How We Heal from Painful Childhoods by Ernest Ellender outlines a comprehensive method for healing from the trauma of youth by focusing on relationship skills, self-care, and community engagement. Ellender speaks about goal-setting to manage thoughts and emotions, highlights the role of the autonomic nervous...

Mental Illness: MI Doesn’t Look Like ME by Susie L. Landown-Clarke chronicles the author's harrowing struggle with complex mental illnesses. Facing emotional turmoil, PTSD, anxiety, and depression, she describes how these disorders eroded her mental health and led her to the brink of suicide. Through...

My ValHalla: Angels Are No Strangers to Chains by Celia LaVon Belt is a must-read memoir about a strong woman who is also a widow, a brain injury survivor, a burn survivor, and an abuse survivor. Celia Belt tells what she endured between 2022 and...

Diane: True Survivor by Ward Lassoe is a powerful and intensely personal biography of Diane, an ordinary woman who led a tough, uncompromising, and often traumatic life. Born in 1960 to a prostitute in London, Diane was abandoned as a baby and spent her first...

Wake Up! Change Up! Rise Up! by Lynn Lok-Payne takes a look at how gratitude, joy, and love influence overcoming personal and emotional obstacles. She recounts her experiences with grief, such as the loss of her husband and a house fire, speaking on how gratitude,...

Beyond the Trident is a memoir by Tom Murphy, detailing his combat experiences in Vietnam, and the intense training that accompanied them as a U.S. Navy SEAL—as well as its massive impact on his life later. Murphy introduces his "three-legged stool" concept, which represents the...

Hold Back the Rain is Michelle Vignault's memoir of how she got through the hardest years of her life from 2014 to 2017. Her husband Tracy, then 45, started showing signs of detachment. Her reality then became what she had to face during her husband’s...

Custody: Blood is Thicker than Water by Danial Kenneth Mason is inspired by Mason’s true story of fighting for custody of his only son. Set in the 1960s, the book chronicles Mason’s emotional and legal battle against a biased legal system that favored mothers in...

Ghost by Lea Tonin is one of the most unusual memoirs I have ever read…and I have read a lot of memoirs! When Lea is 14, going on 15, she can no longer withstand the constant brutality of her Japanese stepfather. Any infractions or challenges...

In Survivor Times Two: A Poetic Memoir of Suicide and Divorce, Devi Nina Bingham talks about grief and her own experiences. Being a single parent for a long time, her daughter was also her best friend, which made the trauma worse when her teenage daughter...