Tavia Gilbert
Author
Language
English
Description
At 36, Kelly had a good marriage, a couple of kids, and a weekly newspaper column. But she still saw herself as George Corrigan's daughter. A garrulous Irish-American charmer from Baltimore, George was the center of the ebullient, raucous Corrigan clan. Kelly's was a colorful childhood, just the sort a girl could get attached to. She lives deep within what she calls the Middle Place--"that sliver of time when parenthood and childhood overlap"--but...
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6 - AR Pts: 15
Lexile measure
920L
Language
English
Description
Loung Ung, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh, tells of her experiences after her family was forced to flee from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, discussing her training as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, and telling of how her surviving siblings were eventually reunited.
Author
Language
English
Description
When Marya Hornbacher published her first book, Wasted, she did not yet know the reason for her all-but-shattered young life. At age 24, Hornbacher was diagnosed with Type 1 rapid-cycle bipolar, the most severe form of bipolar disease there is. Here, in her trademark wry, self-revealing voice, Hornbacher tells her new story. She takes us inside her own desperate attempts to control violently careening mood swings by self-starvation, substance abuse,...
Author
Lexile measure
970L
Language
English
Formats
Description
This is the powerful story of the author's struggle with multiple sclerosis and how a healer's unusual prescription of mindful altruism--to "give away 29 gifts in 29 days"--ignited her energy, her happiness, and invited more abundance into her life.
Author
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English
Formats
Description
A New York Times bestseller
For readers of Eat Pray Love, Under the Tuscan Sun, and The 4-Hour Workweek, comes a funny, romantic, and inspiring travel memoir about a woman who quits her job, moves to Paris, and finds love—and herself.
Exhausted and on the verge of burnout, Janice MacLeod cuts back, saves up, and buys herself two years of freedom in Europe. In Paris, Janice meets Christophe, the cute
...Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The day Lacey Sturm planned to kill herself was the day her grandmother forced her to go to church, a place Lacey thought was filled with hypocrites, fakers, and simpletons. The screaming match she had with her grandmother was the reason she went to church. What she found there was the Reason she is alive today. With raw vulnerability, this hard rock princess tells her own story of physical abuse, drug use, suicide attempts, and more--and her ultimate...
9) Getting lost
Author
Language
English
Description
"Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation...
10) The Possession
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.
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English
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Description
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...
Author
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English
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Description
Alternately humorous and poignant, this inspiring memoir chronicles the author's misadventures as she and her husband cook in quirky kitchens, struggle to speak French and shop like locals in outdoor markets. With candor and optimism, Deborah Jacobs transports readers from the grape harvest in the Loire Valley to an exuberant chile pepper festival in Basque Country and, ultimately, to Paris, where she witnesses history in the making. En route, she...
13) Simple Passion
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude,...
14) A Man's Place
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he...
Author
Language
English
Description
Sammy Ikua Gachagua had lost his father to illness, his mother to abandonment, and his home to poverty. By age ten, he was living in a shack with seven other children and very little food. He entered an orphanage seeing it as a miracle with three meals a day, a bed to sleep in, and clothes on his back. When Claire Diaz-Ortiz arrived in Kenya at the end of an around-the-world journey, she decided to stay the night, climb Mt. Kenya, then head back home....