Up, Not Down Syndrome is a love letter and a map. Experience how it feels to think your life is over after having an unlovable baby. At first, the loss seems impossible to overcome. Alex becomes the author's greatest teacher. Love is stronger than fear. Everyone has gifts. The book consists of three parts: the story, the lessons that Alex taught the writer and Alex's perspective. Up, Not Down Syndrome is a promise to stay positive, no matter what: up, not down.

Jill and Derick knew a normal life wasn’t possible for them. As a star on the popular TLC reality show 19 Kids and Counting, Jill grew up in front of viewers who were fascinated by her family’s way of life. She was the responsible, second daughter of Jim Bob and Michelle’s nineteen kids; always with a baby on her hip and happy to wear the modest ankle-length dresses with throat-high necklines.

From the moment Martha and her husband, John, conceived their second child, all hell broke loose. They were a couple obsessed with success. After years of matching IQs and test scores with less driven peers, they had two Harvard degrees apiece and were gunning for more. But the dream had begun to disintegrate. Then, when their unborn son, Adam, was diagnosed with Down syndrome, doctors, advisers, and friends in the Harvard community warned them not to keep the baby.

Eden was always good at being good. Starting high school didn’t change who she was. But the night her brother’s best friend rapes her, Eden’s world capsizes. What was once simple, is now complex. What Eden once loved—who she once loved—she now hates. What she thought she knew to be true, is now lies. Nothing makes sense anymore, and she knows she’s supposed to tell someone what happened but she can’t. So she buries it instead. And she buries the way she used to be.

For decades, Demi Moore has been synonymous with celebrity. From iconic film roles to high-profile relationships, Moore has never been far from the spotlight - or the headlines. Even as Demi was becoming the highest paid actress in Hollywood, however, she was always outrunning her past. Throughout her rise to fame and during some of the most pivotal moments of her life, Demi battled addiction, body image issues, and childhood trauma that would follow her for years - all while juggling a skyrocketing career and at times negative public perception.

​For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life—a story she’s never shared, until now.

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. Then a trip to the doctor and, a few weeks shy of her 23rd birthday, a diagnosis: leukemia, with a 35 percent chance of survival.

Kim Edwards' stunning novel begins on a winter night in 1964 in Lexington, Kentucky, when a blizzard forces Dr. David Henry to deliver his own twins. His son, born first, is perfectly healthy, but the doctor immediately recognizes that his daughter has Down syndrome. Rationalizing it as a need to protect Norah, his wife, he makes a split-second decision that will alter all of their lives forever. He asks his nurse, Caroline, to take the baby away to an institution and never to reveal the secret. Instead she disappears into another city to raise the child herself.

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.

Melody is not like most people. She cannot walk or talk, but she has a photographic memory; she can remember every detail of everything she has ever experienced. She is smarter than most of the adults who try to diagnose her and smarter than her classmates in her integrated classroom - the very same classmates who dismiss her as mentally challenged because she cannot tell them otherwise. But Melody refuses to be defined by cerebral palsy.

Just after her fortieth birthday, author Shauna Niequist found herself in a season of chaos, change, and loss unlike anything she'd ever faced. She discovered that many of the beliefs and practices that she usually turned to were no longer serving her.

Just when Glennon Doyle Melton was beginning to feel she had it all figured out - three happy children, a doting spouse, and a writing career so successful that her first book catapulted to the top of the New York Times best seller list - her husband revealed his infidelity and she was forced to realize that nothing was as it seemed. A recovering alcoholic and bulimic, Glennon found that rock bottom was a familiar place. In the midst of crisis, she knew to hold on to what she discovered in recovery: that her deepest pain has always held within it an invitation to a richer life.

These are the faces that call me "mom", the three children who made me a mother. When I started my journey into parenthood I never thought it would look like this. I never planned on having three adopted children, and I certainly never imagined that two of them would have Down syndrome. But like most of the things God does, once we stepped into the craziness and confusion of the unknown and unplanned, we quickly realized that we were indeed among the lucky few.

Anne Lamott meets Elizabeth Gilbert in this inspirational, side-splittingly funny exploration of the power of living with love, forgiveness, and honesty. Glennon Melton became a sensation when her personal essays started going viral. Giving language to our universal (yet often secret) experiences, her hilarious and poignant observations were read by millions, shared among friends, discussed at water coolers, quoted in The New York Times, and have inspired a social movement.

The first story Selma Blair Beitner ever heard about herself is that she was a mean, mean baby. With her mouth pulled in a perpetual snarl and a head so furry it had to be rubbed to make way for her forehead, Selma spent years living up to her terrible reputation: biting her sisters, lying spontaneously, getting drunk from Passover wine at the age of seven, and behaving dramatically so that she would be the center of attention. In a memoir that is as wildly funny as it is emotionally shattering, Blair tells the captivating story of growing up and finding her truth.

In her younger years, Jillian Lauren was a college dropout, a drug addict, and an international concubine in the Prince of Brunei's harem, an experience she immortalized in her best-selling memoir, Some Girls. In her 30s, Jillian's most radical act is learning the steadying power of love when she and her rock star husband adopt an Ethiopian child with special needs.

When unexpected grief brings two families together, how do they start their journey to healing? Join Michael and Gina Spehn--bestselling authors and founders of the New Day Foundation--as they tell their story of resilience, remembrance, and reliance on their shared faith.

Millions know Emily Maynard Johnson from her unprecedented double appearances on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. Millions also know that neither of the relationships from those shows lasted much longer than a commercial break. Overcome with embarrassment following her nationally televised failures at romance, Emily finally committed her heart to the only one she knew would never leave her empty and alone. Abandoning her desire to be chosen by men and finding peace in the fact that she was already chosen by God, Emily found the joy she had been looking for in serving God.

A medical mistake during an IVF procedure.An unthinkable situation....you're pregnant with the wrong baby. You can terminate, but you can't keep him. What choice would you make?

"Okay, Lord, you can have him. But if he must die, I want it to be for something big. I want someone’s life to be changed forever." This is what Laura Sobeich prayed when she found out her 17-year-old son had only one year to live. With this desperate prayer, she released her son to God’s will. At that point, Zach Sobiech was just another teenager battling cancer. When his mother told him to think about writing good-bye letters to family and friends, he decided instead to write songs. One of them, "Clouds", captured hearts and changed not one life but millions, making him an international sensation.

Lucy Houston and Mickey Chandler probably shouldn't have fallen in love, let alone gotten married. They're both plagued with faulty genes - he has bipolar disorder and she has a ravaging family history of breast cancer. But when their paths cross on the night of Lucy's 21st birthday, sparks fly, and there's no denying their chemistry. Cautious every step of the way, they are determined to make their relationship work-and they put it all in writing. Mickey promises to take his medication. Lucy promises not to blame him for what is beyond his control. He promises honesty.

In her best-selling memoir North of Normal, Cea wrote with grace about her unconventional childhood - her early years living in a tipi in Alberta with her pot-smoking, free-loving counterculture family. But her struggles do not end when she leaves her family at the age of 13 to become a model. Honest and daring, Nearly Normal reveals the many ways that Cea's unconventional childhood continues to reverberate through the years.

In 2005, Dan Bucatinsky and his partner, Don Roos, found themselves in an L.A. delivery room, decked out in disposable scrubs from shower cap to booties, to welcome their adopted baby girl - launching their frantic yet memorable adventures into fatherhood. Two and a half years later, the same birth mother - a heroically generous, pack-a-day teen with a passion for Bridezilla marathons and Mountain Dew - delivered a son into the couple’s arms.

Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman's journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires---even the simplest ones---are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need Him most. This story is about one woman's unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it's a book about the "undeserved gift which is life itself."

Some families are created in different ways but are still, in every way, a family. Writer and star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Nia Vardalos firmly believed she was supposed to be a mom, but Mother Nature and modern medicine had put her in a headlock. So she made a choice that shocked friends, family, and even herself: with only 14 hours' notice, she adopted a preschooler.

Clare Dunkle seemed to have an ideal life - two beautiful, high-achieving teenage daughters, a loving husband, and a satisfying and successful career as a children's book novelist. But it's when you let down your guard that the ax falls. Just after one daughter successfully conquered her depression, another daughter developed a life-threatening eating disorder.

When Kim Goldman was just 22, her older brother, Ron, was brutally killed by O. J. Simpson. Ron and Kim were very close, and her devastation was compounded by the shocking not guilty verdict that allowed a smirking Simpson to leave as a free man.

Kari Baxter Jacobs is furious, hurt, and confused. Her husband, Tim, a respected professor of journalism, is having an affair with a student. Stunned, Kari returns home to the Baxter family to sort things out. But when an old flame comes back into her life, she is more confused than ever.

After 60 years of marriage and five daughters, Lynn "Lovey" White knows that all of us, from time to time, need to use our little white lies. Her granddaughter Annabelle, on the other hand, is as truthful as they come. She always does the right thing - that is until she dumps her hedge fund manager fiance and marries a musician she has known for three days. After all, her grandparents fell in love at first sight....

Melissa had clung to the thin thread of hope given by the adoption agency that someday her newborn son might want to connect with her. When his eighteenth birthday arrived, she called the agency to simply update her contact information, not expecting a response.