Come Sit a Spell: Recalling and Writing Memoirs
Author:
Publisher: Eileen Birin
Published:
Total Pages: 96
ISBN-13: 9780965533935
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Come Sit a Spell
Author: Marilyn Jansen
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2022-04-05
Total Pages: 217
ISBN-13: 1496453697
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCome Sit a Spell takes you back to a time when people’s lives were real and raw, where folks lived full of hard-worn love. Through her personal reflections on growing up in the Missouri Ozarks, Marilyn Jansen reminds us that God’s love comforts and guides us even when the pantry is empty. These stories, based on memories from three generations of kitchens, come fully baked with a recipe that just about anyone can master, and ingredients that are probably already in your cupboard. Come Sit a Spell is about people and food—not the glamorous kind, but the everyday, love-’em-with-all-you-got kind that is the foundation of country homes across America.
The Memory Palace
Author: Mira Bartok
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2011-08-09
Total Pages: 323
ISBN-13: 1439183325
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA gorgeous memoir about the 17 year estrangement of the author and her homeless schizophrenic mother, and their reunion.
Sitting Pretty
Author: Rebekah Taussig
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-08-25
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 0062936816
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA memoir-in-essays from disability advocate and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty Rebekah Taussig, processing a lifetime of memories to paint a beautiful, nuanced portrait of a body that looks and moves differently than most. Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.
Irish-American Autobiography
Author: James Silas Rogers
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press + ORM
Published: 2017-01-27
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 0813229197
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis lively survey of the ever-changing Irish-American experience contains “many perceptive, and sometimes surprising, observations” (The Irish Times). Irish-American Autobiography explores the evolution of Irishness in America through memoirs that describe, define, and redefine what it means to be Irish. From athletes and entertainers to saloon keepers, community activists, and Catholic priests, Irish-Americans of all stripes share their thoughts and perceptions on their ever-evolving ethnic identity. Poet and Irish studies specialist James Silas Rogers begins his evocative analysis with celebrity memoirs by athletes like boxer John L. Sullivan and ballplayer Connie Mack―written when the Irish were eager to put their raffish origins behind them. Later, he traces the many tensions registered by lesser-known Irish-Americans who’ve told their life stories. South Boston step dancers set themselves against the larger culture, framing their identity as outsiders looking in. Even the classic 1950s sitcom The Honeymooners speaks to the poignant sense of exclusion felt by its creator Jackie Gleason. Rogers also examines the changing role of Catholicism as a cultural touchstone for Irish Americans, and examines the painful diffidence of priest autobiographers. Irish-American Autobiography becomes, in the end, a story of a continued search for connection—documenting an “ethnic fade” that never quite happened.
A Million Little Pieces
Author: James Frey
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2004-05-11
Total Pages: 596
ISBN-13: 1400079012
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping memoir about the nature of addiction and the meaning of recovery from a bold and talented literary voice. “Anyone who has ever felt broken and wished for a better life will find inspiration in Frey’s story.” —People “A great story.... You can't help but cheer his victory.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review By the time he entered a drug and alcohol treatment facility, James Frey had taken his addictions to near-deadly extremes. He had so thoroughly ravaged his body that the facility’s doctors were shocked he was still alive. The ensuing torments of detoxification and withdrawal, and the never-ending urge to use chemicals, are captured with a vitality and directness that recalls the seminal eye-opening power of William Burroughs’s Junky. But A Million Little Pieces refuses to fit any mold of drug literature. Inside the clinic, James is surrounded by patients as troubled as he is—including a judge, a mobster, a one-time world-champion boxer, and a fragile former prostitute to whom he is not allowed to speak—but their friendship and advice strikes James as stronger and truer than the clinic’s droning dogma of How to Recover. James refuses to consider himself a victim of anything but his own bad decisions, and insists on accepting sole accountability for the person he has been and the person he may become—which runs directly counter to his counselors' recipes for recovery. James has to fight to find his own way to confront the consequences of the life he has lived so far, and to determine what future, if any, he holds. It is this fight, told with the charismatic energy and power of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, that is at the heart of A Million Little Pieces: the fight between one young man’s will and the ever-tempting chemical trip to oblivion, the fight to survive on his own terms, for reasons close to his own heart. "
Spell Albuquerque
Author: Tennessee Reed
Publisher: Counterpunch
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781904859888
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn kindergarten, teachers told Tennessee Reed that she had a learning disability so severe that she would never read or write, but she proved them wrong by writing her first book at the age of 11. In this inspiring autobiography, spanning from school to university, Reed gives an inspiring account of her disabilities and how they affect her life. More importantly, she exposes society's disability' - that there is only one correct way of being. Through great reserves of courage, she has fought an education system that would otherwise have written off her capabilities.'
Let's Pretend This Never Happened
Author: Jenny Lawson
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2012-04-17
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1101573082
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside
In Spite of Myself
Author: Christopher Plummer
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Published: 2009-10-06
Total Pages: 658
ISBN-13: 0307373126
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCanada’s most celebrated and acclaimed actor lets loose in a magnificent memoir that will delight and enchant readers across the country. A rollicking, rich self-portrait written by one of today’s greatest living actors. The story of a “young wastrel, incurably romantic, spoiled rotten” – his privileged Montreal background, rich in Victorian gentility, included steam yachts, rare orchid farms, music lessons in Paris and Berlin – “who tore himself away from the ski slopes to break into the big, bad world of theater not from the streets up but from an Edwardian living room down.” Plummer writes of his early acting days – on radio and stage with William Shatner and other fellow Canadians; of the early days of the Stratford Festival in southern Ontario; of his Broadway debut at twenty-four in The Starcross Story, starring Eva Le Gallienne (“It opened and closed in one night, but what a night!”); of joining Peter Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company (its other members included Judi Dench, Vanessa Redgrave and Peter O’Toole); of his first picture, Stage Struck, directed by Sidney Lumet; and of The Sound of Music, which he affectionately dubbed “S&M.” He writes about his legendary colleagues: Dame Judith Anderson (“the Tasmanian devil from Down Under”); Sir Tyrone Guthrie; Sir Laurence Olivier; Elia Kazan (“this chameleon of chameleons might change into you, wear your skin, steal your soul”); and “that reprobate” Jason Robards, among many others. A revelation of the wild and exuberant ride that is the actor’s – at least this actor’s – life.
