Recommendations based on "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness"

The extraordinary #1 bestseller - a word-of-mouth literary phenomenon'Do not read this book in public: it will make you cry' Anne Enright'Every line pulses with the pain and joy and complexity of an extraordinary life' Mark O'Connell'I am afraid of being the disruptive woman. And of not being disruptive enough. I am afraid. But I am doing it anyway.'In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the business of living as a woman in the 21st century - its extraordinary pain and its extraordinary joy. Courageous, humane and uncompromising, she writes with radical honesty on birth and death, on the grief of infertility, on caring for her alcoholic father, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. Devastatingly poignant and profoundly wise - and joyful against the odds - Notes to Self offers a portrait not just of its author but of a whole generation.

“Audacious, original and profoundly moving . . . . Healing is a likely outcome of a book imbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of Swing Low.” —Globe and Mail (Canada)Reverberating with emotional power, authenticity, and insight, Swing Low is Miriam Toews's daring and deeply affecting memoir of her father’s struggle with manic depression in a small Mennonite community in rural Canada. Personal and touching, a stirring counterpart to her novel IrmaVoth and reminiscent of works by Susan Cheever, Gail Caldwell, Mary Karr, and Alexandra Styron, Swing Low is an elegiac ode to a difficult life by an author drawing from the deepest well of insight,craft, and emotion.

"One of the maddest memoirs you'll read this year." —The Times "Extraordinary" —The Guardian* "A riveting debut" — People Magazine ("Book of the Week")Named A 'Best Book of the Summer' by LA Times, People, USA Today, Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, Amazon, Apple, Cup of Jo, Kirkus, Parade, & TodayWhat is a "normal family," and how do you go about making one? Chrysta Bilton's magnetic, larger-than-life mother, Debra, yearned to have a child, but as a single gay woman in 1980s California, she had few options. Until one day, while getting her hair done in a Beverly Hills salon, she met a man and instantly knew he was the one she'd been looking for. Beautiful, athletic, artistic, and from a well-to-do family, Jeffrey Harrison appeared to be Debra's ideal sperm donor.A verbal agreement, a couple of thousand in cash, and a few squirts of a turkey baster later, and Chrysta was conceived. Over the years, Jeffrey would make regular appearances at the family home, which grew to include Chrysta's baby sister. But how much did Debra really know about the man she'd chosen to father her daughters? And as a single mother torn between ferocious independence and abject dependence—on other women, alcohol, drugs, and the adrenaline of get-rich-quick schemes—what secrets of her own was she keeping?It wasn't until Chrysta was a young adult that she discovered just how much her parents had hidden from their daughters—and each other—including a shocking revelation with far-reaching consequences not only for Debra, Chrysta, and her sister, but for dozens and possibly hundreds of unsuspecting families across the country. After a lifetime of longing for a "normal family," can Chrysta face the reality of her own, in all its complexity?Bringing us into the fold of a deeply dysfunctional yet fiercely loving clan that is anything but "normal," this emotional roller coaster of a memoir will make you cry, laugh, and rethink the meaning of family.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission to re-entry into “normal” life—from the founder of The Isolation Journals and a subject of the Netflix documentary American Symphony ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The Rumpus, She Reads, Library Journal, Booklist “I was immersed for the whole ride and would follow Jaouad anywhere. . . . Her writing restores the moon, lights the way as we learn to endure the unknown.”—Chanel Miller, The New York Times Book Review “Beautifully crafted . . . affecting . . . a transformative read . . . Jaouad’s insights about the self, connectedness, uncertainty and time speak to all of us.”—The Washington Post In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing, as they say in commencement speeches, to enter “the real world.” She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. It started with an itch—first on her feet, then up her legs, like a thousand invisible mosquito bites. Next came the exhaustion, and the six-hour naps that only deepened her fatigue. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival. Just like that, the life she had imagined for herself had gone up in flames. By the time Jaouad flew home to New York, she had lost her job, her apartment, and her independence. She would spend much of the next four years in a hospital bed, fighting for her life and chronicling the saga in a column for The New York Times. When Jaouad finally walked out of the cancer ward—after countless rounds of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant—she was, according to the doctors, cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. She had spent the past 1,500 days in desperate pursuit of one goal—to survive. And now that she’d done so, she realized that she had no idea how to live. How would she reenter the world and live again? How could she reclaim what had been lost? Jaouad embarked—with her new best friend, Oscar, a scruffy terrier mutt—on a 100-day, 15,000-mile road trip across the country. She set out to meet some of the strangers who had written to her during her years in the hospital: a teenage girl in Florida also recovering from cancer; a teacher in California grieving the death of her son; a death-row inmate in Texas who’d spent his own years confined to a room. What she learned on this trip is that the divide between sick and well is porous, that the vast majority of us will travel back and forth between these realms throughout our lives. Between Two Kingdoms is a profound chronicle of survivorship and a fierce, tender, and inspiring exploration of what it means to begin again.

Constance's mother systematically abused her daughter throughout her childhood. Regularly beaten and starved, she tried to get herself taken into care without success and even drank bleach. When she was 13, her mother left her to fend for herself but Constance found the courage to survive and this is her story.

Vicky Beeching, called “arguably the most influential Christian of her generation” in The Guardian, began writing songs for the church in her teens. By the time she reached her early thirties, Vicky was a household name in churches on both sides of the pond. Recording multiple albums and singing in America’s largest megachurches, her music was used weekly around the globe and translated into numerous languages. But this poster girl for evangelical Christianity lived with a debilitating inner battle: she was gay. The tens of thousands of traditional Christians she sang in front of were unanimous in their view – they staunchly opposed same-sex relationships and saw homosexuality as a grievous sin. Vicky knew if she ever spoke up about her identity it would cost her everything. Faced with a major health crisis, at the age of thirty-five she decided to tell the world that she was gay. As a result, all hell broke loose. She lost her music career and livelihood, faced threats and vitriol from traditionalists, developed further health issues from the immense stress, and had to rebuild her life almost from scratch. But despite losing so much she gained far more: she was finally able to live from a place of wholeness, vulnerability, and authenticity. She finally found peace. What’s more, Vicky became a champion for others, fighting for LGBT equality in the church and in the corporate sector. Her courageous work is creating change in the US and the UK, as she urges people to celebrate diversity, live authentically, and become undivided.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A deeply powerful memoir about bipolar illness that has both transformed and saved lives—with a new preface by the author.  Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Here Jamison examines bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

From the Publisher Thirty-two years ago, my mother's best friend died on the operating table. She felt herself moving toward a brilliant light and spoke with her father who had passed away years before. Ultimately, she made the decision to return to take care of her two young children. Although this was the most peaceful experience of her life, she kept it a secret until the publication of books like CLOSER TO THE LIGHT and TRANSFORMED BY THE LIGHT. Reading the experiences of others gave her the freedom to speak openly about what it means to die and why there is little to fear. Lorelei Andrysick Ballantine Advertising

"The talented Warner has previously explored the themes of friendship and change, but never more powerfully or effectively than in this piercing novel. Driven almost exclusively by dialogue, her narrative focuses on the necessarily metamorphosing relationship between the often needy 12-year-old Cady and her normally independent, feisty best friend, Nana, who is dying of cancer."--"Publishers Weekly, " starred review.

From the acclaimed, controversial singer-songwriter Sinéad O'Connor comes a revelatory memoir of her fraught childhood, musical triumphs, fearless activism, and of the enduring power of song. Blessed with a singular voice and a fiery temperament, Sinéad O'Connor rose to massive fame in the late 1980s and 1990s with a string of gold records. By the time she was twenty, she was world famous--living a rock star life out loud. From her trademark shaved head to her 1992 appearance on Saturday Night Live when she tore up Pope John Paul II's photograph, Sinéad has fascinated and outraged millions. In Rememberings, O'Connor recounts her painful tale of growing up in Dublin in a dysfunctional, abusive household. Inspired by a brother's Bob Dylan records, she escaped into music. She relates her early forays with local Irish bands; we see Sinéad completing her first album while eight months pregnant, hanging with Rastas in the East Village, and soaring to unimaginable popularity with her cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2U." Intimate, replete with candid anecdotes and told in a singular form true to her unconventional career, Sinéad's memoir is a remarkable chronicle of an enduring and influential artist.