Staying A Memoir

Author : Jessie Cole
Publisher : Text Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1925626547
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staying written by Jessie Cole and published by Text Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-30 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As children, Jessie Cole and her brother Jake ran wild, free to roam their rainforest home as they pleased. They had each other, parents who adored them, and two mysterious, beautiful, clever half-sisters, Billie and Zoe, who came to visit every holidays. But when Jessie was on the cusp of adolescence, tragedy struck, and her happy, loving family fell apart. This heartbreaking memoir asks what happens to those who are left behind when someone takes their own life. It’s about the importance of home, family and forgiveness—and finding peace in a place of pain. By the critically acclaimed author of Darkness on the Edge of Town and Deeper Water. Jessie Cole grew up in an isolated valley in northern New South Wales and lived a bush childhood of creek swimming and barefoot free-range adventuring. Her first novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal and longlisted for the Dobbie Literary Award. Her second novel, Deeper Water, was released in 2014 to much critical acclaim. ‘Graceful, revealing, pitch perfect. Cole is an author who pays sharp attention to the world around her.’ Australian on Deeper Water ‘A wounded, lovely, luminous book about grief, trauma and the strange healing potential of words.’ Tim Winton ‘Staying is a well-written, extremely moving memoir that steers resolutely clear of stereotypes and self-pity...For all the darkness, there is light too. Cole is a gifted writer with a sensual turn of phrase, and her exploration of the reverberating effects of suicide is both illuminating and absorbing. It will appeal to readers who loved her previous novels.’ Books+Publishing ‘This touching memoir from Australian author Jessie Cole, whose childhood was irrevocably changed when her sister committed suicide, offers a rare personal take on unthinkable tragedy.’ Elle 'When Australia’s cultural narratives insist an artist must leave home to succeed, Cole shows one forged by staying put...It’s surprising that, in the midst of such sorrow, what resounds is a sensation of fecundity. But perhaps it’s not, from a writer of such talent and grace.' Saturday Paper ‘Staying is a heartbreaking testament to the despair, helplessness and guilt of those left behind.’ Australian Financial Review ‘Staying is rich and complex – and often surprisingly funny given its dark subject matter. Above all, this memoir is a meditation on what it means to be traumatised by loss, and ultimately to be healed by life.’ Sydney Morning Herald ‘This is a book buoyant with a love for family and the natural world. Its pages are filled with light: the vividness of the living being who wants to live...Its message is that life has a tenacious power to draw us out of states of bereavement that, if surrendered to, have the capacity to destroy us entirely.’ Australian ‘Heartbreaking...a truly beautiful book.’ New Zealand Women’s Weekly ‘Staying isn’t just a tale of paradise lost – it’s about the birth of an artist in the midst of trauma, crafted with the eye and prose of a novelist. It’s also a hymn to a landscape, and to the immense difficulty in deciding simply to stay.’ Adelaide Advertiser ‘A delicate, difficult portrait of a family suffering delicate, difficult circumstances.’ Adelaide Review ‘I have read many memoirs this year, but none as scrupulously honest as this one...I am pleased Cole was talented enough, and brave enough, to share her words, providing insight into a subject that will doubtless touch many readers.’ Otago Daily Times ‘An honest, raw and well-crafted memoir about a family torn apart.’ AU Review

Author : Hua Hsu
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0593315200
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stay True written by Hua Hsu and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu “This book is exquisite and excruciating and I will be thinking about it for years and years to come.” —Rachel Kushner, New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken—with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity—is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes ’zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn’t seem to have a place for either of them. But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet. Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends—his memories—Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he’s been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

Author : Jenny Sanford
Publisher : Ballantine Books
ISBN 13 : 0345522400
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staying True written by Jenny Sanford and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-02-05 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BONUS: This edition contains a Staying True discussion guide. In this candid and compelling memoir, the first lady of South Carolina reveals the private ordeal behind her very public betrayal—and offers inspiration for anyone struggling to keep faith during life’s most trying times. She’s been a successful investment banker, a mother of four, and the campaign manager for one of American politics’ rising stars—her husband, Mark Sanford of South Carolina, once widely hailed as a possible candidate for president in 2012. Yet to most Americans, Jenny Sanford is best known for the one role she refused to play—that of conventional political spouse standing silently by while her husband went before the media and confessed his infidelity. Instead, she stayed true—to herself, to her faith, and to her highest ideals of parenthood and public service. She chose to let Mark Sanford deal with the embarrassment and political fallout from his own actions while focusing her own efforts privately on raising their children to be men of character, even in the face of the lies their father has told. In Staying True, Jenny Sanford recalls her shock and anguish upon discovering that her husband was having an affair with a woman in Argentina, and the further pain when she learned—just a day ahead of most Americans—that he had not ended the affair when she believed he had. She reveals the source of her determination to be honest and forthright instead of the victim in the tabloid passion play that gripped the nation in June 2009. But her story neither begins nor ends with Mark Sanford’s astounding fall from grace. Writing with uncommon candor from a deep well of spiritual strength, Sanford shares personal stories and life lessons from before and after she stepped into the public realm. She recounts the many stresses—as well as the myriad joys—that she experienced on a daily basis while living in the governmental spotlight. (Just try keeping four young boys out of mischief in the governor’s mansion!) And she describes the many ways that the seductions of power can drive apart even the most committed couples. At every step along her journey, Jenny Sanford has made choices: She gave up her career, moved far from her home state of Illinois, even changed her religious practices. Every choice was a glad concession to harmonious married life and, in some cases, to the support of her husband’s political aspirations. But the one thing she never gave up was her sense of self, her inner moral compass. Her remarkable poise and decency make her a role model for men and women alike. Her story will empower anyone who has fought to maintain independence and integrity—within a marriage or elsewhere in life.

Author : Marsha M. Linehan
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812984994
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.96/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Building a Life Worth Living written by Marsha M. Linehan and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marsha Linehan tells the story of her journey from suicidal teenager to world-renowned developer of the life-saving behavioral therapy DBT, using her own struggle to develop life skills for others. “This book is a victory on both sides of the page.”—Gloria Steinem “Are you one of us?” a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy. “Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope.” Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story. In this remarkable and inspiring memoir, Linehan describes how, when she was eighteen years old, she began an abrupt downward spiral from popular teenager to suicidal young woman. After several miserable years in a psychiatric institute, Linehan made a vow that if she could get out of emotional hell, she would try to find a way to help others get out of hell too, and to build a life worth living. She went on to put herself through night school and college, living at a YWCA and often scraping together spare change to buy food. She went on to get her PhD in psychology, specializing in behavior therapy. In the 1980s, she achieved a breakthrough when she developed Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, a therapeutic approach that combines acceptance of the self and ways to change. Linehan included mindfulness as a key component in therapy treatment, along with original and specific life-skill techniques. She says, "You can't think yourself into new ways of acting; you can only act yourself into new ways of thinking." Throughout her extraordinary scientific career, Marsha Linehan remained a woman of deep spirituality. Her powerful and moving story is one of faith and perseverance. Linehan shows, in Building a Life Worth Living, how the principles of DBT really work—and how, using her life skills and techniques, people can build lives worth living.

Author : Derek Frost
Publisher : Watkins Media Limited
ISBN 13 : 1786785005
Total Pages : 286 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living and Loving in the Age of AIDS written by Derek Frost and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the tale of a devastating pandemic, of lives cut painfully short; it's also a love letter. Derek, a distinguished designer and J, his husband, a pioneering entrepreneur and creator of both The Embassy Club, London’s answer to Studio 54, and iconic Heaven, Europe’s largest gay discotheque, met and fell in love more than 40 years ago. Their lives were high-octane, full of adventure, fun and fearless creativity. Suddenly their friends began to get sick and die – AIDS had arrived in their lives. When they got tested, J received what was then a death sentence: he was HIV Positive. While the onset of AIDS strengthened stigma and fear globally, they confronted their personal crisis with courage, humour and an indomitable resolve to survive. J’s battle lasted six long years. Turning to spiritual reflection, yoga, nature – and always to love – Derek describes a transformation of the spirit, how compassion and empathy rose phoenix-like from the flames of sickness and death. Out of this transformation also came Aids Ark, the charity they founded, which helped to save, amongst the world’s most marginalised people, more than 1,000 HIV Positive lives. This is a story of joy and triumph; about facing universal challenges; about the great rewards that come from giving back. Derek speaks for a generation who lived through a global health crisis that many in society refused even to acknowledge. His is a powerful story chronicling this extraordinary time.

Author : Jessie Cole
Publisher : HarperCollins Australia
ISBN 13 : 0730493857
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Darkness On The Edge Of Town written by Jessie Cole and published by HarperCollins Australia. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A hauntingly searing tale of the kindness of strangers and the malice of loved ones, featuring an accidental hero, his daughter and a tragic interloper who crashes into their lives in a northern NSW country town - with unexpected consequences... 'My dad, he collects broken things ... Where other people see junk he sees potential ... My dad collects broken people too ... ' Vincent is nearly forty years old, with little to show for his life except his precious sixteen-year-old daughter, Gemma: sensitive, insightful and wise beyond her years. When a stranger crashes her car outside Vincent and Gemma's bush home, their lives take a dramatic turn. In an effort to help the stranded woman, father and daughter are drawn into a world of unexpected and life-changing consequences. DARKNESS ON tHE EDGE OF tOWN is a haunting tale that beguiles the reader with its deceptively simple prose, its gripping and unrelenting tensions, and its disturbing yet tender observations.

Author : Laura B. Hayden
Publisher : Oceanus World Link Services
ISBN 13 : 0983941904
Total Pages : 159 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staying Alive: A Love Story written by Laura B. Hayden and published by Oceanus World Link Services. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Staying Alive: A Love Story is a story of hope and renewal that centers on a woman’s search for meaning after the untimely death of her 49-year-old husband. Coupled with other experiences of loss in her life she is determined to, with her children, persevere.Like Annie Dillard, Hayden draws on the rhythms and rituals of the natural world to explore her Brooklyn roots and New England adulthood. Wild creatures and domesticated critters, seasides and hillsides proffer comfort and understanding as she comes to realize that “no more than a hairline and no less than an eternity” separate her from the man she loved. Even with the wear and tear her faith endures, it rarely diminishes.Her purpose – to usher her two grieving children through a difficult adolescence to a well-adjusted adulthood – resonates through her own struggles. With the precise objectivity reminiscent of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Joyce Carol Oates’ A Widow’s Story, Hayden recounts the day her husband died and the rituals and obsessions of the bereaved. Forced to look at death straight in the eye, the author stares back, wide-eyed, without blinking through her tears.Hayden also manages to be seriously droll – in an Anne Lamott way. Never is her humor more honed than in the portrayal of her deceased spouse, whose devotion, antics, and wisdom remain ever-present to those who are staying alive without him. His death becomes not only the family’s heartbreak, but the loss of a well-executed life for all who knew him or will get to know him through these essays.Whether Laura Hayden’s writing deals with herself, her children, or her cadre of loved ones, it is clear that she, her daughter, and her son emerge from their tragic loss survivors, not victims of Larry’s death, an outcome of which he would be very pleased. In a culture of intentionally exposed and celebrated self-victimization, the story of this family may be considered a quiet triumph.

Author : Lita Ford
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 0062270664
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Living Like a Runaway written by Lita Ford and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fearless, revealing, and compulsively readable, Lita Ford’s Living Like a Runaway is the long-awaited memoir from one of rock’s greatest pioneers—and fiercest survivors. “Heavy metal’s leading female rocker" (Rolling Stone) bares all, opening up about the Runaways, the glory days of the punk and hard-rock scenes, and the highs and lows of her trailblazing career. Wielding her signature black guitar, Lita Ford shredded stereotypes of female musicians throughout the 1970s and ‘80s. Then followed more than a decade of silence and darkness—until rock and roll repaid the debt it owed this pioneer, helped Lita reclaim her soul, and restored the Queen of Metal to her throne. In 1975, Lita Ford left home at age sixteen to join the world’s first major all-female rock group, the Runaways—a “pioneering band” (New York Times) that became the subject of a Hollywood movie starring Kristen Stewart ad Dakota Fanning. Lita went on to become “heavy rock’s first female guitar hero” (Washington Post), a platinum-selling solo star who shared the bill with the Ramones, Van Halen, Motley Crue, Bon Jovi, Def Leppard, Poison, and others and who gave Ozzy Osbourne his first Top 10 hit. She was a bare-ass, leather-clad babe whose hair was bigger and whose guitar licks were hotter than any of the guys’. Hailed by Elle as “one of the greatest female electric guitar players to ever pick up the instrument,” Lita spurred the meteoric rise of Joan Jett, Cherie Currie, and the rest of the Runaways. Her phenomenal talent on the fret board also carried her to tremendous individual success after the group’s 1979 disbandment, when she established herself as a “legendary metal icon” (Guitar World) and a fixture of the 1980s music scene who held her own after hours with Nikki Sixx, Jon Bon Jovi, Eddie Van Halen, Tommy Lee, Motorhead’s Lemmy, Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi (to whom she was engaged), and others. Featuring a foreword by Dee Snider, Living Like a Runaway also provides never-before-told details of Lita’s dramatic personal story. For Lita, life as a woman in the male-dominated rock scene was never easy, a constant battle with the music establishment. But then, at a low point in her career, came a tumultuous marriage that left her feeling trapped, isolated from the rock-and-roll scene for more than a decade, and—most tragically—alienated from her two sons. And yet, after a dramatic and emotional personal odyssey, Lita picked up her guitar and stormed back to the stage. As Guitar Player hailed in 2014 when they inducted her into their hall of fame of guitar greats: “She is as badass as ever.”

Author : Matt Haig
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0143128728
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Reasons to Stay Alive written by Matt Haig and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library. "Destined to become a modern classic." —Entertainment Weekly WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO FEEL TRULY ALIVE? At the age of 24, Matt Haig's world caved in. He could see no way to go on living. This is the true story of how he came through crisis, triumphed over an illness that almost destroyed him and learned to live again. A moving, funny and joyous exploration of how to live better, love better and feel more alive, Reasons to Stay Alive is more than a memoir. It is a book about making the most of your time on earth. "I wrote this book because the oldest clichés remain the truest. Time heals. The bottom of the valley never provides the clearest view. The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we haven't been able to see it . . . Words, just sometimes, really can set you free."

Author : Demi Lovato
Publisher : Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 1250051444
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.48/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Staying Strong written by Demi Lovato and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-11-19 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The singer and actress presents a 365-day collection of hopeful insights and affirmations that offer comfort, inspiration, and daily goals to foster strength and self-acceptance.