At age 20, Gabrielle Pelicci returned from her modeling career in NYC to her hometown of Scranton, PA where her mother suddenly passed away. At her mother's funeral, Gabrielle had a spiritual experience that left her reeling and set her on a heroine's journey to learn about both the scientific and mystical explanations of human consciousness. Gabrielle studied a dozen healing practices, from alternative medicine to yoga, including travel immersions in Europe, Asia and Africa. Over the next 10 years, her complex PTSD symptoms persisted. Little by little, Gabrielle's childhood experiences of domestic violence, and her parents' mental illnesses and addictions are revealed. At age 30, still grieving the loss of her mother and disgusted with the fact that she can't overcome her anxiety and depression, Gabrielle attempted to take her own life. Luckily, she survived and continued on her journey of healing and trauma recovery, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a professor of Holistic Medicine, with a dissertation on Women Healers. In this deeply personal and vulnerable account, Gabrielle reveals how childhood trauma impacts our physical and mental health - as well as our adult relationships. She explores how you are only as sick as your secrets and telling your story is the medicine that can save your life. All This Healing is Killing Me is a brave narrative that reckons with the hold of the past over the present, the mind over the body and celebrates one woman's ability to write herself a happy ending.

Jason Schmidt wasn't surprised when he came home one day during his junior year of high school and found his father, Mark, crawling around in a giant pool of blood. Things like that had been happening a lot since Mark had been diagnosed with HIV, three years earlier. Jason's life with Mark was full of secrets—about drugs, crime, and sex. If the straights—people with normal lives—ever found out any of those secrets, the police would come. Jason's home would be torn apart. So the rule, since Jason had been in preschool, was never to tell the straights anything. A List of Things That Didn't Kill Me is a funny, disturbing memoir full of brutal insights and unexpected wit that explores the question: How do you find your moral center in a world that doesn't seem to have one?

This volume offers a rigorous yet accessible overview of the key questions and intersectional approaches pertaining to American literature and the body. The chapters have been written in an accessible style, making them useful for undergraduates as well as for more experienced researchers.

'Gloriously funny . . . unfailingly entertaining' – Mail on Sunday 'What worlds she's seen, what a life she's had – at long last, the memoirs of the fearless, witty, indomitable Ann Leslie' – Deborah Moggach She has been shot at by Bosnian snipers, been pursued by Robert Mugabe’s notorious secret police, filed from the North Korean border, propositioned by both Salvador Dali and David Niven and been driven maniacally through London by Steve McQueen. But Ann Leslie’s life is every bit as remarkable as her career. A daughter of the Raj, she was born in India and the strongest influence on her early life was an illiterate Pashtun bearer, who saved her life during Partition. Her mother, a great beauty, was indifferent to her eldest daughter and she was sent to the first of a series of boarding-schools aged just four, eventually winning a scholarship to Oxford. After graduating she began her career at the Manchester office of the Daily Express, where the news editor took an instant dislike to her - she was a southerner, educated and – worst of all – female. Despite his best efforts she was soon given her own column. Then, after a stint covering show business she was appointed Foreign Correspondent of the Daily Mail, an association that endures today, almost forty years later, and one which finally allowed her real talent to shine through. Killing My Own Snakes is a witty, incident-filled account of an extraordinary life, a fascinating self-portrait of one the most influential journalists of our time.

Book Delisted

In his memoir All-American Boy, Scott Peck poignantly relives the pain and isolation of growing up gay in a Christian Southern community. In this touching memoir, Peck finds a way through the pain from his childhood, growing up gay without acceptance in the Christian South, and through this emotional journey he learns to heal from those wounds. He doesn't hold back while reliving the time when his father, Marine Col. Fred Peck, testified before Congress that there was no place for his gay son in the military. This is merely one of the many big moments shaping the book and the author's life, on top of the religious influences that surrounded him since he was born. This is a "survivor's tale that in its universal appeal brings to mind the most compelling aspects of Gal and Shot in the Heart. Through the course of these scathing, inspiring, instructive pages, Scott Peck, writer and human being, grows into one hell of a terrific man" (Michael Dorris).

Winner of the Chautauqua Prize Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal “Uplifting... it’s about savoring the present, not allowing sadness to dominate and surrendering yourself to love, for better or worse.” —San Francisco Chronicle When she was just seventeen, independent and ambitious Elizabeth Scarboro fell in love with irreverent and irresistible Stephen. She knew he had cystic fibrosis, that he was expected to live only until the age of thirty or so, and that soon she’d have a choice to make. She could set out to travel, date, and lead the adventurous life she’d imagined, or she could be with Stephen, who came with an urgency of his own. In choosing him, Scarboro embraced another kind of adventure—simultaneously joyous and heartrending—staying with Stephen and building a life in the ten years they’d have together. The illness would be present in the background of their lives and then ever-more-insistently in the foreground. Beyond the illness, though, is a breathtaking love story. In crystalline prose, Scarboro describes the pulse of her relationship with Stephen with all its illuminating quirks. Like any young couple, they agonize about career choices, attempt ill-fated road trips, bargain about whether to adopt a puppy, and host one memorably disastrous Thanksgiving. They navigate the growing pains of their twenties alongside the twists and turns of life-threatening disease; if their telephone rings at midnight, the caller might be a heartbroken friend, or the hospital offering a new set of lungs. As time goes on and trouble looms, the dangers of Stephen’s illness consume her, just as they will consume readers who feel they have come to know this extraordinary couple. Scarboro tells her story of fierce love and its limitations with humor, grace, and remarkable bravery. My Foreign Cities is a portrait of a young couple approaching mortality with reckless abandon, gleefully outrunning it for as long as they can.

When veteran flight attendant Steven Slater told off his startled passengers and slid down the emergency escape slide of a JetBlue airplane on a sunny summer's day at New York's Kennedy Airport in 2010, he said goodbye to the world as he knew it. Overnight, Slater became a media sensation and working class hero. Now, for the first time, Slater writes in his own words about what really happened that fateful day at JFK and shares his experiences of the surreal whirlwind that is overnight celebrity. But behind the splashy headlines, Slater fought battles no one knew anything about. In Wingwalking, Slater shares his lifelong journey through bipolar disorder, suicidal idealization, and a powerful addiction that brought him to his knees. In Wingwalking, Slater recounts treasured memories of a privileged childhood as the son of an airline pilot and the gift of exotic travel his intrepid parents bestowed upon him growing up. He invites the reader into his younger years and arduous and painstaking process of self discovery as a gay man stifled by a small town and his great escape to the big city and a career as a flight attendant that spanned the globe with some of the world’s leading airlines. Sidelined by trauma and harrowing PTSD, Slater sought refuge in drugs and alcohol and found himself homeless on the streets of Los Angeles’ Skid Row, lost in virtual obscurity and hopelessness. Slater fell into an underworld of danger and violence, barely escaping with his life. He lost his mind and was locked away from society in a succession of hospitals and psych wards. Yet, Slater is a born survivor, and fought valiantly for his safety and his sanity, prevailing over both his abusers and a mental health system that rendered him voiceless and powerless. At times hilarious and sometimes heart-wrenching, Wingwalking introduces the reader to the man behind the myth. Slater writes with startling candor and brilliant authenticity about what many face, but few speak of. Ultimately, Wingwalking is a story of resilience and transcendence and offers the reader hope and encouragement. Slater’s story is a true testament to the human spirit.

Moments before the slaughter of orphans in Riga, a young Jewish woman snatches a half-Gentile boy and flees into the forests of Nazi-occupied Latvia where they spend four years dodging captivity. His faith in God and natural optimism carry him through the resulting trauma, but he must overcome his anger and shame when he is sent to America as an adolescent. Much more than a war story, "To No Man's Glory," is the story of desperation of a child who sacrifices his childhood to the terrors of surviving inhuman conditions. It is the faith and hope that dominates the human spirit if we will let it. It is a story that could take place in any time period; in any war...it just happens to take place during World War II, during the Holocaust. But it is mostly the story of a little boy who develops the strength to live under conditions that kill millions of others less fortunate.

In 1961, Michael Rockefeller, son of then-governor of New York State Nelson A. Rockefeller, mysteriously disappeared off the remote coast of southern New Guinea. Amid the glare of international public interest, the governor, along with his daughter Mary, Michael’s twin, set off on a futile search, only to return empty handed and empty hearted. What followed were Mary’s twenty-seven-year repression of her grief and an unconscious denial of her twin’s death, which haunted her relationships and controlled her life. In this startlingly frank and moving memoir, Mary R. Morgan struggles to claim an individual identity, which enables her to face Michael’s death and the huge loss it engendered. With remarkable honesty, she shares her spiritually evocative healing journey and her story of moving forward into a life of new beginnings and meaning, especially in her work with others who have lost a twin. “The sea change began one November day in 1961. I remember the moment before. A window in the corner of my parents’ living room drew my attention. A windblown branch from an azalea bush scratched the surface of the glass, making a discordant sound. My father stands out clearly, his figure powerful and solid next to the soft, down-pillowed sofa. By the window, my two brothers and I are clustered around my mother, wary, and watching him. It was barely two months since Father had separated from her. And just days before, he’d called a press conference, choosing to publicly expose his affair and his decision to remarry. Father held a yellow cablegram in his hand. Mike, my twin brother, was missing off the coast of New Guinea. Missing . . . The ‘s’ sound. Like a thin knife, it slipped deep inside me. No resistance, just a sharp, knowing pain and then shimmering silence.” —Adapted from Chapter One