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One terrible night in 2011, Brin Miller’s life is upended when she learns that her teenage stepson has been sexually abusing her two daughters. Once this secret is discovered, Brin’s marriage, already crumbling and unable to sustain itself, breaks apart. But against all odds, Brin and her husband, along with their daughters, are gradually able to learn resilience, forgiveness, strength, and courage, and—miraculously—Brin’s marriage begins to heal. Haunting and horrible yet hopeful and beautiful, Buried Saints is a fast and raw memoir of forgiveness and resilience, a revelatory look into a family deeply destroyed by deceit, and a truly astonishing story about the intense, unpredictable love of two parents who have to decide whether to fall or flourish in a tragic situation. Author: Brin Miller Publication Date: April 16, 2019 -
Broth from the Cauldron is a collection of “teaching stories,” a literary Wiccan soup for the soul. It is a distillation of the wisdom Cerridwen Fallingstar has gathered from her journey through life, and from her forty years as a Shamanic teacher and Wiccan Priestess. At turns poignant and humorous, it chronicles her trajectory from a Republican cold war upbringing to Pagan Priestess, offering a portrait of a culture growing from denial to awareness. Accessible to any audience interested in personal growth, Broth from the Cauldron is for anyone who’s ever stood at the crossroads wishing a faery godmother would come along and show them the path. Author: Cerridwen Fallingstar Publication Date: May 12, 2020 -
At the age of thirty-five, desperate to salvage a self that has been suffocating for years―and to save her two-year-old son from witnessing a miserable relationship between his parents―Jane Binns leaves her husband of twelve years. She has no plan or intention but to leave, however, and therein begins the misadventures lying in wait for her. Over the years that follow, Binns falls in love with Steve, a man eighteen years her senior who has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder since his return from military service in Vietnam forty years prior, and who has a talent for making her feel heard. Despite his inability to provide anything more than a spurious connection, run on a mercurial and erratic schedule, and despite his repeated rejections of her love, she continues to pursue him. During their off periods, she dates other men―but she inevitably compares each new suitor to Steve, and all of them fall short. Ultimately, it takes the loss of her father in the summer of 2014, followed by the death of her ex-husband five months later, for her to finally let go of Steve―and, in the process, fully unearth the self she’s been chasing all along. Author: Jane Binns Publication Date: November 13, 2018 -
Karen Grassle, the beloved actress who played Ma on Little House on the Prairie, grew up at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in a family where love was plentiful, but alcohol wreaked havoc. In this candid memoir, Grassle reveals her journey to succeed as an actress even as she struggles to overcome depression, combat her own dependence on alcohol, and find a loving relationship. With humor and hard-won wisdom, Grassle takes the reader with her through the sexual revolution and upheavals of the ’60s, to training at the famed London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art, behind the curtains of Broadway, and onto storied Hollywood sets. We know Karen Grassle best as the actress playing the strong prairie woman Caroline Ingalls, but here is the complex, funny, rebellious, and soulful woman we didn’t know. Raw, emotional, and empathic, Bright Lights celebrates and honors womanhood, in all its complexity. Author: Karen Grassle Publication Date: November 16, 2021 -
Bridey is tethered to her mom’s addiction to dangerous men who park their Harley-Davidsons in the house and kick holes in all their doors. Raised to be her mother’s keeper, rescuer, and punching bag, Bridey gets used to stuffing her life into black trash bags, hauling them between Alaska and California, and changing schools every time her mom moves in a new monster or runs away from one.
Desperately seeking the normal life she’s observed in sitcoms and her friends’ families, Bridey earns her way into a fancy, private college, where she tries to forget who she is until her mom calls with a threat that drops Bridey to her knees. Watching doctors and police interrogate her mother at the hospital, Bridey realizes her mom has become a monster herself . . . and she doesn’t want to be saved.
But Bridey does.
Bright Eyes is about the indomitable spirit of a young girl forced to be brave, required to be resilient, and conditioned to be optimistic, and how she ultimately uses the same traits that helped her to survive her mother’s chaos to create her own happily-ever-after.
Author: Bridey Thelen-Heidel Publication date: September 24, 2024 -
2015 International Book Awards: Finalist, Autobiography/Memoir 2015 INPE Best Book of the Year: Winner, Narrative Nonfiction 2015 Reader’s Choice International Book Awards: Finalist Kittel’s inspirational memoir, Breathe, tells the story of a family that suffers the unimaginable loss of an infant son as a result of the family being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Kittels’ pain is all consuming, and it’s enhanced by the fact that their extended family tries to point fingers and pass the blame. But the story moves from heartbreaking to horrific when, a mere nine months later, they are forced to bury yet another son when the doctor and her medical team make a terrible mistake during Kittel’s pregnancy. The narrative takes a third turn when the Kittels decide to press charges of malpractice, but the surprises don’t stop there. The Kittels end up having to battle not only the medical system but also their own family in a court of law, all while raising their other three young children and trying to heal from the pain of living through the deaths of two sons. Breathe is a story about motherhood, death, and a family in conflict. Although the pain Kittel suffers is tremendous, she narrates the story beautifully, and she ultimately shows readers how to embrace love, honesty, and joy even on the heels of tragedy. Author: Kelly Kittel Publication Date: May 14, 2014 -
At forty, Margaret quits her sales job to follow her husband’s hotel career to Paris. She’s setting sail on this adventure with a glass half full of bravery, a well-traveled passport, a journal in which she plans to write her novel, and the mentally engrained Davis Family Handbook of Rules to Live By. Everyone tells Margaret she’s living the dream, but she feels adrift without a professional identity. Desperate to feel productive and valued, she abandons her writing and throws herself into new roles: perfect wife, hostess, guide, and expatriate. When she and her husband move to Cairo, however, the void inside she’s been ignoring threatens to engulf her. It’s clear that something needs to change, so she does the one thing she was raised never to do: asks for—and accepts—help. Over the next fifteen years abroad, the cultures of Egypt, Thailand, and Singapore confront Margaret with lessons she never would have learned at home. But it’s only when they move back to Chicago—with Margaret now stepping into the role of perfect caretaker to her parents—that she has to decide once and for all: will she dare to let go of the old rules and roles she thinks keep her safe in order to step into her own life and creative destiny? Author: Margaret Davis Ghielmetti Publication Date: September 15, 2020 -
"In reading Beth Ricanati's Braided: A Journey of a Thousand Challahs, one feels as if one is drinking from a spiritual fountain that allows a new wave of life to surge within them. This book offers both a recipe and a path to personal growth and healing. Packed with insight and wisdom, it is one of those rare books that every woman should read." —Readers' Favorite, five stars "Ricanati's memoir with recipes is a well-written investigation into her maturation as a doctor, her growth as a wife and mother, and the increasing wisdom she gained while pondering Jewish rites and rituals." —Booklist, starred review "'I knead for my needs, ' the author insists--and readers are likely to join her." —Kirkus Reviews2018 National Jewish Book Award Finalist2018 Foreword INDIES Winner2019 Readers' Favorite Awards Finalist2019 Wilbur Award, Nonfiction Winner2020 Eric Hoffer Award, First Horizon Award Finalist2020 Eric Hoffer Award, 1st runner up in Nonfiction2020 Eric Hoffer Award, Grand Prize Shortlist Finalist2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist2020 Next Generation Indie Book Awards WinnerWhat if you could bake bread once a week, every week? What if the smell of fresh bread could turn your house into a home? And what if the act of making the bread―mixing and kneading, watching and waiting―could heal your heartache and your emptiness, your sense of being overwhelmed? It can. This is the surprise that physician-mother Beth Ricanati learned when she started baking challah: that simply stopping and baking bread was the best medicine she could prescribe in a fast-paced world.Author: Beth Ricanati, MD Publication Date: September 18, 2018 -
In Bowing to Elephants, a woman seeking love and authenticity comes to understand herself as a citizen of the world through decades of wandering the globe. During her travels she sees herself more clearly as she gazes into the feathery eyes of a 14,000-pound African elephant and looks for answers to old questions in Vietnam and the tragically ravaged landscape of Cambodia. Bowing to Elephants is a travel memoir with a twist―the story of an unloved rich girl from San Francisco who becomes a travel junkie, searching for herself in the world to avoid the tragic fate of her narcissistic, alcoholic mother. Haunted by images of childhood loneliness and the need to learn about her world, Dimond journeys to far-flung places―into the perfumed chaos of India, the nostalgic, damp streets of Paris, the gray, watery world of Venice in the winter, the reverent and silent mountains of Bhutan, and the gold temples of Burma. In the end, she accepts the death of the mother she never really had―and finds peace and her authentic self in the refuge of Buddhist practice. Author: Mag Dimond Publication Date: September 17, 2019 -
Unflinchingly honest and darkly funny, this memoir will resonate with anyone facing the complicated reality of aging and illness in the United States. Elizabeth and her mother, Judy, have always had a complicated relationship. Now they face a confounding illness, as well as a labyrinthine healthcare system, at a complicated stage of life. Nothing is as it first seems in this riveting account of an unconventional mother-daughter journey—a journey that from the start poses questions about love, life, family, aging, healthcare, sex, and death. In Bound, Elizabeth Anne Wood addresses these questions as she chronicles the last eight months of her mother’s life—a period she comes to see, over the course of months, as a maternity leave in reverse: she is carrying her mother as she dies. Throughout their journey, Wood uses her notebook as a shield to keep unruly emotions at bay, often taking comfort in her role as advocate and forgetting to “be the daughter,” as one doctor reminds her to do. Meanwhile, her mother’s penchant for denial and childlike tendency toward magical thinking lead to moments of humor even as Wood battles the red tape of hospital bureaucracies, the frustration of planning in the midst of an unpredictable illness, and the unintentional inhumanity of a healthcare system that too often fails to see the person behind the medical chart. Author: Elizabeth Anne Wood Publication Date: August 13, 2019 -
From the outside, Vanya’s childhood looked idyllic: she rode horses with her father in the solitude of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and attended flamboyant operas with her mother in the city. But life for Vanya and her family turned dark when ghosts from her father’s service on a Pacific destroyer in World War II tore her family apart. Set in postwar California, this is the story of a girl who tried to make sense of her parents’ unpredictable actions―from being left to lie in her own blood-soaked diaper while her Christian Scientist mother prayed, refusing to get medical help to watching her father writhe on his bed in the detox ward, his hands and feet tethered with leather straps―by immersing herself in the beauty and solitude of the wilderness around her. It was only decades later, when memories began to haunt her, that Vanya was able to look back with unflinching honesty and tender compassion for her family and herself. In this elegant, haunting narrative, Erickson invites us to witness it all―from the gripping, often disturbing, truths of her childhood to her ultimate survival. Author: Vanya Erickson Publication Date: August 21, 2018 -
2016 Best Book Award Finalist, Women’s Issues “A little transcendentalist, a little bit rock and roll, Haapala made her decision and stuck with it…Recommended for most patient health collections.” ―Library Journal “Body 2.0 is a touching exploration of body image, motherhood, and the sexualization of breasts and breast cancer.” ―Bustle, “12 Memoirs by Badass Women to Add to Your Wishlist in Fall 2016” To honor her mother’s deathbed advice to head off breast cancer “be there” for her boys, Krista Hammerbacher Haapala chose to trade healthy breasts for longevity and peace of mind. In Body 2.0, Haapala chronicles the personal research, medical process, bodily changes, and the emotional toll involved in the more than two-year odyssey of what she referred to as her “Body 2.0 vision quest.” Through it all, Haapala shares her insights for living awake during even the darkest times, and captures the raw ebbs and flows she and her family experience in the face of her wrenching decision. She takes on body image, the sexualization of breast cancer, motherhood, and maternal relationships, as well as how to sustain an intimate, loving partnership. An unflinching, irreverent take on preventative double mastectomy, Body 2.0 is a guide to reframing adversity, finding inspiration, and shaping your own life. Author: Krista Hammerbacher Haapala Publication Date: September 20, 2016 -
2016 Beverly Hills Book Award: LGBTQ Non-Fiction, Winner 2016 USA Best Book Awards: Narrative Non-Fiction, Winner 2017 IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards Gold Medal Winner in LGBT Carrie Highley was always a tomboy—and by the time she turned sixteen, she was wishing she were dancing with the girls instead of the boys at cotillion dances. In her early thirties, while living in West Virginia, she discovered a passion for road biking, finally stopped sequestering her deep feelings for women, and began an ill-fated love affair with a female cycling friend. Then, at thirty-six, she found herself skidding into Asheville, North Carolina, holding on tight to the coattails of her doctor husband and spending her time as a stay-athome mother of two boys. Moving to North Carolina was Highley’s attempt to reembrace heterosexual married life after her tumultuous time in West Virginia. But in Asheville, she met Charlie, a fellow cyclist twenty-three years her senior, who became her mentor, friend, and father all rolled into one—and as they grew closer, she started unloading her fears into Charlie’s inbox. With Charlie’s support, Highley finally got the courage to do what she’d been waiting her whole life to do: go down the mountain with her hands off the brakes. Author: Carrie Highley Publication Date: June 7, 2016 -
When Pam Valois, a young photographer, met Jacomena Maybeck in 1979, she saw the woman she wanted to be in her own later years. Tarring roofs and splitting logs into her eighties, Jackie presided over the legacy of Bernard Maybeck and his clan on Berkeley’s legendary Nut Hill. The friendship between the two women led to a best-selling book—Gifts of Age, a treasury of stories about successful aging. Blooming in Winter is an intimate portrait of Jackie that gives us a paradigm for living exuberantly until the very end. Publication Date: June 29, 2021 Author: Pam Valois -
It should have been Tracey Yokas’s time to heal. With the recent death of her mother, she was given a brand-new chance to redefine herself and her happiness on her own terms. But just as she prepares herself to spread her wings, Tracey discovers that her only child, Faith, is battling issues of her own—carrying forward the legacy of disordered eating, depression, and self-harm Tracey is so desperate to leave behind. Tracey is determined to save her daughter, but she has no idea how to reach her—and as their fragile family navigates a medical system and a societal fabric that fails innumerable families in need, she and Faith become near strangers to each other. Ultimately, it’s only when Tracey begins the hard work of standing up to her own history of rejection, low self-esteem, and longing does healing—for both mother and daughter—become possible. Carrying a message made urgent by the epidemic of mental health challenges now besetting millions of American teens each year, Bloodlines is a story about how waking up to the power of love can allow us to reimagine the past—and fortify the present. Author: Tracey Yokas Publication Date: May 7, 2024 -
“Her candid tale is followed by a useful list of substance-abuse and mental- illness websites, books, and organizations, making this a helpful resource for parents struggling to make sense of teen or adult children’s struggles.” ―Booklist “As her heartfelt and moving story descends further into the realms of despair and desperation, the author remains a beacon of hope and sets an amazing example for readers caught in a similar situation involving mental illness and a family member. The bond between mother and child knows no bounds in this intense memoir darkened by addiction and bipolar disorder yet buoyed by love and possibility.” ―Kirkus Reviews One day a teenage boy gets on his bike and rides forty miles up California’s Pacific Coast Highway to avoid causing an earthquake he fears will endanger his mother and sister. But the quake he is experiencing is not coming from beneath the earth; it’s the onset of bipolar illness. Blinded by Hope describes what it’s like to have an unusually bright, creative child—and then to have that child suddenly be hit with an illness that defies description and cure. Over the years, McGuire attributes her son’s lost jobs, broken relationships, legal troubles, and periodic hospitalizations to the manic phase of his illness, denying the severity of his growing drug use—but ultimately, she has to face her own addiction to rescuing him, and to forge a path for herself toward acceptance, resilience, and love. A wakeup call about the epidemic of mental illness, substance abuse, and mass incarceration in our society, Blinded by Hope shines a light on the shadow of family dynamics that shame, ignorance, and stigma rarely let the public see, and asks the question: How does a mother cope when love is not enough? Author: Meg McGuire Publication Date: June 6, 2017 -
Writer Susan Tweit and her economist-turned-sculptor husband Richard Cabe had just settled into their version of a “good life” when Richard saw thousands of birds one day—harbingers of the brain cancer that would kill him two years later. This compelling and intimate memoir chronicles their journey into the end of his life, framed by their final trip together, a 4,000-mile-long delayed honeymoon road trip. As Susan and Richard navigate the unfamiliar territory of brain cancer treatment and learn a whole new vocabulary—craniotomies, adjuvant chemotherapy, and brain geography—they also develop new routines for a mindful existence, relying on each other and their connection to nature, including the real birds Richard enjoys watching. Their determination to walk hand in hand, with open hearts, results in profound and difficult adjustments in their roles. Bless the Birds is not a sad story. It is both prayer and love song, a guide to how to thrive in a world where all we hold dear seems to be eroding, whether simple civility and respect, our health and safety, or the Earth itself. It’s an exploration of living with love in a time of dying—whether personal or global—with humor, unflinching courage, and grace. And it is an invitation to choose to live in light of what we love, rather than what we fear. Publication Date: April 27, 2021 Author: Susan J. Tweit -
Growing up in the ’50s in what was then the small town of Napa, California, Donna Brazzi had loving parents, a backyard the size of a football field with a swing and a big wooden picnic table perfect for summer barbecues, a cocker spaniel named Patty, and a cat named Stinky—everything a kid could want. She was a happy child. But as she grew older and started to reach for more than a young woman from a working-class, Swiss-Italian family was expected to want—a university education and a career in the larger world beyond her hometown—she began to see that if she was going to realize her big dreams, she was going to have to fight for them. Big Dreams is Donna’s story of pursuing her education goals while confronting society’s assumptions about women’s roles in work, marriage, and motherhood from the 1950s through the mid-2000s, helped along by the evolving social movements for equality. Her journey from obedient daughter to minister’s wife to PhD in sociology was never a smooth one—but ultimately, with passion and persistence, she broke free of the family and cultural assumptions constraining her, forged her own identity, and shaped the life she wanted. Author: Donna Brazzi Barnes Pub Date: April 5, 2022 -
Beyond the Next Village is Mary Anne Mercer’s memoir of discovery, growth, and awakening in 1978 Nepal, which was then a mysterious country to most of the world. After arriving in Nepal, Mercer, an American nurse, spent a year traveling on foot often in flip-flops with a Nepali health team, providing immunizations and clinical care in each village they visited. Communicating in a newly acquired language, she was often called upon to provide the only modern medicine available to the people she and her team were serving. Over time, she learned to recognize and respect the prominence of their cultural beliefs about health and illness. Encounters with life-threatening conditions such as severe malnutrition and ectopic pregnancy gave her an enlightening view of both the limitations and power of modern health care; immersed in villagers’ lives and those of her own team, she realized she was living in not just another country, but another time. This unique story of the joys and perils of one woman’s journey in the shadow of the Himalayas, Beyond the Next Village opens a window into a world where the spirits were as real as the trees, the birds, or the rain and healing could be as much magic as medicine. Author: Mary Anne Mercer Pub Date: May 3, 2022 -
In the crucible of grief following a friend’s death, Presbyterian pastor Patricia Pearce sensed a dimension of existence beneath her ordinary perception—and became resolved to discover it. She soon found herself in a vortex of revelatory dreams, synchronicities, energy openings, and insights that shattered her worldview, exposed a unified Reality of Love, and unveiled the illusory nature of the ego and the world it has created. Faced with these discoveries, she struggled to remain in a religion that she now realized had been shaped by the very ego consciousness Jesus had transcended and urged others to abandon. Enlightening, revelatory, and bold, Beyond Jesus reveals how our political and religious institutions are an outward manifestation of the inner beliefs we hold about who we are, and that beneath the layers of dogma about Jesus lies a key to our spiritual evolution and the astonishing possibility it holds for the future. Author: Patricia Pearce Publication Date: July 3, 2018 -
At twenty-one, Evelyn is naïve about life and love. Raised in a small Montana town, she moves at age sixteen with her devout Catholic family to California. There, she is drawn to Latino culture when she works among the migrant workers. During the summer of her junior year in college, Evelyn travels to a small Mexican town to help set up a school and a library—an experience that whets her appetite for a life full of both purpose and adventure. After graduation, Evelyn joins the Peace Corps and is sent to perform community development work in a small mountain town in the Andes of Perú. There, she and her roommate, Marie, search for meaningful projects and adjust to living with few amenities. Over the course of eighteen months, the two young women work in a hospital, start 4-H clubs, attend campesino meetings, and teach PE in a school with dirt floors. Evelyn is chosen queen of the local boys’ high school and—despite her resolve to resist such temptations—falls in love with a university student. As she comes of age, Evelyn learns about life and love the hard way when she must choose between following the religious rules of her youth and giving in to her sexual desires. Author: Evelyn Kohl LaTorre Publication Date: August 11, 2020 -
In this richly depicted story, told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of her sexual abuse, from age four to thirteen, by her father. A victim of her father’s anger and her mother’s complacency with his abusive behavior, Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to the abuse, and as a way to block her own sense of self. How does a child confused by episodes of abuse come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal? How does a young woman learn the difference between real love and a desire for sexual pleasure stimulated by abusive childhood sexual experiences? Careening through life, Eagle wonders how to trust others and, most importantly, herself. As a mature woman struggling to understand and live with her past, she remains earnest in her pursuit of clarity, compassion, and trust to build a stronger life. Being Mean is about blocking sexual abuse memories, having them surface, then learning how to acknowledge and live with incomprehensible experiences in the healthiest ways possible. Author: Patricia Eagle Publication Date: June 11, 2019 -
“A fascinating window into the frightening and relentless world of anorexia and, equally, young womanhood.” ―Katherine Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency Shani Raviv is a misfit teen whose peer-pressured diet spirals down into full-blown anorexia nervosa— something no one in her early-nineties, local South African community knows anything about. Fourteen-year-old Shani spends the next six years being “Ana” (as many anorexics call it), on the run from her feelings. She goes from aerobics addict to Israeli soldier to rave bunny to wannabe reborn, using sex, drugs, exercise and, above all, starvation, to numb out everything along the way. But one night, at age twenty, Shani faces the rude awakening that if she doesn’t slow down, break her denial, and seek help, she will starve to death. Three years later, her hardest journey of all begins: the journey to let go of being Ana and learn to love herself. Being Ana is an exploration into the soul and psyche of a young woman wrestling with anorexia’s demons— one that not only exposes the real horrors of a day in the life of an anorexic girl but also reveals the courage it takes to stop fighting and find healing. Author: Shani Raviv Publication Date: July 11, 2017 -
For readers who loved Marley & Me, a poignant memoir about cats, dogs, and what it means to forge a friendship—in life and in death—with a person you can never meet. Betsy Pauly died five years before Jen Braaksma knew she had even lived. Betsy was an artist and writer hailing from Minnesota, Texas, Missouri, and Florida. Jen is an author and book coach from Ottawa, Canada. Yet, improbably, Betsy became Jen’s friend. When Betsy died, she left behind a heartbroken husband, a hole in the hearts of her family and friends, and a half-finished manuscript. To honor his wife, Chips wanted to publish her animal stories—Betsy was a dedicated animal welfare advocate who could never say no to a stray dog or cat (or dozens!). Turning manuscripts around is Jen’s job. But as she worked, she never expected to form a friendship with the woman on the page. How was that even possible? Readers might feel they “know” an author by their writing, but Jen’s experience went further. She got to see Betsy’s drafts and her process. She got to see Betsy’s mind. And in doing so, she got to know this extraordinary woman. This may be Jen’s journey, but it’s Betsy’s story. A story about dedication, passion, and the connection that comes from sharing your authentic self—even between two people who can never meet. Author: Jen Braaksma and Betsy Pauly Publication Date: December 9, 2025
