Memoir Dysfunctional

The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn't come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan's father killed himself in the carport. Forty years later Forhan "bravely considers the way he is and is not his father's son" (Larry Watson).

Kate Russell's third memoir explores the effects of child abuse. Beginning with her parent's upbringing, chronicling her life, ending in present day, Kate reveals traits, habits and mindsets that developed as the result of early childhood trauma. Long estranged from her abusers, Kate examines choices she made, masks she donned, and the outcome of her efforts through the lens of a survivor in recovery. For anyone who was physically, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually or psychologically abused. Especially those who cope by sweeping their past under the rug.

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.

Weaving between preparations for his father’s funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father’s alcoholism—a lifelong love that ended only at his death at the age of forty-eight, having poisoned himself one Carta Blanca at a time. Addiction respects no borders; the havoc Silva’s father wreaked on his family not only followed them north, where mother and son moved to escape his violent drunken rages, but would make itself felt even from the grave.

Earth to Moon is a reckoning with self-esteem, the ghosts of the past and a mother and a father who, in the process of leaving their mark upon on the world, scarred their first daughter on home soil. Brutally self-deprecating and funny as hell, it belies a rose-tinted perspective on the 70s and 80s west coast American scene, from within the belly of the beast of the rock and roll world.

After a tumor bursts in Mike Scalise's brain, leaving him with a hole in the head and malfunctioning hormones, he must navigate a new alien world of illness maintenance. His mother, who has a chronic heart condition and a flair for drama, becomes a complicated model as she competes with him for the status of "best sick person". The Brand New Catastrophe is a moving, funny exploration of how we define ourselves by the stories we choose to tell.

Two families assemble for a wedding at a family mansion on the beach in East Hampton. But as the festivities are readied, the father of the bride suffers a massive stroke from alcohol withdrawal and lies in a coma in the hospital. So begins Jeanne McCulloch’s vivid memoir of her wedding weekend in 1983 and its aftereffects on her family and the family of the groom. As McCulloch reveals, the repercussions from that weekend will ripple throughout her own family and that of her in-law as they grapple with questions of loyalty, tradition, marital honor, hope, and loss.

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.

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.

Fugitives from a man as alluring as he is violent, Andrea Jarrell and her mother develop a powerful, unusual bond. Once grown, Jarrell thinks she's put that chapter of her life behind her - until a woman she knows is murdered, and she suddenly sees that it's her mother's choices she's been trying to escape all along. Without preaching or prescribing, I'm the One Who Got Away is a life-affirming story of having the courage to become both safe enough and vulnerable enough to love and be loved.

Moving from the glamour and dysfunction of 1970s Brooklyn, to the sybaritic materialism of Reagan’s 1980s to post-9/11 New York, Lot Six offers a quintessentially American tale of an outsider striving to reshape himself in the funhouse mirror of American culture. Adjmi’s memoir is a genre-bending Künstlerroman in the spirit of Charles Dickens and Alison Bechdel, a portrait of the artist in the throes of a life and death crisis of identity.

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.

Zoe Zolbrod remained silent about her early childhood molestation for nearly a decade. When she finally decided to tell, she wasn't sure what to expect or what to say. Through a series of experiences - Zolbrod hitchhikes with a boyfriend from one coast to another, hangs out in a strip club in Philadelphia, meets and marries her husband, and gives birth to her children - she traces the development of her sexuality, her relationships with men, and the cultivation of her motherhood in the shadow of her childhood sexual abuse.

My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Beautiful, audacious, moving and so very funny, Sarah Moss’s memoir is a remarkable exercise in the way a brain turns on itself, and then offers a way out: it is a blindingly brilliant experiment in and celebration of what a creative mind can do.

On November 29, 1909, police were called to a ramshackle home in East Orange, New Jersey, where they found the emaciated body of 24-year-old Oceana "Ocey" Snead facedown in the bathtub - dead of an apparent suicide by drowning. There was even a note left behind. But it would not take authorities long to discover that Ocey's death was no suicide. And Ocey's own mother and two aunts were far from the sorrowful caretakers they appeared to be.

If Only You People Could Follow Directions is a spellbinding debut by Jessica Hendry Nelson. In linked autobiographical essays, Nelson has reimagined the memoir with her thoroughly original voice, fearless writing, and hypnotic storytelling. At its center, the book is the story of three people: Nelson’s mother Susan, her brother Eric, and Jessica herself.

Don’t Let Me Down is about a brave girl trying to navigate family secrets and tragedies and escape from small-town small-mindedness. It is a searing and often funny exploration of how women first see themselves through the lens of a parent’s love and of the ties that bind us to our childhood heroes, who ultimately lead us to ask that most profound of questions: Is love really all you need?

Kelly Thompson and her older sister, Meghan, are proof that sisterhood doesn’t always equate to friendship. Growing up within a military family, the girls were close despite being temperamental opposites—Kelly, anxious and studious, looked to her big sister for comfort, and Meghan, who battled kidney cancer as a toddler, was gregarious and protective. But as she approached adulthood, Meghan spi­ralled into a cocaine and opioid addiction, and Kelly’s relationship with her sister was torn apart.

Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist—the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places—into the perfumed chaos of India; the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris; the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter; the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan; and the gold temples of Burma.

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.