Memoir Dysfunctional

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.

In Born in a Living Hell version 2.0, Darlene J. Clark courageously unveils the haunting realities of her tumultuous childhood, marked by abuse, betrayal, and unimaginable hardship. This raw, unflinching memoir not only recounts the painful moments of her past but serves as a beacon of hope and resilience for those who have suffered in silence. Through her story, Darlene calls for understanding, awareness, and the courage to stand up against abuse, reminding us all that survival is not only possible it’s a triumph. For those seeking a tale of strength amid adversity, Born in a Living Hell...

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.

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.

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.

This is my inspirational true story of childhood sexual abuse that I endured. The abuse was a secret, even to me, due to the fact that all the painful images were locked up in my subconscious for close to 37 years.

Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

Robert Ragland toiled every day on his family’s Appalachian tobacco farm as a young boy. His father, an impoverished and illiterate sharecropper, spent his earnings on alcohol and beat his children and wife constantly. And Robert couldn’t take one more strike. Meanwhile, Mennonite families had moved to town, providing food and comfort when Robert’s mother broke her leg. Witnessing compassion from these people, Robert wondered: What would it feel like to belong to a group where I was wanted, loved, and appreciated?

Jimmy, known by his friends as Meathead, is struggling to keep a secret. He wets the bed. Together with his dog and his pet ferret, Meathead rides his Big Wheel to misadventures in the gully, a swampy stream that cuts through his neighborhood. Impressing the older kids seems important, but it leads him into trouble. Losing his beloved pets and having his secret exposed, Meathead learns his lessons the hard way.

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.

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.

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.

On a snowy November day in 1997, in Flint, Michigan, police found the body of 45-year-old waitress Nancy Billiter. Her corpse had survived a botched attempt to burn it. An autopsy revealed that she'd been bound, beaten, sexually violated, and then injected with a lethal mixture of battery acid and heroin. Police suspected Nancy's friend, Carol Giles, 26, and Giles' boyfriend, Tim Collier, who had often boasted of a murderous gangland past.

On September 8, 2022, the world stood still as news broke of Queen Elizabeth II’s passing. Her death dismantled the protective shield around the world’s most famous family, and saw a long-simmering crisis of confidence in the British monarchy begin to resurface. Now, with unique insight, deep access and exclusive revelations, journalist Omid Scobie pulls back the curtain on an institution in turmoil—exposing the chaos, family dysfunction, distrust and draconian practices threatening its very future. This is the monarchy’s endgame. Do they have what it takes to save it?

As a young girl, Alda Sigmundsdóttir yearns to be close to her beautiful, distant mother, yet is never able to win her affection. When her parents divorce, a dark symbiosis between mother and daughter is forged, with devastating consequences that threaten to derail everything—especially Alda’s chance at intimacy and love.

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.

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.

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.

One dramatic day in her college dorm, self-injury lands a young woman in the surreal world of a psych ward for 74 hours. Those traumatic hours define her life for many years, until she comes to see the trauma through the lens of self-forgiveness, ongoing recovery, and God’s grace of revelation. Within Discovering My Scars, Stephanie Kostopoulos makes herself vulnerable and invites listeners into her reality with raw and visceral depictions of non-suicidal self-injury. The journey encapsulates life during her 20s, while stepping back to childhood, revealing abuse....

In the Fall of 1970, at the start of eighth grade, Peter Selgin fell in love with the young teacher who'd arrived from Oxford wearing Frye boots, with long blond hair and a passion for his students that was as intense as it was rebellious. The son of an emotionally remote inventor, Peter was also a twin competing for the attention and affection of his parents. He had a burning need to feel special. The new teacher supplied that need.