Trauma Memoir

By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as an award-winning radio producer at This American Life and a loving boyfriend. But behind her office door, she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk every morning. After years of questioning what was wrong with herself, she was diagnosed with complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years.

First, I Believe You is an astonishing memoir of resilience and recovery from severe childhood trauma she had no memory of. Terrifying flashbacks haunted her for decades despite an affluent, advantaged childhood, resulting in severe depression, food addiction, anxiety, and nightmares.

Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife... but as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead - and the book she has written is equally extraordinary.

When her six-year-old daughter found her collapsed on the kitchen floor, Rachel had no idea how much her life was about to change. A brain scan revealed a dark shadowy mass, a huge abnormal growth of tissue that, whilst benign, was still growing and would surely kill her. It was too big to operate on. It needed to be "managed", and Rachel had, at best, two years to live. Refusing to accept the bleak prognosis, Rachel was determined to stay alive.

In this searing memoir, Congressman Jamie Raskin tells the story of the forty-five days at the start of 2021 that permanently changed his life—and his family’s—as he confronted the painful loss of his son to suicide, lived through the violent insurrection in our nation’s Capitol, and led the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable for inciting the political violence.

With poignant prose and a deeply authentic personal story, this harrowing account exposes the stark and painful realities of childhood abuse, painting a heart-breaking picture of the lasting pain and fear that it inflicts on its victims. Spanning 30 years, in this coming-of-age memoir, author Christina Vitagliano recounts in vivid detail the frightening nights spent when her father loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, along with the psychological toll that the relentless familial abuse took on her psyche.

Paul Scheer has entertained countless fans and podcast listeners with stories about the odd, wild, and absurd details of his life. Yet these tales have pointed to deeper, more difficult truths that the actor and comedian has kept to himself. Now, he is finally ready to share those truths for the first time—but, of course, with a healthy dose of humor.

Thailand, the 'Land of Smiles', is not an easy place to be a long-term expat, though some might argue it is the easiest. In this memoir and self-help story, a digital nomad, expatriate and economic refugee finds himself in a foreign land where he is forced to unlock the endless mysteries of Asia. Along the way, our wayward traveler begins to smile with genuine happiness for the first time in his life, and he soon realizes that if he had never journeyed to the ASEAN region, he might not still be alive to write these words. This 25,000-word travelogue, tour guidebook, and self help text can ...

October 18, 2019. Cristina Rivera Garza travels from her home in Texas to Mexico City, in search of an old, unresolved criminal file. “My name is Cristina Rivera Garza,” she writes in her request to the attorney general, “and I am writing to you as a relative of Liliana Rivera Garza, who was murdered on July 16, 1990.” It’s been twenty-nine years. Twenty-nine years, three months, and two days since Liliana was murdered by an abusive ex-boyfriend.

In this intimate memoir, renowned developer of Somatic Experiencing, Peter A. Levine—the man who changed the way psychologists, doctors, and healers understand and treat the wounds of trauma and abuse—shares his personal journey to heal his own severe childhood trauma and offers profound insights into the evolution of his innovative healing method.

Caleb Carr has had special relationships with cats since he was a young boy in a turbulent household, famously peopled by the founding members of the Beat Generation, where his steadiest companions were the adopted cats that lived with him both in the city and the country. As an adult, he has had many close feline companions, with relationships that have outlasted most of his human ones. But only after building a three-story home in rural, upstate New York did he enter into the most extraordinary of all of his cat pairings: Masha, a Siberian Forest cat who had been abandoned as a kitten.

What if emotional abuse is so hidden that its effects remain unchallenged for decades, masquerading as personal failings? Believing Me is an emotionally gripping memoir that gives language to the hidden and ineffable nature of childhood trauma and how it can imprint on a person, resulting in fractured self-esteem, addictions, perfectionism, and a string of abusive relationships.

On a summer night in 1984, 19-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job at the University of California Police Department and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul chilling struggle she manages to escape and call 911. Police catch her assailant, she identifies him, and he is arrested. Fast forward 2014, 30 years after her assault. Why does the body remember what the mind tries so desperately to forget?

From a young age, Ali Rothrock fell head over heels in love with firefighting. But when she entered the fire service, she was ostracized by those who weren't willing to accept a girl into their ranks. In the years since, Ali has worked as a domestic violence and sexual assault counselor, an advocate for abused children, an inspirational speaker, and a crisis counselor for first responders. On her journey of recovery, she has collected other people's stories of resilience. After Trauma is a story of adversity, grit, defiance, choice, and hope.

On May 12, 2015, Amtrak 188 derailed outside of Philadelphia going 106 miles per hour. Geralyn Ritter was thrown from the train with such force that she sustained catastrophic injuries to her chest, her abdomen, and her pelvis. Found unconscious, unable to breathe, and suffering massive blood loss, she was not expected to survive. After enduring weeks in the ICU, dozens of surgeries over the following years, unremitting pain, PTSD, depression, and opioid dependence, Geralyn was faced with a daunting question: Beyond mere survival after trauma, where is the path back to joy?

Annie Liontas suffered multiple concussions in her thirties. In Sex with a Brain Injury, she writes about what it means to be one of the “walking wounded,” facing her fear, her rage, her physical suffering, and the effects of head trauma on her marriage and other relationships. Forced to reckon with her own queer mother’s battle with addiction, Liontas finds echoes in their pain. Liontas weaves history, philosophy, and personal accounts to interrogate and expand representations of mental health, ability, and disability—particularly in relation to women and the LGBT community.

Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is a gripping, intimate, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

As an award-winning stuntwoman, Kimberly Shannon Murphy was intimate with pain. For years, she propelled her body through dangerous spaces—medicating the trauma of her childhood sexual abuse with the adrenaline rush that came from pushing herself to the absolute limit. But as Kimberly learned, no matter how much you suppress your past, it always catches up with you.

October 2021. Whitney Lyn Allen’s happiness came screeching to a standstill. Stunned by her husband Ryan's rare allergic reaction to a bee sting, the 35-year-old felt hopeless after Ryan succumbed to irreversible brain damage. With his unexpected death leaving a massive gap in their close-knit family, she feared she would never be enough to raise their two young boys.

At the start of this remarkable story of recovery, healing, and redemption, Ginger Gaffney answers a call to help retrain the troubled horses at an alternative prison ranch in New Mexico, a facility run entirely by the prisoners. The horses are scavenging through the dumpsters, kicking and running down the residents when they bring the trash out after meals. One horse is severely injured. The horses and residents arrive at the ranch broken in one way or many: the horses are defensive and terrified, while the residents, some battling addictions, are emotionally and physically shattered.