Memoir Dysfunctional

The American mental health system is in crisis, and those affected by its shortcomings are drowning without the tools and resources they deserve and need to thrive. In Born into Crisis, author Kenneth Nixon shares his story of growing up with a mother with severe mental illness and a family stuck in an enduring cycle of trauma. He knows firsthand the impact trauma can have on a person's life. Kenneth not only takes you on a powerful journey through his stories, he provides cogent and practical strategies for creating lasting change in our mental health system.

Chronicling her childhood of abuse, her diagnosis of BPD in her twenties, and her ultimate road to recovery, Born Under the Gaslight is a memoir like none you have ever listened to before. Offering a rare and insightful glimpse into the inner struggles of someone who lives with BPD, Born Under the Gaslight is a must-listen for therapists, others living with BPD, and anyone wanting to understand the complexities of BPD and how to offer practical and emotional support.

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.

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).

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.

Little Billy Eiland grew up in the projects having never known his real father. Julie, his mother, a white prostitute with a penchant for black men, would always change the subject when Billy asked her about his origins. Thus, Billy grew up not knowing who he was, but knowing that he was different. Billy’s siblings' fathers were all 100 percent black, but Billie had blond hair and blue eyes. Julie’s other children had the last name of Clark. Billy was the only child whose last name was Eiland. Not knowing his true identity, Billy was forced to forge a new one.

Set in the bucolic, yet brutal South of his youth, My Mother’s House is a memoir by novelist David Armand. It recounts the young author’s early memories of being born to a schizophrenic mother, then given up for adoption, only to be raised in a home with an alcoholic and abusive step-father.

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.

In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family whose members blamed their woes on ghosts and demons when in fact they should have been on antipsychotic meds.

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.

In this brave and shocking memoir, the author masterfully guides us through the pivotal points of her life, from an abusive upbringing that destroys her self-confidence, to the wreckage of an ill-conceived marriage, and on to a defining moment, full of grace and mercy, which gave her the wings to become the conquering and triumphant phoenix she is today.

To outsiders, Jessica Berger Gross's childhood - growing up in a "nice" Jewish family in middle class Long Island - seemed as wholesomely American as any other. But behind closed doors, Jessica suffered years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her father, whose mood would veer unexpectedly from loving to violent. At the age of 28, still reeling from the trauma but emotionally dependent on her dysfunctional family, Jessica made the anguished decision to cut ties with them entirely.

As the “Seeing Eye Girl” for her blind, artistic, and mentally ill mother, Beverly Armento was intimately connected with and responsible for her, even though her mother physically and emotionally abused her. Beverly’s mother regained her sight and went on to enjoy a moment of fame as an artist, but these positive turns did nothing to stop her disintegration into delusions. In this memoir, Beverly shares the coping strategies she invented to get herself through the trials of her young life, and the ways in which school and church served as refuges over the course of her journey.

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.

Leaving home was not easy for Irene Sardanis. Born into a Greek family in the Bronx in the 1940s, she was the youngest child of an unhappy mother and a father who drank, gambled, and enjoyed other women—and then, when Irene was 11, abandoned the family altogether. Irene's older siblings found a way out, but Irene was trapped, held hostage to her mother's rage and despair. When she finally escaped her mother as a young adult, she married a Greek man who controlled and dominated her just like her mother always had. But Irene wasn't ready to let her story end there.

When Heather Havrilesky was a kid in the seventies, it seemed there were only disaster movies. Burning towers, devouring earthquakes, careening airliners, alien pod invasions. To be prepared, she and her siblings fabricated elaborate plans to escape any and every emergency. But what began merely as a childhood game grew into a way of life where something shocking lurked around every corner.

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.

Domestic Abuse - Parent Abuse, Children’s Story, Those Left Behind, Our Stories & More of Our Stories Bundle. These are stories about the friends and families who have lost loved ones. Some have been forced to leave their abuser by going into hiding. Others haven't been as lucky. These people that are left behind tell their heartbreaking stories of their losses and grief.

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.