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GETTING ABOVE YOUR RAISING memoirs of overcoming toxic childhoods
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by Ariel Leve
Leve chronicles her materially privileged yet miserably abusive 1970s childhood in a forensically crafted mosaic of jagged shards. Her beautiful if wildly unkempt writer and feminist-activist mother was so irresponsible and narcissistic, Leve's father fled halfway around the world, dividing young Leve's life between brief, bright summers in Bangkok, and dark and grueling seasons in New York City.
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by Eve Ensler
The author excavates the violent truths of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in a painful quest for healing. Told from the perspective of the father who committed countless wrongs against his child, this is a chilling portrait from the broken mirror of his memories.
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by Jennifer Lauck
A poignant autobiography describes growing up in Carson City, Nevada, during the 1970s, the shattering effects of tragedy--loss, loneliness, mistreatment--on her family, and her own indomitable will to survive.
also available in alternate format(s)
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by Liz Murray
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 she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, Liz found herself on the streets, and learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.
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by Wendy Lawless
Recounts the author's emotional trauma from living with a mentally ill mother, Georgann Rea, who grew up in a trailer park, then reinvented herself as a glamorous Manhattanite who left a string of men in her wake. Lawless describes her mother's nervous breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospital stays with equal parts detachment and regret.
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by Pat Conroy
Conroy's memoir chronicles his relationship with his domineering fighter-pilot father, and the lifelong challenges he faced because of this father's emotional abuse, violence, and neglect. He illustrates the complex intergenerational problems that were created by his father's conduct, including breakdowns and hospitalizations.
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by Tara Westover
As the youngest of seven children born to fundamentalist parents in remote Idaho, seven-year-old Westover realized it was unusual that her siblings didn't go to school. Her father's distrust of government, education, and doctors meant Westover didn't have a birth certificate, medical records, or school records. Neglect and abuse were common, especially at the fists of one of her older brothers.
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by Jennifer Vogel
Investigative reporter Vogel here tells the true story of life with John Vogel: counterfeiter, arsonist, con man, and careless but loving father. A dreamer who couldn't be bothered to live by society's rules, Vogel made his way in life by scamming whomever he could, eventually turning his considerable artistic talents to counterfeiting $100 bills.
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by Stephen Zanichkowsky
The eighth child in a family of fourteen recounts his dark childhood experiences during which his siblings and he fended for themselves away from an angry father and emotionally distant mother, witnessed mysterious events surrounding two of their number, and left home at the age of eighteen, rarely to interact with each other again.
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by Jeannette Walls
The second child of a scholarly, alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing from the Arizona desert, to Las Vegas, to an Appalachian mining town, during which her siblings and she fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors and the authorities.
also available in other format(s)
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by Susanna Sonnenberg
The daughter of a narcissistic and addictive mother shares the story of her life as it was influenced by her glamorous and charismatic mother's ill-fated teen elopement, compulsive lies, and dependence on cocaine, narcotics, and sex.
also available in alternate format(s)
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by Julia Scheeres
The road out of an intolerant small town leads straight to a faith-based reform school in this scarifying memoir. When she was 16, her fundamentalist Christian parents moved the author and her two adopted, African-American brothers to a Midwest farming community that they immediately discovered was a little patch of racist attitudes.
also available in alternate format(s)
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by Mira Bartók
A disturbing, mesmerizing personal narrative about growing up with a brilliant but schizophrenic mother.The book is comprised of two intertwining narratives. One concerns artist Bartok's mother, Norma Herr, and her struggle with mental illness. The other examines the author's midlife struggle with a traumatic brain injury.
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by Howard Dully
At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital—or ice pick—lobotomy.
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by Carissa Phelps
Carissa Phelps was a runner. By the time she was twelve, she had run away from home, dropped out of school, and fled blindly into the arms of a brutal pimp. Even when she escaped him, she could not outrun the crushing inner pain of abuse, neglect, and abandonment
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by Augusten Burroughs
The author describes his bizarre coming-of-age years after his adoption by his mother's psychiatrist, during which he witnessed such misadventures as a fake suicide attempt, a pedophile's life in a barn, and front-lawn family/patient sleepovers.
also available in other format(s)
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by Julie Gregory
An unusual memoir describes growing up as the victim of Munchausen by proxy, a dangerous form of child abuse in which her mother invented or caused a series of illnesses and ailments, and her struggle to escape her mother's serious psychological problems to rebuild her life as a healthy, compassionate young woman.
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by Harriet Brown
The day of her mother's funeral, Harriet Brown was five thousand miles away. By the time Harriet's mom died at age 76, they were out of contact. Yet Harriet felt her death deeply, embarking on an exploration of what family estrangement means--to those who cut off contact, to those who are estranged, to the friends and family members who are on the sidelines.
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by Kathryn Harrison
Early on an April morning, eighteen-year-old Billy Frank Gilley, Jr., killed his sleeping parents. Surprised in the act by his younger sister, Becky, he turned on her as well. Billy then climbed the stairs to the bedroom of his other sister, Jody, and said, “We’re free.”
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by Jeanette Winterson
Raised by adoptive parents in a grimy north England industrial town, Winterson endured a religious fanatic of a mother with two sets of dentures and a tendency to lock her daughter out of the house at night. As the author searched for her biological mother, fiction and poetry provided a lifeline.
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