Trauma Memoir

Carmen Aguirre has lived many lives, all of them to the fullest. At age six she was a Chilean refugee adjusting to life as a Latina in North America. At 18 she was a revolutionary dissident. In her early 20s she fought to find her voice as an actor and to break away from the stereotypical roles thrust upon her - Housekeeper, Hotel Maid, Mexican Hooker #1.

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

In this powerful, incisive work of social and self-exploration, Melnick blends personal essay with cultural criticism to explore Parton’s dual identities as a feminist icon and objectified sex symbol, identities that reflect the author’s own fraught history with rape culture and the arduous work of reclaiming her voice.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

In 1945, Edith Farnsworth asked the German architect Mies van der Rohe, already renowned for his avant-garde buildings, to design a weekend home for her outside of Chicago. Edith was a woman ahead of her time—unmarried, she was a distinguished medical researcher, as well as an accomplished violinist, translator, and poet. The two quickly began spending weekends together, talking philosophy, Catholic mysticism, and, of course, architecture over wine-soaked picnic lunches.

In 2001, Christine Yanke’s life was turned upside down after police raided her family’s home and arrested her Hells Angel husband. Suddenly an unemployed single mother of three boys, she had to fight to keep her home and family together. For the next three years, her husband awaited a trial that would determine their future together as a family. Blinded by an Angel is the true story of one woman’s struggle to survive mental, physical, and financial hardships.

With an audacious persistence to reclaim her life, Tia set off on a 15-year path to psychological health. The result is an emotionally regulated, actualized, self-aware woman able to tell her hard story without retraumatizing herself, a woman able to reach a hand back to help others claim what’s theirs. If trauma took your past, it shouldn’t get your present and future too. Through a series of personal stories, therapeutic stages, and resources built around a multi-step model, Tia Levings will guide you through the journey that helped her leave abuse, rediscover selfhood, and heal her mind.

The third of a nonfiction trilogy, this intrepid memoir tracks sexual harassment and sexual abuse in the life of a veteran American journalist. It also describes the long and ultimately successful psychotherapy the author undertook to heal.

A deeply moving story of the beauty and brutality of life, and death, on the world's most unpredictable and perilous mountain. Sitting just lower than Everest at 8,611 meters above sea level on the China-Pakistan border, the Savage Mountain claims the lives of even the most experienced climbers. Alongside severe altitude, the weather is notoriously volatile and the climb relentlessly steep. A staggering one in four attempts result in death on the mountain.

An urgent, no-holds-barred tale of gang life, guerrilla warfare, intergenerational trauma, and interconnected violence between the United States and El Salvador, Roberto Lovato’s memoir excavates family history and reveals the intimate stories beneath headlines about gang violence and mass Central American migration, one of the most important, yet least-understood humanitarian crises of our time - and one in which the perspectives of Central Americans in the United States have been silenced and forgotten.

Rising to accept a prestigious award, Jody Lulich wondered what to say. Describe how caring for helpless, voiceless animals in his own shame and pain provided a lifeline, a chance to heal himself as well? Lulich tells his story in In the Company of Grace, a memoir about finding courage in compassion and strength in healing-and power in finally confronting the darkness of his youth.

“You were like this once. What did you do to get better?” A day out from a mental institution, a woman devastated by flashbacks from childhood trauma poses this question to her big brother. Within a few weeks, she took her own life. This book is the answer that her brother wished he could have offered. Spiritual director and professor Frank Rogers had been there. As a young adult, he too was tormented by trauma suffered in the same family.

E. Lynn Harris writes the memoir of his life - from his childhood in Arkansas as a closeted gay boy through his struggling days as a self-published author to his rise as a New York Times best-selling author. In What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris shares an extraordinary life touched by loneliness and depression, but, more important, he reveals the triumphant life of a small-town dreamer who was able through writing to make his dreams - and more - come true.

As a young, single mother, Sara Schulting Kranz discovered her path to forgiveness and healing from the scars of sexual abuse and the trauma of an unexpected divorce started with a daily practice of actively embracing the power and beauty of nature. Along the way, Sara learned a key lesson that to heal from anything you must walk through it on your own terms.

Having suffered the unimaginable loss of her first husband and child, Lindsay Nicholson worked her way up to become the most successful lifestyle magazine editor in Britain. But when a would-be suicide ran in front of her car, the pages of her picture-perfect life fell apart once more. In just one year, Lindsay lost her marriage, job and home, and was even arrested. Suicidal and suffering from profound PTSD, she tried medication, therapy and New Age courses – until she found the answers she was looking for in the pages of her former magazine.

The Parents is a story of a woman who overcame years of abuse and trauma by discovering the dark root from which it all formed: the generational programming passed down through her family line, and belief systems that could reach back thousands of generations which created repeated patterns of pain and damage. She realized that these beliefs ingrained in her since birth shaped her in ways she never fully understood.

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.

Suffering from PTSD and severe depression from past trauma, battling an addiction to overprescribed psychiatric medication, and at the rock bottom of his career, journalist Brad Wetzler had nowhere to go. So he set out on a journey to wander and hopefully find himself—and the world—again. Into the Soul of the World is Wetzler’s thrilling, impactful, and heartrending memoir of healing—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. An adventure journalist at heart, Wetzler mixes travelogue with empowering insights about his inner journey to better care for his own mental health.

Trauma, tragedy, and loss are experiences that can be profoundly challenging and life-altering. They can shake us to our core, leaving us struggling to make sense of our world and find a way forward. Yet, in the face of unimaginable adversity, many people have found a way to survive and thrive.

Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War. In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader.