was meant to have and the story of motherhood that all American families need now. In this unflinching account of her parenting journey, Nefertiti examines the history of adoption in the African American community, faces off against stereotypes of single, Black motherhood, and confronts the reality of raising children of color in racially charged, modern-day America.

One spring morning, Kathryn Schulz went to lunch with a stranger and fell in love. Having spent years looking for the right relationship, she was dazzled by how swiftly everything changed when she finally met her future wife. But as the two of them began building a life together, Schulz’s beloved father—a charming, brilliant, absentminded Jewish refugee—went into the hospital with a minor heart condition and never came out. Newly in love yet also newly bereft, Schulz was left contending simultaneously with wild joy and terrible grief.

This is the second volume of true, heinous child-abuse stories.

Writer and therapist Sahaj Kaur Kohli grew up knowing exactly what it means to straddle multiple cultures at once. Like many children of immigrants, she has often found herself plagued by questions: Can I establish my own values and embrace where I come from? Is prioritizing my mental health really rejecting my culture? How do I set boundaries and care for myself when family and community mean everything? Even after becoming a therapist herself, she saw those same gaps in the mental health world, leading her to wonder, like so many children of immigrants: what about us?

In "Bare," Raina O’Dell takes you on a journey that traverses many lifetimes all in one. She lays bare the realities of her life, from the highs of her success in business to the lows of divorce, illness, and bankruptcy. Yet, by moving through it all with fearless awareness, she discovers her truth, which she shares here with deep conviction: where we are today does not dictate where we’ll be tomorrow.

The New York Times best-selling author and front man and rhythm guitarist of Kiss grants fans an all-access backstage pass to his personal life and shows them how to pursue a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle of their own, offering hard-won advice from a music legend.

After author Jess Keefe ended things with her long-term boyfriend, she moved in with her brother in hopes that family could help her not only heal from the break-up but also evolve into a healthy adult. But that fantasy ended when Matt’s heroin addiction came roaring back after lying dormant for years, leading to a fatal overdose one October night. Thirty-Thousand Steps is a powerful and transformative memoir that interweaves the author’s obsessive training to becoming a distance runner, along with her focused research into the science of addiction in the shadow of grief.

Kate Spencer lost her mom to cancer when she was 27. In The Dead Moms Club, she walks listeners through her experience of stumbling through grief and loss, and helps them to get through it, too. This isn't a weepy, sentimental story, but rather a frank, up-front look at what it means to go through gruesome grief and come out on the other side.

Dr. Jean Marmoreo spent her career keeping people alive. But when the Supreme Court of Canada gave the green light to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) in 2016, she became one of a small group of doctors who chose to immediately train themselves in this new field. Over the course of a single year, Marmoreo learns about end-of-life practices in bustling Toronto hospitals, in hospices, and in the facilities of smaller communities. She found that the needed services were often minimal—or non-existent.

Let's face it - raising children can take a wrecking ball to your ambitions, your finances, your relationships, even your health. But, as mother of three Shantelle Bisson will tell you, it doesn't have to be that way. In Raising Your Kids Without Losing Your Cool, Shantelle sets out how to get ready for baby's arrival, helps you through the big push, lays it all out on breastfeeding, and makes sure you don't forget to keep having sex. Plus, she'll help you navigate the perils of helicopter parenting, children on social media, and even gender-reveal parties.

When Kristina Kuzmic started to see signs that her otherwise sunny, resilient teenage son was struggling, she felt sure that a few simple fixes would right the ship. Over the following months, the issues her family faced were more nuanced, complicated, and pervasive than she could've predicted. Not only that, the obligations, ideas, and unrealistic standards she'd unintentionally aborbed from parenting culture and social media made it impossible to ask for help, or even put into action the tools she'd been sure she'd deploy in a crisis.

Hollywood Park is a remarkable memoir of a tumultuous life. Mikel Jollett was born into one of the country’s most infamous cults and subjected to a childhood filled with poverty, addiction, and emotional abuse. Yet, ultimately, his is a story of fierce love and family loyalty told in a raw, poetic voice that signals the emergence of a uniquely gifted writer.

This is the story of a courageous young woman who grew up in a home headed by a sexual predator and an abused mother who lost her mind when Christine was only 14, disappearing until she was a mother herself. It recounts the secrets and lies that were designed to protect the darkest family secret of all, which had the effect of making the eight children strangers to each other, and then prisoners of the passions that disordered their lives, and set them against each other. Christine's story is filled with intense dramas and the saga of Christine's climb out of the family wreck.

Kate, born to abusive, drug addicted parents, identifies an inner God voice when she is very young. This voice, and the support of her grandmother, helps her overcome her circumstances instead of falling victim to them. However, as she grows up she finds that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, and she discovers that she is an addict herself. Deciding not to go down the path her parents went, she rises above her circumstances again and chooses the path of recovery.

Pregnant from her first sexual encounter, a teenager living in a town of 3,000 Catholics keeps her secret from everyone until six weeks before the baby's due date. Hustled out of town and hidden in the Iowa countryside within hours of finally confiding in her mother, she concocts a scheme that will allow her to raise her child, but can she win over any of the people who might help her? As her pregnancy and its looming consequences unfold, she realizes that her life of lies and secrets has only just begun.

As a farm girl in eastern Oregon, feeding bottles to bummer lambs and babysitting her little sister, Jackie Shannon Hollis expected to become a mother someday. After a series of failed relationships, she met Bill, the man she wanted to spend her life with. But he was a man who never wanted children. Saying I do meant saying I don't to a rite of passage her body had prepared her for since puberty.