Recommendations based on "You Won't Get Free of It - Stories of Mothers and Daughters"

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - "On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate." On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at the Bataclan Theater in Paris, in the deadliest attack on France since World War II. Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife’s killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son’s life be defined by Hélène’s murder. He refused to let the killers have their way: “For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom.” Instantly, that short Facebook post caught fire, and was reported on by newspapers and television stations all over the world. In his determination to honor the memory of his wife, he became an international hero to everyone searching desperately for a way to deal with the horror of the Paris attacks and the grim shadow cast today by the threat of terrorism.   Now Leiris tells the full story of his grief and struggle. You Will Not Have My Hate is a remarkable, heartbreaking, and, indeed, beautiful memoir of how he and his baby son, Melvil, endured in the days and weeks after Hélène’s murder. With absolute emotional courage and openness, he somehow finds a way to answer that impossible question: how can I go on? He visits Hélène’s body at the morgue, has to tell Melvil that Mommy will not be coming home, and buries the woman he had planned to spend the rest of his life with. Leiris’s grief is terrible, but his love for his family is indomitable. This is the rare and unforgettable testimony of a survivor, and a universal message of hope and resilience. Leiris confronts an incomprehensible pain with a humbling generosity and grandeur of spirit. He is a guiding star for us all in these perilous times. His message—hate will be vanquished by love—is eternal.

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.

NO ONE COULD REACH HERTwelve-year-old Helen Keller lived in a prison of silence and darkness. Born deaf, blind, and mute, with no way to express herself or comprehend those around her, she flew into primal rages against anyone who tried to help her, fighting tooth and nail with a strength born of furious, unknowing desperation.Then Annie Sullivan came. Half-blind herself, but possessing an almost fanatical determination, she would begin a frightening and incredibly moving struggle to tame the wild girl no one could reach, and bring Helen into the world at last....

Bestselling author and foster carer Casey Watson tells the shocking and deeply moving true story of a young girl with severe behavioural problems.This is the first of several stories about ‘difficult’ children Casey helped during her time as a behaviour manager at her local comprehensive.Casey has been in the post for six months when thirteen-year-old Imogen joins her class. One of six children Casey is teaching, Imogen has selective mutism. She’s a bright girl, but her speech problems have been making mainstream lessons difficult.Life at home is also hard for Imogen. Her mum walked out on her a few years earlier and she’s never got on with her dad’s new girlfriend. She’s now living with her grandparents. There’s no physical explanation for Imogen’s condition, and her family insist she’s never had troubles like this before.Everyone thinks Imogen is just playing up – except the member of staff closest to her, her teacher Casey Watson. It is the deadpan expression she constantly has on her face that is most disturbing to Casey. Determined there must be more to it, Casey starts digging and it’s not long before she starts to discover a very different side to Imogen’s character.A visit to her grandparents’ reveals that Imogen is anything but silent at home. In fact she’s prone to violent outbursts; her elderly grandparents are terrified of her.Eventually Casey’s hard work starts to pay off. After months of silence, Imogen utters her first, terrified, words to Casey: ‘I thought she was going to burn me.’Dark, shocking and deeply disturbing, Casey begins to uncover the reality of what Imogen has been subjected to for years.Casey Watson's book 'Little Girl Lost' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2024-03-25.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “piercing account” (The Wall Street Journal) of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs—especially if you’re an Olympic figure skater. “A riveting memoir, which details her experience with an eating disorder, depression and her high-stakes career.”—People (Best Books to Read in February 2024) When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift.But little did the public know what Gold was facing when the cameras were off, driven by the self-destructive voice inside that she calls “outofshapeworthlessloser.” In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as an eating disorder and anxiety treatment but was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gold’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll.Now Gold reveals the exclusive and harrowing story of her struggles in and out of the pressure-packed world of elite figure skating: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and her deteriorating mental health.Outofshapeworthlessloser is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete but also an intimate memoir, told with unflinching honesty and stirring defiance.

WINNER OF THE 2020 PULITZER PRIZE IN GENERAL NONFICTION"The Undying is a startling, urgent intervention in our discourses about sickness and health, art and science, language and literature, and mortality and death. In dissecting what she terms 'the ideological regime of cancer,' Anne Boyer has produced a profound and unforgettable document on the experience of life itself." —Sally Rooney, author of Normal People"Anne Boyer’s radically unsentimental account of cancer and the 'carcinogenosphere' obliterates cliche. By demonstrating how her utterly specific experience is also irreducibly social, she opens up new spaces for thinking and feeling together. The Undying is an outraged, beautiful, and brilliant work of embodied critique." —Ben Lerner, author of The Topeka SchoolA week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.A genre-bending memoir in the tradition of The Argonauts, The Undying will break your heart, make you angry enough to spit, and show you contemporary America as a thing both desperately ill and occasionally, perversely glorious.Includes black-and-white illustrations

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.

"Silence has the rusty taste of shame. The words shut up are the most terrible words I know. . . . The man who raped me spat these words out over and over during the hours of my attack--when I screamed, when I tried to talk him out of what he was doing, when I protested. It seemed to me that for seven years--until at last I spoke--these words had sunk into my soul and become prophecy. And it seems to me now that these words, the brutish message of tyrants, preserve the darkness that still covers this pervasive crime. The real shame, as I have learned, is to consent to them." After Silence is Nancy Venable Raine's eloquent,  profoundly moving response to her rapist's command to "shut up," a command that is so often echoed by society and internalized by rape victims. Beginning with her assault by a stranger in her home in 1985, Raine's riveting narrative of the ten-year aftermath of her rape brings to light the truth that survivors of traumatic experiences know--a trauma does not end when you find yourself alive.          Just as devastating as the rape itself was the silence that shrouded it, a silence born of her own feelings of shame as well as the incomprehension of others. Raine gives shape, form, and voice to the "unspeakable" and exposes the misconceptions and cruelties that surround this prevalent though hidden crime. With formidable power and in intimate detail, she probes the long-term psychological and physiological aftereffects of rape, its tangled sexual confusions, the treatment of rape by the media and the legal and medical professions, and contemporary cultural views of victimhood.          For anyone, female or male, who has suffered from or witnessed the shattering effects of rape, After Silence inspires and points the way to healing. This landmark book is a stunning literary achievement that is a testimony to the power of language to transform the worst sort of violation and suffering into meaning and into art.

From the founder of This Gathered Nest YouTube channel, an uplifting story of Angela Braniff's unusual path to becoming the mother to seven children through various methods of adoption and biological approaches, encouraging women and mothers to embrace the unique purpose that God has put in their lives. Angela’s love for life and her family radiates through everything she does. The Braniff household includes their two biological daughters, Kennedy, 12, and Shelby 10; Rosie, 7, who was adopted from China with Down syndrome; Noah, 7, adopted from Congo; Jonah 5, adopted domestically; and finally, Ivy and Amelia, their one year old twins who were adopted as embryos, and implanted in Angela, who gave birth to them. In fact, after the book was finished, they joyfully welcomed a new baby into their home, Benjamin, through adoption, making them now a family of ten! Love Without Borders shares Angela's relatable, humorous, and honest view of motherhood. Angela chronicles her journey to discover God’s purpose for her life. For years she walked the safe, expected path, until one day she could feel God calling her to boldly step out and follow him into new places, which led her to raise a large, non-traditional family that looked different than she ever imagined.   It was a winding path to motherhood, complete with heartbreak from failed adoptions, challenging pregnancies, and secondary infertility, but through it all Angela found the unique adventure God had for her. She has shared her family’s stories on her popular YouTube channel, This Gathered Nest, and now invites us in to go deeper and listen to where God might be calling us to go and who we’ve been tasked with loving, no matter how unusual (or just plain crazy) it may sound! The beauty of God’s plan is he uses imperfect people to bring about perfectly beautiful stories. What happens when you trade a predictable life for a radical ‘yes’ to God? A Multi-Faceted Adoption Memoir: Follow Angela’s path to motherhood through international adoption from Congo and China, a domestic adoption, and the pioneering journey of embryo adoption. Special Needs Adoption: Discover the joy and beauty of adopting a child with Down syndrome and see how Rosie completely changed their family's world for the better. Overcoming Infertility: A raw and honest look at the grueling battle with hyperemesis gravidarum (HG) and secondary infertility, and the unwavering faith required to keep going. Non-Traditional Family: An inspiring call to break free from the ‘checklist life’ and embrace the messy, beautiful, and unexpected adventure God has for you and your family.

A mother’s love over decades and across continents. The sudden death of Sarah’s mother reveals their relationship with poignant clarity and shows her the individual who existed beyond motherhood. A reflection on mothers and daughters.