Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who - after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven - told her she’d probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who promised her he would “treat your mind as well as your body.” Julia figured if she could somehow manage to get herself into a wheelchair, at least she’d always find parking. But after many, many months of hospitalization and rehab, Julia not only got into a wheelchair, but she got back out.

The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge. The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age 15 is not always enough to propel someone through life at age 30; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence.

Margaret Jacobsen is just about to step into the bright future she’s worked for so hard and so long: a new dream job, a fiancé she adores, and the promise of a picture-perfect life just around the corner. Then, suddenly, on what should have been one of the happiest days of her life, everything she worked for is taken away in a brief, tumultuous moment. In the hospital and forced to face the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again, Maggie must confront the unthinkable.

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?

After 30 years of a healthy, rewarding, and exciting life, I wake up in a hospital bed unable to move. The neurosurgeon leans down and breaks the news: You won't regain any function in your body and you will never walk again. My medical insurance sends me home, discontinues my care, and tells me to "adapt to my new life". Little Big Steps is the story of the pivotal moments, interactions, and breakthroughs following the injury that turned my life upside down.

From New York Times best-selling author and blogger Heather B. Armstrong comes an honest and irreverent memoir - reminiscent of the New York Times best-seller Brain on Fire - about her experience as one of only a few people to participate in an experimental treatment for depression involving 10 rounds of a chemically induced coma approximating brain death.

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.

Some twins communicate in a secret language all their own. For Whiskey and Charlie Ferns, the two-way alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta) whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies is the best they can do. But as the brothers grow up, they grow apart. Whiskey is everything Charlie is not - bold, daring, carefree - and Charlie blames his brother for always stealing the limelight, always striving ahead while seeming to push Charlie back.

When Vicky Cruz wakes up in the Lakeview Hospital Mental Disorders ward, she knows one thing: She can't even commit suicide right. But for once, a mistake works out well for her, as she meets Mona, the live wire; Gabriel, the saint; E. M., always angry; and Dr. Desai, a quiet force. With stories and honesty, kindness and hard work, they push her to reconsider her life before Lakeview and offer her an acceptance she's never had.

Thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Alexander is a psychotherapist, a spin instructor, a volunteer, and an athlete. She is also almost completely blind, with significantly deteriorated hearing. Not Fade Away is a deeply moving exploration of the obstacles we all face-physical, psychological, and philosophical. Rebecca's story is an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

Written by Deborah Ziegler, the mother of Brittany Maynard - a 29-year-old woman with a terminal brain tumor - this touching and beautiful memoir captures and celebrates her daughter's spirit and the mostly untold story of Brittany's last year of life as she chose her right to die with dignity, a journey that inspired millions.

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.

All their lives, Alice Stanhope and her daughter, Zoe, have been a family of two, living quietly in Northern California. Zoe has always struggled with crippling social anxiety, and her mother has been her constant and fierce protector. With no family to speak of and the identity of Zoe's father shrouded in mystery, their team of two works - until it doesn't. Until Alice gets sick and needs to fight for her life. Desperate to find stability for Zoe, Alice reaches out to two women who are practically strangers but who are her only hope: Kate, a nurse, and Sonja, a social worker.

Fractured Not Broken is a true story of loss, faith, and a rare love that only happens in nonfiction. In a sweeping and heart-wrenching narrative, Kelly exposes the truth about what happened after a drunk driver rendered her a quadriplegic. She shares how she found her way back - through faith and pain, her community, her family, and the love of a man she prayed for.

Stay-at-home mom Piper Whitman Hart is too close to her nine-year-old son, Fred, to realize that his idiosyncrasies are signs of something more. And just when his diagnosis of autism sends her life reeling, she's dragged back into the orbit of her emotionally abusive father, Lance, after a heart attack leaves him with brain damage.

Julia Fox Garrison refused to listen to the professionals she called Dr. Jerk and Dr. Panic, who - after she suffered a massive, debilitating stroke at age thirty-seven - told her she’d probably die, or to Nurse Doom, who ignored her emergency call button. Instead she heeded the advice of kind, gifted Dr. Neuro, who promised her he would “treat your mind as well as your body.” Julia figured if she could somehow manage to get herself into a wheelchair, at least she’d always find parking. But after many, many months of hospitalization and rehab, Julia not only got into a wheelchair, but she got back out.

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.

Thirty-four-year-old Rebecca Alexander is a psychotherapist, a spin instructor, a volunteer, and an athlete. She is also almost completely blind, with significantly deteriorated hearing. Not Fade Away is a deeply moving exploration of the obstacles we all face-physical, psychological, and philosophical. Rebecca's story is an exquisite reminder to live each day to its fullest.

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.

David Menasche lived for his work as a high school English teacher. His passion inspired his students, and between lessons on Shakespeare and sentence structure, he forged a unique bond with his kids, buoying them through personal struggles while sharing valuable life lessons.

Nearly 26 years after receiving her first heart transplant, Amy Silverstein's donor heart plummeted into failure. If she wanted to live, she had to take on the grueling quest for a new heart - immediately. A shot at survival meant uprooting her life and moving across the country to California. When her friends heard of her plans, there was only one reaction: "I'm there." Nine remarkable women - Joy, Jill, Leja, Jody, Lauren, Robin, Valerie, Ann, and Jane - put demanding jobs and pressing family obligations on hold to fly across the country and be by Amy's side.

Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia and the other who becomes a psychiatrist after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister.

His name was Joshua Silver. He was 23 years old, educated, and had an impressive vocabulary. The NYPD had found Joshua Silver naked in Times Square, barking like a dog. It was just another night for Julie Holland, the attending doctor in the world famous Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room.

101 True Stories about how Positive Thinking can change your life! Everyone needs a little attitude adjustment once in a while, and these amazing true life stories reveal how real people used positive thinking to improve their lives and overcome challenges. You’ll read stories about how you can make every day a special day, incorporate gratitude and joy into your daily life, count your blessings and change your outlook, use a few well-chosen words to reorient your life, manage cancer and other health challenges through a positive attitude, simplify and have a more meaningful life and more!

A hilarious and heartbreaking memoir-in-remedies by a self-described "professional soul-searcher" that details a journey of self-discovery through more than 160 tonics, seminars, regimens, and transformative therapies. With a voice that is at once intimate and hilarious, Megan captures the openness and honesty necessary for people to take a new path in life. Listeners will open the audiobook with curiosity about all the different healing therapies that Megan tries, but leave with a new understanding of themselves.

Lauren Marks was 27 when an aneurysm ruptured in her brain and left her fighting for her life. She woke up in a hospital soon after with serious deficiencies to her reading, speaking, and writing abilities, and an unfamiliar diagnosis: aphasia. This would be shocking news for anyone, but Lauren was a voracious reader, an actress, director, dramaturg, and pursuing her PhD. At any other period of her life, this diagnosis would have been a devastating blow. But she woke up...different.

People often say, "I feel like I've been run over by a truck." Katie actually was. On a sunny morning bike ride in Brooklyn, 24-year-old Katie McKenna was forever changed when she was run over by an 18-wheeler. Being crushed under a massive semi wasn't something Katie should have survived. After 10 hours of emergency surgery, she woke to find herself in a body and a life that would never be the same.

Laura Brandon's promise to her dying father was simple: to visit an elderly woman she'd never heard of before. A woman who remembers nothing-except the distant past. Visiting Sarah Tolley seemed a small enough sacrifice to make. But Laura's promise results in another death: her husband's. And after their five-year-old daughter, Emma, witnesses her father's suicide, Emma refuses to talk about it - to talk at all.Frantic and guilt ridden, Laura contacts the only person who may be able to help.

Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved. Lacking facts but roused by suspicion and troubled by seemingly random acts of terror around him, Gregory starts to fear for the safety of the people he loves. The question of the inviolability of confidential disclosures made to Gregory by his patients - privileged information - becomes crucial as the psychologist pursues an unsettling romance with Lauren Crowder, a lovely deputy district attorney investigating one of the deaths. Bound to silence, Gregory follows the psychological tracks of someone he fears may be a cunning and disturbed killer, while turning to his enigmatic but supportive partner, Diane Estevez, for counsel, and to his tart-tongued female urologist neighbor for support. The sinister, surprising drama unfolds against Boulder's Rocky Mountain backdrop, in the arresting natural beauty of Aspen, and in the midst of a baroque Halloween costume party in downtown Boulder. Finally, in a lonely mountain lodge enshrouded in menace, the story comes to its breathtaking climax.

At first, Ken Abraham wrote off his mother’s changes in behavior as quirks that just come with old age. There was memory loss, physical decline, hygiene issues, paranoia, and uncharacteristic attitudes. He soon realized that dementia had changed her life - and his family’s - forever. According to the Alzheimer’s Association, an estimated 5.4 million Americans of all ages have Alzheimer’s disease. That’s one in eight older Americans. More than likely, that figure includes someone you know and love.