An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson's account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of "bleeding o...

Ryan Kelly's memoir, Octagon, The Early Years, is a true account of a young boy's life set in the timeframe of 1943 to 1960. Ryan shares a unique view of a boy dealing with a dysfunctional family and his own sexual identity, in a writ...

Caroline Kettlewell's autobiography reveals a girl whose feelings of pain and alienation led her to seek relief in physically hurting herself, from age twelve into her twenties. Skin Game employs clear language and candid reflection t...

Jamaica Kincaid's incantatory, poetic, and often shockingly frank recounting of her brother Devon Drew's life is also the story of her family on the island of Antigua, a constellation centered on the powerful, sometimes threatening fi...

The Outsider is an unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family's experience with mental illness. In 1978, Charles Lachenmeyer was a happily married professor of sociology who lived in the New York suburbs with his wife and...

Homesick' is a women's riveting and emotionally complex story of pain and tentative, hard-won recovery that bravely confronts the roots and nuances of eating disorders and the myriad ways they are enabled and rationalized by sufferers...

Lorde's self-named "biomythography"

She was a beautiful doelike child, with an intense, graceful fragility. In her first year, she picked up words, smiled and laughed, and learned to walk. But then Anne-Marie began to turn inward. And when her little girl lost some of t...

In August 2004, Governor James E. McGreevey of New Jersey made history when he stepped before microphones, declared 'My truth is that I am a gay American,' and announced his resignation. The story made international headlines—but w...

This very personal exploration of schizophrenia explores each stage, from the early signs and reactions from friends and family to seeking help and the challenges of recovery. McLean bravely shares his paranoid delusions and offers bo...

Hailed for its searing emotional insights, and for the astonishing originality with which it weaves together personal history, cultural essay, and readings of classical texts by Sophocles, Ovid, Euripides, and Sappho, The Elusive Embr...

A child of the 1950s from a small New England town, 'perfect Paul' earns straight A's and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret -- from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be, or at least ...

The bestselling author of The Orchid Thief is back with this delightfully entertaining collection of her best and brightest profiles. Acclaimed New Yorker writer Susan Orlean brings her wry sensibility, exuberant voice, and peculiar c...

After enduring years of cruelty and abuse at the hands of several families who successively owned her in Bermuda and the West Indies, Mary Prince traveled to London in 1828, in the service of the Woods family. There she was granted he...

Borderline Personality Disorder. 'What the hell was that?' raged Rachel Reiland when she read the diagnosis written in her medical chart. As the 29-year old accountant, wife, and mother of young children would soon discover, it was th...

At the age of fifteen, Jennifer Rothschild confronted two unshakable realities: Blindness is inevitable ... and God is enough. Now this popular author, speaker, and recording artist offers poignant lessons that illuminate a path to fr...

One Tuesday afternoon Allen Rucker, Hollywood comedy writer and family man, wakes from a nap to find himself paralyzed from the waist down. Shocking? Yes. Unfair? Absolutely. Reality? Inescapably. Rucker is shaken up and angry, but s...

The poignant, funny, and truly unique observations of a young writer diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. "Please be forewarned that you are about to read the observations and life lessons of someone who entertains himself by far...

Richard Prangley was unjustly institutionalized for fifteen years. Yet he managed to become not only a productive citizen but also an effective advocate for the developmentally disabled. In Waiting for Home, journalist John Schneid...

A personal story of crisis, commitment, and hope from the best-selling author of Memoirs of An Ex-Prom Queen  One day it happens, the dreaded thing that will change your life forever, the more dreadful because, though you've half exp...

Now I find myself in late August, with the nights cool and the crickets thick in the fields. Already the first blighted leaves glow scarlet on the red maples. IIt's a season of fullness and sweet longings made sweeter now by the fact ...

Nearly four million Americans have Alzheimer's disease, a debilitating neurological disorder affecting the memory that places great stress on the sufferer as well as the caregivers. Robert and Anne Simpson share the story of Bob's e...

book

A nationally known spokesperson for the mentally ill offers hope and inspiration in this moving story of his decades-long struggle with schizophrenia and his remarkable recovery. For thirty-two years Ken Steele lived with the devast...

Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a da...

John Reid's The Best Little Boy in the World was hailed as a classic memoir of growing up gay in a straight world. But 'John Reid' didn't write it. Years would pass before the writer could reveal his true identity as Andrew Tobias, Am...

Zac Unger didn't feel like much of a fireman at first. Most of his fellow recruits seemed to have planned for the job all their lives; he was an Ivy League grad responding to an ad at a bus stop. He couldn't keep his boots shined, and...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) affects more than ten million Americans, yet the disorder is still shrouded in mystery and stigma. Only recently have treatments like dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) been developed for this 'in...

ALCOHOL: The number one drug of choice for America's youth. Throughout his college years, Toren Volkmann partied like there was no tomorrow. And like so many parents, his mother, Chris, overlooked Toren's growing alcohol problem. But...

A vivid and compelling book.' (Time magazine) Erik Weihenmayer was born with retinoscheses, a degenerative eye disorder that would leave him blind by the age of thirteen. But Erik was determined to rise above this devastating disabil...