Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Horizontal Epistles of Andromeda Veal"

“I had experienced absolute freedom—I had felt that my body was without boundaries, limitless; that pain didn’t matter, that nothing mattered at all—and it intoxicated me.”In 2010, more than 750,000 people stood in line at Marina Abramović’s MoMA retrospective for the chance to sit across from her and communicate with her nonverbally in an unprecedented durational performance that lasted more than 700 hours. This celebration of nearly fifty years of groundbreaking performance art demonstrated once again that Marina Abramović is truly a force of nature.The child of Communist war-hero parents under Tito’s regime in postwar Yugoslavia, she was raised with a relentless work ethic. Even as she was beginning to build an international artistic career, Marina lived at home under her mother’s abusive control, strictly obeying a 10 p.m. curfew. But nothing could quell her insatiable curiosity, her desire to connect with people, or her distinctly Balkan sense of humor—all of which informs her art and her life. The beating heart of Walk Through Walls is an operatic love story—a twelve-year collaboration with fellow performance artist Ulay, much of which was spent penniless in a van traveling across Europe—a relationship that began to unravel and came to a dramatic end atop the Great Wall of China.Marina’s story, by turns moving, epic, and dryly funny, informs an incomparable artistic career that involves pushing her body past the limits of fear, pain, exhaustion, and danger in an uncompromising quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. A remarkable work of performance in its own right, Walk Through Walls is a vivid and powerful rendering of the unparalleled life of an extraordinary artist.

The Bell Jar is a classic of American literature. Originally published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963--only a month before the author's suicide--Sylvia Plath's harrowing autobiographical novel traces a young woman's descent into an emotional breakdown. The brilliant and disturbing story of Esther Greenwood's journey from the glamorous world of magazine publishing in New York to the isolating world of the asylum has become one of the most famous books of the late twentieth century, and still has all its power to shock and move us.

The gripping first-person account of one woman's survival in Joshua Tree National Park against the odds."A vibrantly physical book"—The Guardian • "Uplifting and brave"—Stylist • "A riveting account of loneliness, anxiety and survival"—CosmopolitanIn 2018, writer Claire Nelson made international headlines when she fell over 25 feet after wandering off the trail in a deserted corner of Joshua Tree. The fall shattered her pelvis, rendering her completely immobile. There Claire lay for the next four days, surrounded by boulders that muffled her cries for help, but exposed her to the relentless California sun above. Her rescuers had not expected to find her alive.In THINGS I LEARNED FROM FALLING Claire tells not only her story of surviving, but also her story of falling. What led this successful thirty-something to a desert trail on the other side of the globe from her home where no one knew she would be that day? At once the unbelievable story of an impossible event, and the human journey of a young woman wrestling with the agitation of past and anxiety of future.

'Three in the bed. One not yet born, another dead, and I'm alive.' Puk is 26 years old, preparing for the birth of her second child, when her husband has a heart attack on his morning run. She leaves their toddler with a friend and dashes to the hospital, where Lasse lies unresponsive in a coma. He dies a few hours later. Into a Star follows Puk and her young family for one year after this tragedy, which has shattered the ordinary life she thought she would live, as she finds her way slowly through the enormous grief and, eventually, out the other side. With remarkable dignity, candour and attention to the domestic details that make us human, Puk Qvortrup invites us into the hardest moments of her life. And she reveals, amid the devastation, a powerful thread of hope.

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.

What happens when your partner of twenty years suddenly believes you’re nothing but a stranger?What do you do when your history together is gone?How do you prove you’re not an imposter in your own life?When the partner of Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Abi Morgan abruptly collapsed from a mysterious illness, doctors were concerned that he would not survive. Then, six months later, Jacob woke from his coma, to the delight and relief of his family and friends—except this proved to be anything but a Hollywood ending. Because to Jacob, the woman standing at his bedside, who had cared for him all these months, was not his partner. Not his children’s mother. Not the woman he loved. Sure, she looked like his Abi, but this was an imposter, living someone else’s life.Finding herself dropped into a real-life night-mare seemingly ripped from the pages of a thriller, Abi must find a way to hang on to not only their past but also their future together, before it slips away from them both. With grace, an irresistible sense of humor and refreshingly raw honesty, This Is Not a Pity Memoir grapples with a journey through fear and redemption few should have to face.What do you do when you are losing your love?You don’t write a pity memoir.You write a love story.

A memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most.Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

The memoirs of Mary Rodgers—writer, composer, Broadway royalty, and “a woman who tried everything.”“What am I, bologna?” Mary Rodgers (1931–2014) often said. She was referring to being stuck in the middle of a talent sandwich: the daughter of one composer and the mother of another. And not just any composers. Her father was Richard Rodgers, perhaps the greatest American melodist; her son, Adam Guettel, a worthy successor. What that leaves out is Mary herself, also a composer, whose musical Once Upon a Mattress remains one of the rare revivable Broadway hits written by a woman. Shy is the story of how it all happened: how Mary grew from an angry child, constrained by privilege and a parent’s overwhelming gift, to become not just a theater figure in her own right but also a renowned author of books for young readers (including the classic Freaky Friday) and, in a final grand turn, a doyenne of philanthropy and the chairman of the Juilliard School. But in telling these stories—with copious annotations, contradictions, and interruptions from Jesse Green, the chief theater critic of The New York Times—Shy also tells another, about a woman liberating herself from disapproving parents and pervasive sexism to find art and romance on her own terms. Whether writing for Judy Holliday or Rin Tin Tin, dating Hal Prince or falling for Stephen Sondheim over a game of chess at thirteen, Rodgers grabbed every chance possible—and then some. Both an eyewitness report from the golden age of American musical theater and a tale of a woman striving for a meaningful life, Shy is, above all, a chance to sit at the feet of the kind of woman they don’t make anymore—and never did. They make themselves.

When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Miss Norma—newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage—rose to her full height of five feet and told the doctor, “I’m ninety years old. I’m hitting the road.” And so Miss Norma took off on an unforgettable around-the-country journey in a thirty-six-foot motor home with her retired son Tim, his wife Ramie, and their dog Ringo. As this once timid woman says “yes” to living in the face of death, she tries regional foods for the first time, reaches for the clouds in a hot air balloon, and mounts up for a horseback ride. With each passing mile (and one educational visit to a cannabis dispensary), Miss Norma’s health improves and conversations that had once been taboo begin to unfold. Norma, Tim, and Ramie bond in ways they had never done before, and their definitions of home, family, and friendship expand. Stop by stop, state by state, they meet countless people from all walks of life—strangers who become fast friends and welcome them with kindness and open hearts.Infused with this irrepressible nonagenarian’s wisdom, courage, and generous spirit, Driving Miss Norma is the charming, infectiously joyous chronicle of their experiences on the road. It portrays a transformative journey of living life on your own terms that shows us it is never too late to begin an adventure, inspire hope, or become a trailblazer.

Award-winning psychoanalyst Dr. Galit Atlas draws on her patients' stories--and her own life experiences--to shed light on how generational trauma affects our lives in this "intimate, textured, compassionate" book (Jon Kabat-Zinn, author of The Healing Power of Mindfulness). The people we love and those who raised us live inside us; we experience their emotional pain, we dream their memories, and these things shape our lives in ways we don't always recognize. Emotional Inheritance is about family secrets that keep us from living to our full potential, create gaps between what we want for ourselves and what we are able to have, and haunt us like ghosts. In this transformative book, Galit Atlas entwines the stories of her patients, her own stories, and decades of research to help us identify the links between our life struggles and the "emotional inheritance" we all carry. For it is only by following the traces those ghosts leave that we can truly change our destiny.