Parenting Memoir

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.

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?

What happens when the love of your life is taken too soon—and in the search for healing, you stumble into the arms of the wrong man? Maureen Smith thought she had it all: a thriving business, a strong faith, a happy marriage, and the kind of love people dream about. But when cancer stole her husband away, her world shattered. Alone, grieving, and vulnerable, she found herself lured into a decade-long relationship with a charming man who seemed like salvation—until his mask slipped. On to the Next Victim is a raw, unflinching memoir about grief, trust, manipulation, and survival.

Delilah, the most listened-to woman on American radio, has distinguished herself as the “Queen of Sappy Love Songs” and America’s ultimate romance guru. But Delilah’s life off-air is all the more extraordinary - a life full of trials, forgiveness, faith, and adventure. In One Heart at a Time, Delilah’s heartfelt account of her own story reveals what shaped the voice that 9 million listeners know and love.

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.

Zoe Zolbrod remained silent about her early childhood molestation for nearly a decade. When she finally decided to tell, she wasn't sure what to expect or what to say. Through a series of experiences - Zolbrod hitchhikes with a boyfriend from one coast to another, hangs out in a strip club in Philadelphia, meets and marries her husband, and gives birth to her children - she traces the development of her sexuality, her relationships with men, and the cultivation of her motherhood in the shadow of her childhood sexual abuse.

At age four, Diana manages her family's banking, grocery shops alone, and befriends the town drunk. Her father is too busy chasing skirts and throwing fits to notice what she does. And her mom is too mentally absent to properly parent. While Diana's narcissistic dad terrorizes and exploits her, she works harder to please him. Estill, an award-winning humor author, shares an honest and comedic look at her dysfunctional childhood. As an adult, she struggles to reclaim her power while caring for her dementia-impaired dad.

With the birth of her first child, Laura Jean Baker found herself electrified by oxytocin, the "love drug" - the first effective antidote to her lifelong depression. Again and again over the next eight years, Baker finds herself craving the intense highs of childbearing - cravings that, she realizes, align her much more closely with her public defender husband's desperate, drug-addled clients than with their middle-class peers. As Ryan's roster of defendants increases, so too does their family - nearly to the point of collapse.

At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she’s always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life’s happy endings don’t always last. If it’s not one thing, after all, it’s your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And she’s here to announce that she’s dying.

Sean Szeps had wanted to be a mum since the age of four when he fell in love with Mrs Potts, the motherly teapot in Beauty and the Beast. But there was just one problem – he was not, in fact, a woman. But when he was swept off his feet by a handsome Australian man in New York City, Szeps's dreams of marriage and parenthood seemed – for the very first time – within reach. There were just a few little things still standing in his way – outdated marriage laws, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a healthy dose of internalised homophobia.

Magnanimous and charming, Bob Guterl knew that he could solve the racial problems bedeviling postwar America. Determined to stave off impending global catastrophe, the larger-than-life judge and his resolute wife, Sheryl, launched a radical experiment, raising their two biological sons alongside four children adopted from Korea, Vietnam, and the South Bronx―the so-called “war zones of the American century”―in a white clapboard house with a white picket fence in small-town New Jersey.

‘The Grip of Childhood Sexual Abuse’ tells the story of our healing journey to overcome the impacts of our abuse. Tragically victims unknowingly accrue many syndromes and disorders as a direct result of enduring sexual abuse over a long period of time. We believe we can help victims by sharing what we've learned. Through recognizing our own strengths, we can encourage others to shed the self-limiting beliefs trauma survivors often unconsciously own.

Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist—the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places—into the perfumed chaos of India; the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris; the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter; the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan; and the gold temples of Burma.

Abandoned by his mother at birth, Kevin was enveloped in a labyrinth of adoption, addiction, and child sexual abuse. By age 20, a shell of the boy he once was, Kevin succumbed completely to a suicidal lifestyle of drug dealing and prostitution. At 45, after many years of recovery, Kevin began a painful journey to uncover his origins, and the hopeful search for his mother. Dear Stephen Michael’s Mother chronicles the unfolding of these two stories.

A compassionate, humorous story of faith, betrayal, and coming of age on the sawdust trail. She was just three years old when her mother signed on as the organist of tent revivalist David Terrell, and before long, Donna Johnson was part of the hugely popular evangelical preacher’s inner circle. At seventeen, she left the ministry for good, with a trove of stranger-than-fiction memories.

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.

Five years into fatherhood, Calvin Hennick is plagued by self-doubt and full of questions. How can he teach his son to be a man when his own father figures abandoned him? As a white man, what can he possibly teach his biracial son about how to live as a black man in America? And what does it even mean to be a man today, when society's expectations of men seem to change from moment to moment?

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.

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.

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.