I had something weird happen when I was downloading the books for this post. One of them said it was one book, but it downloaded another one, which was nothing related to the one I needed. If this happened to you, would you tell the website host or leave it as is? Am I the only one who finds true crime books pretty tricky to access? The reason I’m asking is I found this Crime Scene Corner Readathon being hosted by Chloe Reads Books; you can read any book and still participate, but I thought it would be cool to read some true crime. Anyway, with November around the corner, I thought I would make a list of memoirs to read.
Goodreads Blurb:
The history of the Nayers was divided by one violent, accidental moment. In the time it took her to light a match in the cellar of their rented vacation home, Dorothy and her husband Hank were engulfed in a flash fire.
She barely survived, her face scarred beyond recognition, her body required to endure thirty-seven operations. He was scarcely better off, convinced that survival had been the cruelest of outcomes.
Yet the greatest injustice of all was the estrangement of their young daughters, who didn’t see their parents for nine months after the accident. Their reconnection to people who no longer seemed familiar was painful and slow.
Four decades later, their daughter Louise recounts this difficult transformation with a poetic candor that evokes the relentless determination of her mother and the silent desperation of her father. Burned is the story of how life can be restored through the sheer force of will.
Goodreads Blurb:
For as long as writer Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. For most of that time, she didn’t know why. All of her trips to the ER and her daily anguish, pain, and lethargy only ever resulted in one question: How could any one person be this sick? Several drug addictions, three major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease.
Sick is Khakpour’s arduous, emotional journey—as a woman, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems—through the chronic illness that perpetually left her a victim of anxiety, living a life stymied by an unknown condition.
Divided by settings, Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course—New York, LA, New Mexico, and Germany—as she meditates on both the physical and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life. With candor and grace, she examines her subsequent struggles with mental illness, her addiction to the benzodiazepines prescribed by her psychiatrists, and her ever-deteriorating physical health.
Goodreads Blurb:
Child is the story of Judy Goldman’s relationship with Mattie Culp, the Black woman who worked for her family as a live-in maid and helped raise her―the unconscionable scaffolding on which the relationship was built and the deep love. It is also the story of Mattie’s child, who was left behind to be raised by someone else. Judy, now eighty, cross-examines what it was to be a privileged white child in the Jim Crow South, how a bond can evolve in and out of step with a changing world, and whether we can ever tell the whole truth, even to ourselves. It is an incandescent book of small moments, heart-warming, heartbreaking, and, ultimately, inspiring.
Goodreads Blurb:
At fifteen, Elizabeth Gilpin was an honor student, a state-ranked swimmer and a rising soccer star, but behind closed doors her undiagnosed depression was wreaking havoc on her life. Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever.
The nightmare began when she was abducted from her bed in the middle of the night by hired professionals and dropped off deep into a camp in the woods of AppalachiaAfter three brutal months, Elizabeth was transferred to a boarding school in Southern Virginia that in reality functioned more like a prison. Its curriculum revolved around a perverse form of group therapy where students were psychologically abused and humiliated. Finally, at seventeen, Elizabeth convinced them she was rehabilitated enough to “graduate” and was released.
In this eye-opening and unflinching book, Elizabeth recalls the horrors she endured, the friends she lost to suicide and addiction, and—years later—how she was finally able to pick up the pieces of her life and reclaim her identity.
Goodreads Blurb:
In this achingly honest memoir, Cornwell excavates her own life, detailing her traumatic childhood being raised by neglectful parents, her father abandoning the young family on Christmas day, her mother being institutionalized twice, an abusive foster family, and developing a parental relationship with evangelist Billy Graham’s wife Ruth. Cornwell depicts a harrowing hospitalization and near-death car accident. She unflinchingly shares overcoming obstacles that later gave her the ambition to become an award-winning police reporter. From there it was research in a medical examiner’s office that would turn into a full-time job. She would become a forensic expert and worldwide publishing phenomenon.
Cornwell leaves no stone unturned in this deeply candid account of her life, offering inspiring insight into what made her into the international sensation she is today.