Childhood Memoir

A father-daughter story that tells of the author’s experience growing up in a separatist fundamentalist Christian cult, from the author of the national bestseller Ghostwalk Rebecca Stott grew up in in Brighton, England, as a fourth-generation member of the Exclusive Brethren, a cult that...

In this follow-up to Billy's first international best seller, an autobiography set largely in Thailand's infamous prison system, Billy sets out to explore his experience of childhood abuse that would lead to a life of drug addiction and near-constant incarceration. After Billy's sentence in Klong Prem prison was commuted as a result of his extraordinary success as a Muay Thai boxer, he returned to the UK. In this vividly told story, Liverpudlian Billy contrasts his first-hand experience of one of the cruellest prison systems in the world with his experience of UK prisons.

When the Bible talks about the third- and fourth-generational curse, that's so true. If the curse is not broken by you, then who will stop it dead in its tracks? Fierce Wholeness: Finding Myself After Childhood Emotional Trauma is Robin's story—in all of its raw and messy but authentic and beautiful transparency—as she seeks to repair the dam that had been busted, the riverbed that had been washed away, the landscape that had been obliterated by her family of origin. Listeners who grew up in the clutches of the branches of emotional abuse will be empowered by Robin's story.

These five stories, written and read by Gerald Durrell himself, are taken from his books Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Fillets of Plaice. They were recorded on Jersey in 1985 and are used by kind permission of the Estate of Gerald Durrell.

Rosemary Penfold's beautiful and evocative memoir of her life growing up in the fields of the English countryside is a moving testament to a forgotten world and a disappearing and misunderstood people. Born in 1938 in a traditional Gypsy wagon, surrounded by the love of her parents and extended family in a small but close-knit community, Rosemary paints a vivid and touching portrait of a way of life that no longer exits.

Nestled within the deep Alabama forest lies a community built on ancient Indian burial ground and almost completely hidden away from the world if not for the winding main road which leads to it from the highway. Within this community rests scenic streets, quaint suburban homes, happy families...and ghostly legends that will chill your bones. Here lies a collection of some of the scariest Southern ghost stories.

“Powerful . . . a poetic meditation on how love or attempts at loving can drive us to madness.”—The Boston Globe “We learn about the cracks in Felix’s upbringing, the hurt from the breakup itself, and a pain that spans a lifetime, all through a sharp millennial voice.”—Time A...

In her memoir, Jevranne explores the effects trauma has on the body and how it can often result in blocked-out memories. She shares her personal journey with grief and the struggles that appeared when silencing herself because of not feeling valid in her pain- a childhood and generational wound embedded through the years.

"We live so far in the backwoods, we have to pump sunshine through hollow logs," young Susanette's daddy says, when asked where the Howell family lives. Their cracker house, which has never been slapped by a loaded paintbrush, sits on a small tobacco farm near the Suwannee River in North Florida, 18 miles from the small town of Live Oak - a town that was, at the turn of the 19th century, the fifth largest town in Florida and the largest inland city in the state.

Margaret Staples was nine years old at the beginning of 1939 when her father was posted to the British colony of Malta with the Royal Engineers. Swimming every day, with blue skies and balmy weather; Margaret and her siblings thought they were in paradise. Everything changed when the Second World War broke out. Hitler wanted to take control of Malta for its strategic position, right in the middle of the Mediterranean.

13 June, 1940. Carefully labelled, and each clutching little brown suitcases, Terry, aged seven, and his elder brother Jack, eleven, stand amid the throng of children which crowds the narrow platform at Welling station awaiting the steam engine which will pull them and their fellow evacuees across the country towards their unknown destination – and their new lives...

John Creedon’s scenes from an Irish childhood paint a colourful and sometimes hilarious picture of a changing Ireland and the growing pains of boyhood. Set in a city-centre household bustling with humanity, the cast includes a dozen children and another dozen adults, including aunts, an American writer, an African doctor, and a Scottish bookie. The streets outside overflow with brewery horses, beat clubs, dance halls, nuns, priests, a Turkish delight shop and a pub where a child could sit up on a high stool and smoke his cigarette in peace.

Saturday Night Live veteran Julia Sweeney’s “endearing series of true tales from parenthood’s front lines” (O, The Oprah Magazine) is a funny, smart tour de force that reads like a conversation with your best friend. In these candidly witty and poignant essays, comedienne and writer...

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that feels like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm. Drema's coming of age is colored by tent revivals with Grandpa, poetry-writing hobos, and traveling carnivals, and through it all, she serves witness to a multi-generational family.

By the award-winning author of Team of Rivals and The Bully Pulpit, Wait Till Next Year is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s touching memoir of growing up in love with her family and baseball. Set in the suburbs of New York in the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year re-creates the postwar era, when the corner...

Offering a nuanced and transformative take on immigration, multiculturalism, and America's role on the global stage, The Newcomers follows and reflects on the lives of 22 immigrant teenagers throughout the course of their 2015-2016 school year at Denver's South High School. Unfamiliar with American culture or the English language, the students range from the ages of 14 to 19 and come from nations struggling with drought, famine, or war.

When Jill Sitnick sat on her therapist’s couch trying to stop the panic attack that had lasted for months, she didn’t know she would eventually heal her deeply embedded childhood trauma with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. In Rescuing Jill, Jill shows you why it took a year, and multiple journeys, to fully heal. By describing how MDMA let her view her father’s beatings and mother’s suicide attempts from her adult perspective, she gives you a front-row seat into how psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy healed her trauma and transformed her life.

Recently hailed as "the greatest cabaret artist of [V's] generation" in The New Yorker, Mx. Justin Vivian Bond makes a brilliant literary debut with this staggeringly candid and hilarious novella-length memoir. With a recent diagnosis of attention deficit disorder, and news that V's first lover from childhood has been imprisoned for impersonating an undercover police officer, Bond recalls in vivid detail coming of age as a trans kid. Always haunted by the knowledge of being "different," Bond was further confused when the bully next door wanted to meet secretly. Their trysts went on for years, and made Bond acutely aware of sexual power and vulnerability. With inimitable style, Bond raises issues about LGBTQ adolescence, homophobia, parenting, and sexuality, while being utterly entertaining.

Six-year-old Lovetta had no idea what was to come. The subtle hints lay in the whispers and silent tears of grownups, and the dark uneasiness in the air. Then, in the middle of the night, a stranger crept into her dark room. From that night on, the darkness enveloped her and started to smother the life and light out of her. Trapped in a god forsaken nightmare with nowhere to turn, she longed for freedom. Come along on this dark journey as Lovetta fights to find the light.

When Norbert Elliot graduated from his New Orleans Catholic grammar school in 1966, he was determined to claw himself free from his family and the place they called home. Interlacing the history of one of America’s iconic cities with his childhood memories, Elliot explores two hundred and fifty years of intentional cruelty and promised charity. With a focus on disposable lives, his memoir calls into question traditional views of family and home and asks us to imagine the freedom of lives lived on the delicate line between what can, and cannot, be.