So-Called Normal
So-Called Normal

Author: Mark Henick

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1443455040

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A vital and triumphant story of perseverance and recovery by one of Canada’s foremost advocates for mental health When Mark Henick was a teenager in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, he was overwhelmed by depression and anxiety that led to a series of increasingly dangerous suicide attempts. One night, he climbed onto a bridge over an overpass and stood in the wind, clinging to a girder. Someone shouted, “Jump, you coward!” Another man, a stranger in a brown coat, talked to him quietly, calmly and with deep empathy. Just as Henick’s feet touched open air, the man in the brown coat encircled his chest and pulled him to safety. This near-death experience changed Henick’s life forever. So-Called Normal is Henick’s memoir about growing up in a broken home and the events that led to that fateful night on the bridge. It is a vivid and personal account of the mental health challenges he experienced in childhood and his subsequent journey toward healing and recovery.

It's Perfectly Normal
It's Perfectly Normal

Author: Robie H. Harris

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 1536216127

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Fully and fearlessly updated, this vital new edition of the acclaimed book on sex, sexuality, bodies, and puberty deserves a spot in every family’s library. With more than 1.5 million copies in print, It’s Perfectly Normal has been a trusted resource on sexuality for more than twenty-five years. Rigorously vetted by experts, this is the most ambitiously updated edition yet, featuring to-the-minute information and language accompanied by new and refreshed art. Updates include: * A shift to gender-neutral vocabulary throughout * An expansion on LGBTQIA topics, gender identity, sex, and sexuality—making this a sexual health book for all readers * Coverage of recent advances in methods of sexual safety and contraception with corresponding illustrations * A revised section on abortion, including developments in the shifting politics and legislation as well as an accurate, honest overview * A sensitive and detailed expansion on the topics of sexual abuse, the importance of consent, and destigmatizing HIV/AIDS * A modern understanding of social media and the internet that tackles rapidly changing technology to highlight its benefits and pitfalls and ways to stay safe online Inclusive and accessible, this newest edition of It’s Perfectly Normal provides young people with the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand their bodies, relationships, and identities in order to make responsible decisions and stay healthy.

The Art of Being Normal
The Art of Being Normal

Author: Lisa Williamson

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0374302391

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An inspiring and timely debut novel from Lisa Williamson, The Art of Being Normal is about two transgender friends who figure out how to navigate teen life with help from each other. David Piper has always been an outsider. His parents think he's gay. The school bully thinks he's a freak. Only his two best friends know the real truth: David wants to be a girl. On the first day at his new school Leo Denton has one goal: to be invisible. Attracting the attention of the most beautiful girl in his class is definitely not part of that plan. When Leo stands up for David in a fight, an unlikely friendship forms. But things are about to get messy. Because at Eden Park School secrets have a funny habit of not staying secret for long , and soon everyone knows that Leo used to be a girl. As David prepares to come out to his family and transition into life as a girl and Leo wrestles with figuring out how to deal with people who try to define him through his history, they find in each other the friendship and support they need to navigate life as transgender teens as well as the courage to decide for themselves what normal really means.

The Myth of Normal
The Myth of Normal

Author: Gabor Maté, MD

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-09-13

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 059308389X

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The instant New York Times bestseller By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health? Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Normal
Normal

Author: Graeme Cameron

Publisher: Harlequin

Published: 2016-03-29

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0778317773

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The nameless narrator first appears to fit the stereotype of a meticulous killer untroubled by normal emotions. He researched 18-year-old Sarah Abbott, who was taking a year off from school before heading to Oxford, killed her in her house, and carefully cleaned up afterward. On returning to his van, however, he discovers that he has locked its keys inside. A brick through the van's window solves that problem, but later, back at the victim's house, he runs into a friend of Sarah's, Erica Shaw, who winds up in a cage in the basement of the narrator's garage. His bumbling continues throughout. In a big departure from the standard serial killer trope, he begins nonpredatory relationships with three different women. He even falls in love with one of them. Those who have no trouble accepting a humanized serial killer will be most satisfied.

Reasonable People
Reasonable People

Author: Ralph James Savarese

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2021-04-20

Total Pages: 538

ISBN-13: 1635421446

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Watch an interview with DJ on CNN Listen to Ralph Savarese's interview on NPR's "The Diane Rehm Show" Visit the book's website: www.reasonable-people.com "Why would someone adopt a badly abused, nonspeaking, six-year-old from foster care?" So the author was asked at the outset of his adoption-as-a-first-resort adventure. Part love story, part political manifesto about "living with conviction in a cynical time," the memoir traces the development of DJ, a boy written off as profoundly retarded and now, six years later, earning all "A's" at a regular school. Neither a typical saga of autism nor simply a challenge to expert opinion, Reasonable People illuminates the belated emergence of a self in language. And it does so using DJ's own words, expressed through the once discredited but now resurgent technique of facilitated communication. In this emotional page-turner, DJ reconnects with the sister from whom he was separated, begins to type independently, and explores his experience of disability, poverty, abandonment, and sexual abuse. "Try to remember my life," he says on his talking computer, and remember he does in the most extraordinarily perceptive and lyrical way. Asking difficult questions about the nature of family, the demise of social obligation, and the meaning of neurological difference, Savarese argues for a reasonable commitment to human possibility and caring.

Attempting Normal
Attempting Normal

Author: Marc Maron

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2014-04-08

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0812982789

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER Marc Maron is “a master of spinning humor out of anguish” (Bookforum), even when that anguish is pretty clearly self-inflicted. In Attempting Normal, he threads together twenty-five stories from his life and near-death, from his first comedy road trips (with a fugitive junkie comic with a missing tooth) to his love affair with feral animals (his cat rescues are bloody epics) to his surprisingly moving tales of lust, heartbreak, and hope. The stories are united by Maron’s thrilling storytelling style—intensely smart, disarmingly honest, and explosively funny. Together, they add up to a hilarious and moving tale of failing, flailing, and finding a way. Praise for Attempting Normal “I laughed so hard reading this book.”—David Sedaris “Funny . . . surprisingly deep . . . laced with revelatory insights.”—Los Angeles Times “Superb . . . A reason that [it] is a superior example of an overcrowded genre—the comedian memoir—is Mr. Maron’s hardheaded approach to his history, the wisdom of experience.”—The New York Times “Marc Maron is a legend because he is both a great comic and a brilliant mind. Attempting Normal is a deep, hilarious megashot of feeling and truth as only this man can administer.”—Sam Lipsyte Praise for Marc Maron and WTF “The stuff of comedy legend.”—Rolling Stone “Marc Maron is a startlingly honest, compelling, and hilarious comedian-poet. Truly one of the greatest of all time.”—Louis C.K. “I’ve known Marc for years and I can tell you first hand that he’s passionate, fearless, honest, self-absorbed, neurotic, and screamingly funny.”—David Cross “Revered among his peers . . . raw and unflinchingly honest.”—Entertainment Weekly “Devastatingly funny.”—Los Angeles Times “For a comedy nerd, this show is nirvana.”—Judd Apatow

Normal
Normal

Author: Magdalena M. Newman

Publisher: HMH Books For Young Readers

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1328631834

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"Praised by RJ Palacio as "wondrous"--this moving memoir follows a teenage boy with TC syndrome and his exceptional family from diagnosis at birth to now. "This touching memoir is a must-read for anyone who wants to know more about the real world experiences of a child with craniofacial differences and his extraordinary family. It's also more than that. It's a story about the love between a mother and a son, a child and his family, and the breadth of friends, helpers, and doctors that step in when the unexpected happens. It's a story that will make young readers reevaluate the word "normal" -- not only as it applies to others, but to themselves. Any book that can do that is pretty wondrous, as far as I'm concerned." --R. J. Palacio, author of Wonder"--

Normal People
Normal People

Author: Sally Rooney

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Published: 2019-04-16

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 073527648X

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LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE: A wondrously wise, genuinely unputdownable new novel from Sally Rooney, winner of the 2017 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (at 26, tied with Zadie Smith for the youngest-ever recipient)--the quintessential coming-of-age love story for our time. Connell Waldron is one of the most popular boys in his small-town high school--he is a star of the football team, an excellent student, and never wanting for attention from girls. The one thing he doesn't have is money. Marianne Sheridan, a classmate of Connell's, has the opposite problem. Marianne is plain-looking, odd, and stubborn, and while her family is well-off, she has no friends to speak of. There is, however, a deep and undeniable connection between the two teenagers, one that develops into a secret relationship. Everything changes when both Connell and Marianne are accepted to Trinity College. Suddenly Marianne is well-liked and elegant, holding court with her intellectual friends while Connell hangs at the sidelines, not quite as fluent in language of the elite. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle each other, falling in and out of romance but never straying far from where they started. And as Marianne experiments with an increasingly dangerous string of boyfriends, Connell must decide how far he is willing to go to save his oldest friend. Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a novel that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the inescapable challenges of family and friendships. Normal People is a book that you will read in one sitting, and then immediately share with your friends.

A Nearly Normal Family
A Nearly Normal Family

Author: M. T. Edvardsson

Publisher: Celadon Books

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1250204429

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Now a Netflix Limited Series "...A compulsively readable tour de force." —The Wall Street Journal New York Times Book Review recommends M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family and lauds it as a “page-turner” that forces the reader to confront “the compromises we make with ourselves to be the people we believe our beloveds expect.” (NYTimes Book Review Summer Reading Issue) M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family is a gripping legal thriller that forces the reader to consider: How far would you go to protect the ones you love? In this twisted narrative of love and murder, a horrific crime makes a seemingly normal family question everything they thought they knew about their life—and one another. Eighteen-year-old Stella Sandell stands accused of the brutal murder of a man almost fifteen years her senior. She is an ordinary teenager from an upstanding local family. What reason could she have to know a shady businessman, let alone to kill him? Stella’s father, a pastor, and mother, a criminal defense attorney, find their moral compasses tested as they defend their daughter, while struggling to understand why she is a suspect. Told in an unusual three-part structure, A Nearly Normal Family asks the questions: How well do you know your own children? How far would you go to protect them?