Shame Ate My Soul is Susan Walz’s personal story of rising above stigma, suicide attempts, addiction, and misdiagnosis, and eventually finding recovery. I’ve known Sue since the beginning of my blogging journey. The book opens with a heartbreaking conversation with 2 of her 3 children, as they tried to persuade her to accept help in …
My Bipolar Mind: Surviving the Chaos is by Samantha Steiner, who you may know from her blog My Bipolar Mind. This is her second book, and both are memoirs in the form of compiled blog posts. This book is based on 2018, and is laid out in chronological order. The book covers Samantha’s struggles with …
Book Review: My Bipolar Mind: Surviving the Chaos Read More »
Looking for a distraction while you’re self-isolating? The description of Reflections: My Mad Memoirs! by indie author Kristina Bryson assures readers that: If your life has been perfect then my memoirs will bore the pants off you. However, if you have been mentally battered and bruised by dysfunctional relationships, cursed by anxiety and panic attacks …
Spiders, Vampires and Jail Keys by Brooke O’Neill is a compelling story of one woman’s life with bipolar disorder. Like me, Brooke is a nurse. When she returned to work after her period of acute illness, she was able to have positive conversations self-disclosing to some of her patients who had bipolar disorder in addition …
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is a (mostly true) memoir by Jenny Lawson. This is her first book; I previously reviewed her second book, Furiously Happy. Jenny has a fabulously quirky sense of humour. The book is packed with plenty of wildlife—alive, taxidermied, and otherwise. The book starts off with a bang in the author’s …
I’ve seen other bloggers working on or publishing memoirs, and I decided a little while back that I wanted to do the same. I even started working on writing it. Except I’ve started wondering if I should reconsider. There’s a lot of work that would be involved in writing, publishing, and promoting a book. But …
Polishing the Facets of Life with Bipolar is a memoir by E.M. Sebree about learning to live with bipolar disorder. Like many people bipolar, she was first diagnosed with depression, which was triggered by sexual abuse. While she was still in high school she became manic, and she shares the psychotic symptoms she experienced and her …
Book Review: Polishing the Facets of Life with Bipolar Read More »
Bring Me To Light: Embracing my Bipolar and Social Anxiety by Eleanor Segall describes her journey with mental illness, from pre-diagnosis through her work on recovery. It’s written in clear, simple language, making it easy to understand for readers with no background knowledge of mental illness. She begins by talking about her Jewish heritage and …
Getting By: Understanding Lifelong Depression is a memoir by Jack Trelance that explores his experiences with depression. The author has lived with depression since his teens, and admits to planning his first suicide attempt at age 14. He describes his first suicide attempt at age 25, and afterwards he didn’t feel sadness but rather “a slow-burning …
In Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things, Jenny Lawson uses “furiously happy” as a weapon to counter mental illness, and intends to “destroy the goddamn universe with my irrational joy and I will spew forth pictures of clumsy kittens and baby puppies adopted by raccoons and MOTHERFUCKING NEWBORN LLAMAS DIPPED IN GLITTER AND THE …
