After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide. She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.

When 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: At the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?

Rainey Paxton was born addicted to heroin. In the fragile first hours of Rainey’s life, hospital doctors and nurses fight to keep her alive. Several months later, she is released into her parents' custody, where she is forced to live on neglect and tainted breast milk. Constrained in her home infested with drug addicts and drifters, Rainey’s drug-addicted parents leave little hope for her protection. While Rainey is still an infant, her aunt Sophie visits her and finds the baby dirty and hungry. A bond forms between the two until tragedy strikes.

For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally, in 1992, Sexton's eighteen-year-old daughter Machelle, seeking refuge in a women's shelter, revealed the shocking, sordid details of her father's abuse to authorities. As the law attempted to catch up to Eddie Lee Sexton, he moved his family to a mobile home in western Florida.

Echoing among the Blue Ridge Mountains were the cries of newborn babies that disappeared into the night. The screams of children nearly drowned out by the sound of crickets. A girl, hidden and waiting to be found, terrified, and confused. The fireflies sparkling in the woods, bringing light to darkled places.

In April 2013 a global breaking news story surfaced on social media and in the world press and rapidly gathered momentum. A South African man had fallen overboard in the night during a storm in remote Indonesian waters, without anyone else on board realising. Eight hours later a frantic search was underway.

When a car crash sidelines Mickey just before softball season, she has to find a way to hold on to her spot as the catcher for a team expected to make a historic tournament run. Behind the plate is the only place she’s ever felt comfortable, and the painkillers she’s been prescribed can help her get there. The pills do more than take away pain; they make her feel good. But as the pressure to be Mickey Catalan heightens, her need increases, and it becomes less about pain and more about want, something that could send her spiraling out of control.

There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she'd even turned 20.

Abandoned at 10 years old by a mother who chose her drug-addicted, abusive boyfriend, Danielle was raised by grandparents who thought their child-rearing days had ended in the 1960s. She grew up Black, weird, and overwhelmingly uncool in a mostly white neighborhood in upstate New York, which created its own identity crises.

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

There are millions of homeless children in America today and in A Place Called Home, award-winning child welfare advocate David Ambroz writes about growing up homeless in New York for eleven years and his subsequent years in foster care, offering a window into what so many kids living in poverty experience every day.

Chakra Affirmations combines the potency of intention setting and affirmations with traditional chakra healing modalities to create a more effective and direct tool for balancing each of the seven major chakras.

In 2018, Colton Haynes woke up in a hospital. He’d had two seizures, lost vision in one eye, almost ruptured a kidney, and been put on an involuntary psychiatric hold. Not yet thirty, he knew he had to take stock of his life and make some serious changes if he wanted to see his next birthday. As he worked towards sobriety, Haynes allowed himself to become vulnerable for the first time and discovered profound self-awareness. He had millions of social media followers who constantly told him they loved him.

Using the written word as her witness statement, Jessica Willis Fisher tells a lacerating story of finding her voice after two decades of silence and an unforgettable story of risk and faith.

It was only a few years after the starry-eyed young couple got married when scary news threatened to take the wind out of their sails. But Sean Dietrich's wife, Jamie, wouldn't let it. She dared to hope for and plan for a great big adventure, and she made him promise to do it with her. For love and the promise of biscuits along the way, Sean—who was never an athlete of any kind—undertook the bike ride of a lifetime and lived to talk about it. In this true-life tale, storyteller Sean Dietrich shares their hilarious, touching, and sometimes terrifying story of the long bike ride.

A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

Born Bright, C. Nicole Mason's powerful memoir, is a story of reconciliation, constrained choices, and life on the other side of the tracks. Born in the 1970s in Los Angeles, California, Mason was raised by a beautiful but volatile 16-year-old single mother. Early on, she learned to navigate between an unpredictable home life and school, where she excelled. By high school, Mason was seamlessly straddling two worlds.

The daughter of an NCAA Championship-winning basketball coach and a stay-at-home mom, Anny Donewald had a seemingly blessed childhood. Then, at thirteen, one of her father’s players sexually abused her, and Donewald embarked on a path toward self-destruction. When Donewald was convinced to compete in an amateur night at a strip club, she found herself drawn into a world of drugs, money, and flesh peddlers in Michigan and Chicago - and eventually Las Vegas’ hottest XXX clubs.

Chris Gethard has often found himself in awkward situations most people, including you, probably would have safely avoided. The good news is now, thanks to this book, you can enjoy the painfully funny consequences of his unfortunate decisions at a safe distance. A Bad Idea I'm About to Do invites listeners to join Chris as he navigates an adolescence and adulthood mired in hilariously ill-fated nerdom, and to take comfort in the fact that - as his experiences often prove - things could always be much, much worse.

On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures in the grass outside; when he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of the teenage girl he meets at a comics convention, he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl is his daughter, and she thinks she's white.

What's it like to be undocumented? High school senior M.T. knows all too well. With graduation and an uncertain future looming, she must figure out how to grow up in the only country she's ever called home... a country in which she's "illegal". M.T. was born in Argentina and brought to America as a baby without any official papers. And as questions of college, work, and the future arise, M.T. will have to decide what exactly she wants for herself, knowing someone she loves will unavoidably pay the price for it.

In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever. This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world".

Diane Guerrero, the television actress from the megahit Orange Is the New Black and Jane the Virgin, was just 14 years old on the day her parents were detained and deported while she was at school. Born in the US, Guerrero was able to remain in the country and continue her education, depending on the kindness of family friends who took her in and helped her build a life and a successful acting career for herself, without the support system of her family.

Mishna Wolff grew up in a poor black neighborhood with her single father, a white man who truly believed he was black. "He strutted around with a short perm, a Cosby-esque sweater, gold chains and a Kangol---telling jokes like Redd Fox, and giving advice like Jesse Jackson. You couldn't tell my father he was white. Believe me, I tried," writes Wolff. And so from early childhood on, her father began his crusade to make his white daughter down.

A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California - about where identity truly lies, and how we find it. Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Reza Courdee, a 14-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner.

I'm the One That I Want, based on her show of the same name, is filled with dead-on insights about the experience of being a woman with attitude, of flowing with the highs and lows of life, and of creating one's own identity and acceptance. It is every bit as hilarious, shocking, and irreverent as she is.

Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age 15, Liz found herself on the streets when her family finally unraveled. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep. Then, when Liz's mother died of AIDS, she decided to take control of her own destiny.

Cheryl Robinson, a bright voice in African-American fiction, delivers a fresh tale of love in the modern world. Porter is a handsome Detroit firefighter who just got burned by his cheating girlfriend. Winona is a single mom who is getting by despite an old secret that haunts her. When Porter and Winona meet, they must face their pasts to allow their present romance to grow.

At the age of 20, Chris Gardner arrived in San Francisco to pursue a promising career in medicine. However, he surprised everyone and himself by setting his sights on the competitive world of high finance. Yet no sooner had he landed an entry-level position at a prestigious firm, Gardner found himself caught in a web of incredibly challenging circumstances that left him part of the city's working homeless with his toddler son.

Carmen Rita Wong has always craved a sense of belonging: First as a toddler in a warm room full of Black and brown Latina women, like her mother, Lupe, cheering her dancing during her childhood in Harlem. And in Chinatown, where her immigrant father, “Papi” Wong, a hustler, would show her and her older brother off in opulent restaurants decorated in red and gold. Then came the almost exclusively white playgrounds of New Hampshire after her mother married her stepfather, Marty, who seemed to be the ideal of the white American dad.

The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a 19-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to "cure" him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life.

Growing up in a house filled with dirty feather boas and fearless mice, Emi Nietfeld dreams of escaping to the Ivy League. Emi’s single mom believes in her, but can’t stop hoarding—catapulting Emi into the underworld of troubled teen treatment, foster care, and homelessness. When her shot arrives to trade sleeping in her car for the hallowed halls of an elite college, Emi must decide: How far will she go to market herself as a perfect “overcomer” when her problems are far from over? And what will it cost to maintain that illusion at Harvard and into adulthood?

For decades, Kathleen Buhle chose to play the role of the good wife, beginning when, as a naïve young woman from a working-class family on the South Side of Chicago, she met the dashing son of a senator in Oregon. Within months, Kathleen found herself pregnant and engaged. Determined to build her family on a foundation of love, Kathleen was convinced her and Hunter’s commitment to each other could overcome any obstacle. But when Hunter’s drinking evolved into dependency, she was forced to learn how irrevocably a marriage can fall apart under the merciless power of addiction.

Before Mark Morris became “the most successful and influential choreographer alive” (The New York Times), he was a six-year-old in Seattle cramming his feet into Tupperware glasses so that he could practice walking on pointe. Often the only boy in the dance studio, he was called a sissy, a term he wore like a badge of honor. He was unlike anyone else, deeply gifted and spirited.

When Rachel Krantz met and fell for Adam, he told her that he was looking for a committed partnership—just one that did not include monogamy. Intrigued and more than a little nervous, Krantz decided to see whether their love could coexist with the freedom to date other people. Could they strike an exquisite balance between intimacy and independence, and find a way to feel passion for each other once the honeymoon phase ended?

Fairest is a memoir about a precocious boy with albinism, a "sun child" from a rural Philippine village, who would grow up to become a woman in America. Coping with the strain of parental neglect and the elusive promise of US citizenship, Talusan found childhood comfort from her devoted grandmother, a grounding force as she was treated by others with special preference or public curiosity.

After years of hiding her addiction from everyone—stockpiling pills in her Louboutins and elaborately scheduling her withdrawals between PTA meetings, baby showers, and tennis matches—Laura Cathcart Robbins is running out of places to hide. She has learned the hard way that even her high-profile marriage and Hollywood lifestyle can’t protect her from the pain she’s keeping bottled up inside. Facing divorce, the possibility of a custody battle, and the insistent voice of internalized racism that nags at her as a Black woman in a white world, Laura wonders just how much more she can take.

An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl. With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves.

Brittany K. Barnett was only a law student when she came across the case that would change her life forever - that of Sharanda Jones, single mother, business owner, and, like Brittany, Black daughter of the rural South. A victim of America’s devastating war on drugs, Sharanda had been torn away from her young daughter and was serving a life sentence without parole - for a first-time drug offense.