Memoir Dysfunctional

Norman and Phyllis were my parents and, well, they were crazy. Growing up with them was like being on The Norman and Phyllis Show, a bad sitcom the producers forgot to cancel. They were the uncrowned royalty of the Chicago restaurant scene, where Norman taught Mexican waiters broken Yiddish and was a member of The Golden Tipper’s Club. They had to go to restaurants. Phyllis was a terrible cook.

Camille Kouchner's childhood was marked by sun-drenched summers in the south of France, where a vibrant cast of family and friends would gather at their Sanary-sur-Mer house. This familia grande, which included much of the country's elite, spent memorable days and nights laughing, debating, drinking, and dancing. But a long-held secret poisoned Camille's memories.

In this darkly funny, surprising memoir, the original "Lit Girl" and author of the era-defining Slaves of New York considers her life in and outside of New York City, from the heyday of the 1980s to her life today in a tiny upstate town that proves that fact is always stranger than fiction.

It's the night before Christmas when Casey and Mike get the call. A 12-year-old girl, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Her father is on a ventilator, fighting for his life, while her mother is currently on remand in prison. Despite claiming she attacked him in self-defence, she's been charged with his attempted murder. The girl is called Bella, and she's refusing to say anything. The trouble is that she is also the only witness....

Growing up, Tiffany Rochelle had no reason to believe her mother was not who she claimed to be, but that all changed when she was nine. She learned her mother had been living under a false identity since before she was born, and that the name her mother had used on her birth certificate wasn't real. From that point, Tiffany's life was never the same. By the time she was 25, her mother had used 27 known aliases and had created just as many lives to go along with them.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

Lynn grew up the carefree daughter of a Miami undercover narcotics agent—until her dad snuck out of the house in the dark of night without a glance back. She never knew what happened to her father until she was in high school, and he was in prison for drug smuggling. By then, Lynn had developed a dangerous drug and alcohol habit of her own. It was the perfect setup for her to latch onto the only connection to her dad that remained when he was paroled from prison—cocaine.

Perhaps, you are one of three girls, or one of five boys that was sexually abused by the time you were 18 years old. Unfortunately, I fell into that nasty category. In preparing to write my first memoir, Identifying and Healing Childhood Sexual Abuse, I came upon a list of approximately 99 different after-effects that come as a result of sexual abuse. Finally, I held in my hands, a list of words that totally and completely described myself! I pray that this audiobook will give you the information that you need for a total and complete healing in your life!

In his account of the sensational life and murder of Grady Stiles Jr., also known as the legendary carnival freak Lobster Boy, author Fred Rosen explains how Stiles' death was engineered by his wife, Mary Teresa, the carny known as the Electrified Girl. Rosen describes how Mary Teresa arranged for her husband's murder after years of physical and emotional abuse. During Mary Teresa's dramatic trial, Rosen becomes a character in his own book.

No one can accuse Diane Danvers Simmons of telling a familiar story. Instead she offers a wickedly witty, candid, irreverent British coming-of-age story with a fresh take on maternal abandonment. In My Mother Next Door she shares the life lessons learned growing up in the revolutionary 1970s while her narcissistic mother charted her own unfathomable course to independence and freedom.

A compelling book about dysfunction, forgiveness, a life-changing transformation, and the key to leaving trails of light. If you've struggled with a dysfunctional family, divorce, having mental illnesses, being overweight, being a single parent, having a life-threatening health issue, or challenged by dating again in mid-life, then you will want to find out how one woman found her way to forgive, survive, and thrive. Told with wit and wisdom, Leaving Trails of Light and Toilet Paper is a journey of discovery toward love and light.

Would the love of learning instilled by the grandmother and her unconditional love be sufficient to overcome the abandonment by the parents and the hostile environment into which the child was born? This is the true, dramatic, and heartbreaking story of a child growing up with her paternal grandmother and siblings in the most terrifying and dangerous neighborhood known as Fort Apache in Callao, Lima-Perú. The police and other authorities did not dare to put a foot in this place for fear of being killed.

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.

This is the story of a courageous young woman who grew up in a home headed by a sexual predator and an abused mother who lost her mind when Christine was only 14, disappearing until she was a mother herself. It recounts the secrets and lies that were designed to protect the darkest family secret of all, which had the effect of making the eight children strangers to each other, and then prisoners of the passions that disordered their lives, and set them against each other. Christine's story is filled with intense dramas and the saga of Christine's climb out of the family wreck.

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.

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.

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.

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 The Long Journey Home, their mother, Margaret Robison, finally gets to tell her side of the story, which is more nuanced and poignant than one would ever imagine. Beginning with her childhood in southern Georgia, with its façade of 1950s propriety masking all sorts of recognizable demons (alcoholism, sexual repression, misogyny, suicide, and disease) up until her mental breakdown and, in recent years, her recovery from her massive stroke, The Long Journey Home is Robison's attempt to make sense of a complicated, often tortured, and complex American life.

After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother’s mental illness a secret from the outside world, 20-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won’t leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words she’s not sure are normal.