Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl PDF Author: Stacy Pershall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393080513
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
“An utterly unique journey down some of the mind’s more mysterious byways . . . ranges from the shocking to the simply lovely.”—Marya Hornbacher Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall’s journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl PDF Author: Stacy Pershall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393080513
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
“An utterly unique journey down some of the mind’s more mysterious byways . . . ranges from the shocking to the simply lovely.”—Marya Hornbacher Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall’s journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl PDF Author: Stacy Pershall
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393340791
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
After her 2001 suicide attempt, broadcast live on a Webcam, Pershall realized the need to heal her mind and body. She found a revolutionary cure, met a tattoo artist, and discovered the healing power of body modification.

Running with Scissors

Running with Scissors PDF Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1429902523
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 347

Get Book

Book Description
The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture! Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard shed completed the tableau. Here, there were no rules, there was no school. The Christmas tree stayed up until summer, and Valium was eaten like Pez. And when things got dull, there was always the vintage electroshock therapy machine under the stairs.... Running with Scissors is at turns foul and harrowing, compelling and maniacally funny. But above all, it chronicles an ordinary boy's survival under the most extraordinary circumstances.

Girl in Need of a Tourniquet

Girl in Need of a Tourniquet PDF Author: Merri Lisa Johnson
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458783677
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 238

Get Book

Book Description
An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquetis Merri Lisa Johnsons account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of ''bleeding out'' - unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed ''psycho girlfriend,'' she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point. In recognizing her struggle with borderline personality disorder, Johnson is ultimately able to seek help, embarking on a soul-searching healing process. It's a path that is painful, difficult, and at times heart-wrenching, but ultimately makes her more able to love and coexist in healthy relationships.

Out Loud

Out Loud PDF Author: Mark Morris
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735223084
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book

Book Description
From the most brilliant and audacious choreographer of our time, the exuberant tale of a young dancer’s rise to the pinnacle of the performing arts world, and the triumphs and perils of creating work on his own terms—and staying true to himself Before Mark Morris became “the most successful and influential choreographer alive” (The New York Times), he was a six year-old in Seattle cramming his feet into Tupperware glasses so that he could practice walking on pointe. Often the only boy in the dance studio, he was called a sissy, a term he wore like a badge of honor. He was unlike anyone else, deeply gifted and spirited. Moving to New York at nineteen, he arrived to one of the great booms of dance in America. Audiences in 1976 had the luxury of Merce Cunningham’s finest experiments with time and space, of Twyla Tharp’s virtuosity, and Lucinda Childs's genius. Morris was flat broke but found a group of likeminded artists that danced together, travelled together, slept together. No one wanted to break the spell or miss a thing, because “if you missed anything, you missed everything.” This collective, led by Morris’s fiercely original vision, became the famed Mark Morris Dance Group. Suddenly, Morris was making a fast ascent. Celebrated by The New Yorker’s critic as one of the great young talents, an androgynous beauty in the vein of Michelangelo’s David, he and his company had arrived. Collaborations with the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Yo-Yo Ma, Lou Harrison, and Howard Hodgkin followed. And so did controversy: from the circus of his tenure at La Monnaie in Belgium to his work on the biggest flop in Broadway history. But through the Reagan-Bush era, the worst of the AIDS epidemic, through rehearsal squabbles and backstage intrigues, Morris emerged as one of the great visionaries of modern dance, a force of nature with a dedication to beauty and a love of the body, an artist as joyful as he is provocative. Out Loud is the bighearted and outspoken story of a man as formidable on the page as he is on the boards. With unusual candor and disarming wit, Morris’s memoir captures the life of a performer who broke the mold, a brilliant maverick who found his home in the collective and liberating world of music and dance.

Between Jobs

Between Jobs PDF Author: W.R. Gingell
Publisher: W. R. Gingell
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book

Book Description
When you get up in the morning, the last thing you expect to see is a murdered guy hanging outside your window. Things like that tend to draw the attention of the local police, and when you’re squatting in your parents’ old house until you can afford to buy it, another thing you can’t afford is the attention of the cops. Oh yeah. Hi. My name is Pet. It’s not my real name, but it’s the only one you’re getting. Things like names are important these days. And it’s not so much that I’m Pet. I am a pet. A human pet: I belong to the two Behindkind fae and the pouty vampire who just moved into my house. It’s not weird, I promise—well, it is weird, yeah. But it’s not weird weird, you know?

Rat Girl

Rat Girl PDF Author: Kristin Hersh
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101459026
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Get Book

Book Description
"One of the 25 Greatest Rock Memoirs of All Time” --Rolling Stone Magazine (#8) “Sensitive and emotionally raw… it’s also wildly funny”--The New York Times Book Review A powerfully original memoir of pregnancy and mental illness by the legendary founder of the seminal rock band Throwing Muses, 'a magnificently charged union of Sylvia Plath and Patti Smith' - The Guardian Kristin Hersh was a preternaturally bright teenager, starting college at fifteen and with her band, Throwing Muses, playing rock clubs she was too young to frequent. By the age of seventeen she was living in her car, unable to sleep for the torment of strange songs swimming around her head - the songs for which she is now known. But just as her band was taking off, Hersh was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Rat Girl chronicles the unraveling of a young woman's personality, culminating in a suicide attempt; and then her arduous yet inspiring recovery, her unplanned pregnancy at the age of 19, and the birth of her first son. Playful, vivid, and wonderfully warm, this is a visceral and brave memoir by a truly original performer, told in a truly original voice.

Building a Life Worth Living

Building a Life Worth Living PDF Author: Marsha M. Linehan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812984994
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Get Book

Book Description
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.

My Salinger Year

My Salinger Year PDF Author: Joanna Rakoff
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307958019
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
A keenly observed and irresistibly funny memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing. Now a major motion picture starring Sigourney Weaver and Margaret Qualley After leaving graduate school to pursue her dream of becoming a poet, Joanna Rakoff takes a job as assistant to the storied literary agent for J. D. Salinger. Precariously balanced between poverty and glamour, she spends her days in a plush, wood-paneled office—where Dictaphones and typewriters still reign and agents doze after three-martini lunches—and then goes home to her threadbare Brooklyn apartment and her socialist boyfriend. Rakoff is tasked with processing Salinger’s voluminous fan mail, but as she reads the heart-wrenching letters from around the world, she becomes reluctant to send the agency’s form response and impulsively begins writing back. The results are both humorous and moving, as Rakoff, while acting as the great writer’s voice, begins to discover her own.

Unfollow

Unfollow PDF Author: Megan Phelps-Roper
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374715815
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
The activist and TED speaker Megan Phelps-Roper reveals her life growing up in the most hated family in America At the age of five, Megan Phelps-Roper began protesting homosexuality and other alleged vices alongside fellow members of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. Founded by her grandfather and consisting almost entirely of her extended family, the tiny group would gain worldwide notoriety for its pickets at military funerals and celebrations of death and tragedy. As Phelps-Roper grew up, she saw that church members were close companions and accomplished debaters, applying the logic of predestination and the language of the King James Bible to everyday life with aplomb—which, as the church’s Twitter spokeswoman, she learned to do with great skill. Soon, however, dialogue on Twitter caused her to begin doubting the church’s leaders and message: If humans were sinful and fallible, how could the church itself be so confident about its beliefs? As she digitally jousted with critics, she started to wonder if sometimes they had a point—and then she began exchanging messages with a man who would help change her life. A gripping memoir of escaping extremism and falling in love, Unfollow relates Phelps-Roper’s moral awakening, her departure from the church, and how she exchanged the absolutes she grew up with for new forms of warmth and community. Rich with suspense and thoughtful reflection, Phelps-Roper’s life story exposes the dangers of black-and-white thinking and the need for true humility in a time of angry polarization.