Recommendations based on "Moving Forward 2"

**THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** A breathtakingly candid memoir by Joanna "JoJo" Levesque, the chart-topping, multi-platinum recording artist behind hits like “Leave (Get Out),” “Too Little, Too Late”, and the Grammy Award-winning "Say So" Signed to a major recording deal at just 12 years old, JoJo catapulted to the top of the pop-and-R&B-infused charts in the mid 2000's. The relatability of her youth and the appeal of her cool-girl mystique earned her millions of fans around the world. JoJo was an undeniable superstar and pop culture fixture, spanning roles in major studio films, omnipresence on Top 40 radio, frequenting magazine covers, and appearing on national TV. Then, out of the blue, everything came to a halt and JoJo seemingly stepped out of the spotlight, leaving many fans to wonder: What happened to JoJo? In OVER THE INFLUENCE, JoJo holds nothing back as she brings her against-the-odds story of adversity and triumph to center stage. From being raised by parents who were both battling addiction and depression, to emerging victorious in a never-ending lawsuit with her record label, to putting the fragmented pieces of herself together after a maddening period of rebellion and self-betrayal, she takes the reader through the turbulent years that led her to where she is now: releasing new music under her own imprint, performing in shows and festivals around the world, headlining a Broadway show, and beyond.  In this raw, behind-the-scenes look at her life, both personal and professional, JoJo’s unflinching vulnerability allows readers to connect with her on a whole new level through stories of success, heartbreak, redemption, and resilience. More than a victory lap from an artist with over two decades in an ever-changing entertainment industry, OVER THE INFLUENCE is an unapologetic rallying cry to anyone who’s ever  been terrified to fail and still said, “Count me in.”

"I intend to do everything...to have one way of evaluating experience―does it cause me pleasure or pain, and I shall be very cautious about rejecting the painful―I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!"So wrote Susan Sontag in May 1949 at the age of sixteen. This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag's voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag's complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself―all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

International BestsellerA heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, memoir of a young marriage that is redefined by mental illness and affirms the power of love.Mark and Giulia’s life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that her loved ones were not safe. Eventually, Giulia fully recovered, and the couple had a son. But, soon after Jonas was born, Giulia had another breakdown, and then a third a few years after that. Pushed to the edge of the abyss, everything the couple had once taken for granted was upended. A story of the fragility of the mind, and the tenacity of the human spirit, My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward is, above all, a love story that raises profound questions: How do we care for the people we love? What and who do we live for? Breathtaking in its candor, radiant with compassion, and written with dazzling lyricism, Lukach’s is an intensely personal odyssey through the harrowing years of his wife’s mental illness, anchored by an abiding devotion to family that will affirm readers’ faith in the power of love.

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.

Jazz Thornton first attempted to take her own life at the age of 12. Multiple attempts followed and she spent time in psychiatric wards and under medical supervision as she rode the rollercoaster of depression and anxiety through her teenage years - yet the attempts continued. Find out what Jazz learned about how her negative thought patterns came to be, and how she turned those thoughts, and her life, around. Who and what helped, and what didn't help. The insights she gives will help create greater understanding of those grappling with mental illness, and those around them who desperately want to help. Jazz went on to attend film school, and to co-found Voices of Hope, a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping those with mental health issues and show them there is a way forward. She creates online content to provide hope and help.

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 SymphonyONE 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.

The multi-award-winning meditation on survival, care and the place of literature in an unequal world'Around that time my daughter and I had this exchange:Anne, imagine if the world had nothing in it.Do you mean nothing at all - just darkness - or a world without objects?I mean a world without things: no houses, chairs, or cars. A world with only people and trees and dirt.What do you think would happen?People would make things. We would make things with trees and dirt.'When the cold comes, when our needs announce themselves, it is with clothing, with possessions, in literature, through dreams - in all the forms and categories that shape, contain and constrain - that we keep ourselves alive. Yet, in a society in which some are rich and some are poor, who gets to dream, and who invents our forms? This is a book made of money and the lack of money; of writing and of not-writing; of illness and of care; of low-rent apartments, cake-baking mothers, Socratic daughters and bodies that refuse to become information.

You don't know me, but I know about you.... I can't make you live longer, I can't stop you from hurting. But I can give you one wish, as someone did for me. It's been months since Dani Vanoy's older sister Cassie has been diagnosed as having a brain tumor. And now the treatments aren't helping. Dani is furious that she is powerless to help her sister, and she can't even convince her mother to take the girls on the trip to Florida that Cassie has always longed for. Then Cassie receives an anonymous letter and check. Dani knows she can never make Cassie well, but against all odds she dares to make Cassie's dream come true.

Now, an FX limited series, Dying for Sex on Hulu, starring Michelle Williams as Molly and Jenny Slate as Nikki.From Molly Kochan, the subject of the popular acclaimed Wondery podcast Dying for Sex comes her honest, raw, and insightful memoir about love and loss, and what it looks like to take a swan dive straight into the deep end of darkness, searching for the light on the other side.When Molly is diagnosed as terminal with Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer at age 42, she realizes for the first time that "life is short" is more than some stupid cliché. With this new ticking-clock hanging over her head Molly make a decision . . . to start living HER LIFE. She leaves her husband and goes on a quest, searching for life's answers via a sexual journey of exploration. She juggles dozens of online suitors and brings kinks and fetishes into the real world, all while dealing with the ups and downs of her cancer treatment. But then something happens. As Molly lays in her hospital bed fighting through the last months of her existence, she decides she isn't finished yet. She still has things to say. Molly digs deep wanting answers to her lifelong questions. She pulls out her laptop and finishes the story she'd been waiting her whole life to write.With a sense of dark humor, and a bright spirit that will leave you breathless, Molly leaves no stone unturned. From her days of enduring childhood trauma to navigating her relationships, through the lens of never feeling good enough to her final days of forgiveness where she finds enlightenment and the answer she had been looking for all along.In Screw Cancer Becoming Whole, Molly Kochan takes us on a profound journey into the life of a truly amazing woman who left us all too soon. It's a deeper dive and a perfect companion to the Dying for Sex podcast. Her courageous memoir is a must-read testament for anyone who has ever felt life should be something more, something special, something alive. This is Molly's love letter to life. ♥♥♥♥♥

From Eudora Welty's memoir of childhood to May Sarton's reflections on her seventieth year, writers' journals offer an irresistible opportunity to join a creative thinker in musing on the events—whether in daily life or on a global scale—that shape our lives. In An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, best-selling mystery novelist Susan Wittig Albert invites us to revisit one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, 2008, through the lens of 365 ordinary days in which her reading, writing, and thinking about issues in the wider world—from wars and economic recession to climate change—caused her to reconsider and reshape daily practices in her personal life.Albert's journal provides an engaging account of how the business of being a successful working writer blends with her rural life in the Texas Hill Country and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. As her eclectic daily reading ranges across topics from economics, food production, and oil and energy policy to poetry, place, and the writing life, Albert becomes increasingly concerned about the natural world and the threats facing it, especially climate change and resource depletion. Asking herself, "What does it mean? And what ought I do about it?", she determines practical steps to take, such as growing more food in her garden, and also helps us as readers make sense of these issues and consider what our own responses might be.