Family Memoir

As a happily married, 55-year-old professional woman, Susan had it all-or thought she did - until the day of her shocking diagnosis with stage IV Mantle Cell Lymphoma, a rare and aggressive disease. Ninety-eight percent of her bone marrow was cancerous, and a heart attack or brain aneurism was imminent. Within minutes of being admitted to the hospital, her beautifully ordinary life disappeared.

Richard Hoffman sometimes felt as though he had two fathers: the real one who raised him and an imaginary version, one he talked to on the phone, and one he talked to in his head. Although Hoffman was always close to the man, his father remained a mystery, shrouded in a perplexing mix of tenderness and rage. When his father receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoffman confronts the depths and limitations of their lifelong struggle to know each other.

Meredith Hall's moving but unsentimental memoir begins in 1965, when she becomes pregnant at sixteen. Shunned by her insular New Hampshire community, she is then kicked out of the house by her mother. Her father and stepmother reluctantly take her in, hiding her before they finally banish her altogether. After giving her baby up for adoption, Hall wanders recklessly through the Middle East, where she survives by selling her possessions and finally her blood.

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school.

Caught in a paranoid delusion that she's a bionic spy responsible for 9/11, adoptee Laura Dennis must fight her perfectionist, self-destructive tendencies to regain her sanity. Adopted Reality is a September 11 memoir unlike any you've read. This thrilling psychological adventure follows the ups and downs of bipolar, and examines relationships biological and circumstantial. Laura had always been Miss Perfect - making excellent grades, showing promising dance ability, trying her best to be there for her friends and family.

“It took a long time for me to admit I had failed,” Anastas begins. Broke, his promising literary career evaporated, he’s hounded by debt collectors as he tries to repair a life ripped apart by the spectacular implosion of his marriage, which ended when his pregnant wife left him for another man. Had it all been too good to be true? Anastas’s fierce love for his young son forces him to confront his own childhood, fraught with mental illness and divorce. His father’s disdain for money might have been in line with the ’70s zeitgeist - but what does it mean when you’re dumping change into a Coinstar machine, trying to scrounge enough to buy your son a meal?

A remarkable, true story about raising an unusually challenging child, in this case one who struggles to reciprocate love. Unfolding over nearly 20 years, Raising a Thief focuses on the struggles of a Russian orphan Sonya, mistreated early in life and ultimately diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder, and the family that adopted and tried to raise her.

*AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLER* Actor-dancer Alyson Stoner narrates their revelatory and incisive memoir—from family violence and betrayal, to eating disorders and religious trauma—may begin in Hollywood, but its chilling relatability will resonate with anyone navigating...

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

Lene Fogelberg is dying - she is sure of it - but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with her husband, her two precious daughters, her enchanting surroundings, but the question she has carried in her heart since childhood - will I die young? - is threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: She is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late?

Until Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened her studio on Eight Street in Manhattan in 1914 - which evolved into the Whitney Museum almost two decades later - there were few art museums in the United States, let alone galleries for contemporary artists to exhibit their work. When the mansions of the wealthy cried out for art they sought it from Europe, then the art capital of the world. It was in her tiny sculptor’s studio in Greenwich Village that Whitney began holding exhibitions of contemporary American Artists. This remarkable effort by a scion of America’s wealthiest family helped to change the way art was cultivated in America.

Alive with the intoxicating magic of summer in New England, former editor of the New York Times Book Review Charles McGrath’s evocative memoir looks back at that sun-soaked season, at family, youth, and a singular bond made at a time when he thought he was beyond making friends...

A warm and poignant narrative about finding one’s self amidst the grind of restaurant life, the cross-generational immigrant experience, and a daughter’s attempts to connect with parents who have always been just out of reach.

New York Times Bestseller Read With Jenna Book Club Pick as seen on Today Winner of the Los Angeles Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiography Winner of the American Library Association Alex Award A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Century A young poet tells...

Devastating family drama, abandonment, and drugs are balanced with laugh-out-loud humor that will keep you turning pages. You'll laugh, cry, and be left begging for more. The story begins with an episode that occurred in 1974. When Tom Bross (age 12) experiences a sudden move from Davis to San Anselmo to live with their God Family. Just two months later they move back to Davis with no place to live. His brother and sisters are dropped off at their friend's houses.

Unraveling Eunjoo’s heritage is a bit like mining for gold—painstaking and seemingly futile. Her family’s Korean past and the conditions of their subsequent immigration are as hazy and ever-changing as her mother’s moods. Growing up, she struggled to piece herself together, sifting for truths of her family’s heritage while navigating the American culture that now engulfs them. But one thing was always crystal clear: she was expected to marry by twenty-five.

A moving, compelling memoir about growing up and escaping the tragic legacy of mental illness, suicide, addiction, and depression in one of America's most famous families: the Hemingways.

Winner of the 2015 RBC Taylor Prize Winner of the 2016 Forest of Reading Evergreen Award After almost twenty years of caring for elderly parents—first for their senile father, and then for their cantankerous ninety-three-year-old mother—author Plum Johnson and her three younger...

In this blistering street-level account, "Mafia survivor" Frank DiMatteo teams up with true-crime master Michael Benson to take down one of the most notorious figures in the American La Cosa Nostra. This is the real inside story of Carmine "The Snake" Persico, from his crime-filled childhood on the streets of Brooklyn to the long-term jail sentences that didn't stop him from controlling his criminal empire, with the help of his brother - the equally kill-crazy Alphonse "Allie Boy" Persico.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A radiant new memoir from artist and writer Patti Smith, author of the National Book Award winner Just Kids A TIME AND NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “God whispers through a crease in the wallpaper,” writes Patti Smith in this moving account of her life. A...