The book is touching and engrossing, and much more than a memoir of an illness. Constructed through actual email correspondence, the reader is unaware just what might happen next, offering a harrowing but compelling account of this tragic experience. Woven together with Greg’s own heartfelt recounting of that time in his life, […]
At age seven the author began to have seizures and blackouts. By her teens she began exploring a “daydream world.” Satanic beings threatened to kill her, tempted her with lust, or overwhelmed her with secular influences. Yet she often heard hymns or the voice of God, who several times saved her, she believes, from sin or death. She was once consigned to a locked […]
In an emotionally charged memoir, The Fog of Faith: Surviving My Impotent God, author Dr. Leona Stucky suggests that religion may indeed offer hope, though not always in the ways we expect.
Raised in a Mennonite farming community, and one of seven children, the author began questioning religion in her late teens. Her loving mother contracted MS, becoming wheelchair-bound, and her father struggled to cope without his wife’s participation; farm work was grueling, and money was scarce. Stucky tried repeatedly to escape her abusive and threatening boyfriend, discovering that the law often sided with her abuser. She felt hopeless, […]
Iwuoha tells the narrative with a distance and breeze that at first might catch the reader off guard, but it is clear the effect Iwuoha intended. By keeping the reader at arm’s length, the reader is able to feel what Valeria feels – almost as if life is experienced from behind a pane of glass – clear yet detached and devoid of some vital […]
Growing up too fast is a reality that many people must face, but for Judith Boggess, the author of Confessions of a Bar Brat: Growing Up in Rosendale, New York, adulthood was forced on her at a particularly young age. Falling asleep to the raucous sounds of a bar beneath you isn’t ideal for the maintenance of childhood innocence, and this memoir tells the visceral, and often disturbing truth of what it was like growing up in that strange place during a tumultuous time.
Boggess is an unflinchingly honest narrator of her own life, depicting the constant challenge of […]
In Hardbarned!: One Man’s Quest for Meaningful Work in the American South, an amusing and insightful memoir by Christopher J. Driver, readers are invited to commiserate with a hardworking American in a tough world, trying to pursue the happiness of writing over potential riches doing anything else.
Before this book was born, Driver spent years staring down some of the hardest questions of the last generation, namely: What am I supposed to do with this degree? What do I want to do with my life? Am I ever going to find a job that makes me happy? While these […]
In 2000, following a divorce and depression, Fiona Maria Simon heard an inner voice: “Sell your granola.” She decided to take the chance and created Fiona’s Natural Foods, which went on to great success, as movingly told in Gambling on Granola: Unexpected Gifts on the Path of Entrepreneurship.
Never having had any business training, and knowing only that friends loved her homemade grain mixes, Simon searched for expertise. She serendipitously met people who helped to transform her local sales of hand-packed products to nationally distribution of cereals and energy bars. Her innate integrity impelled her to oversee every aspect […]
Canadian author Shireen Jeejeebhoy recalls her years of seeking treatment, which is sometimes seemingly impossible to find, for a major concussion in Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me.
For Jeejeebhoy, the immediate after-effects of a car accident – anxiety, pain, and fatigue – quickly multiplied and morphed in diverse, often frightening ways. A writer who was at work on an ambitious project, Jeejeebhoy could now barely read, remember, or organize. Her sight and hearing were affected, and she had outbursts of intense anger, while treatment options were limited or nonexistent. Her was perplexed by her altered […]