Others: Positive The author explores her coming-of-age years and beyond in a rural town in Indiana, where, always feeling like an outsider, she experienced some of the most traumatic events of her life. Palm grew up in an Demotte, Indiana where every year the Kankakee River flooded and returned to its old course while the residents sandbagged their homes against the rising water. From her bedroom window she watched the neighbor boy and loved him in secret, but felt escape was a continually receding hope. Now Palm finds herself drawn back, like the river, to her origins. And it means visiting the prison where the boy that she loved is serving a life sentence for a brutal murder.
Genres: biography
Lists: …
Maxine Beneba Clarke
2016 · 259 pages · 3 reviews
Others: PositiveSweltering heat. Three bedroom blonde-brick. Family of five. Beat-up Ford Falcon. Vegemite on toast. Maxine Beneba Clarke's life is just like all the other Aussie kids on her street. Except for this one, glaring, inescapably obvious thing. From one of Australia's most exciting writers, and the author of the multi-award-winning FOREIGN SOIL, comes THE HATE RACE: a powerful, funny, and at times devastating memoir about growing up black in white middle-class Australia.
What made the match, strongest first
Rebekah Taussig
2020 · 256 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive"From disability advocate with a PhD in disability studies and creative nonfiction, and creator of the Instagram account @sitting_pretty, an essay collection based on a lifetime of experiences in a paralyzed body, tackling themes of identity, accessibility, bodies, and representation"-- Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous, inspirational, or angelic. She longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling. Here she writes about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn't fit. Taussig reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life. She shows how disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. -- adapted from jacket
What made the match, strongest first
Robin Wall Kimmerer
2013 · 400 pages · 8 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveAs a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return.
What made the match, strongest first
Catherine Cho
2020 · 248 pages · 4 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveWhat made the match, strongest first
Jesmyn Ward
2013 · 272 pages · 3 reviews
Others: Overwhelmingly positiveIn five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life to drugs, accidents, suicide, and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly black men. But why? As she began to write about living through all the dying, Jesmyn realized the truth -- and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle.
What made the match, strongest first
Mary Laura Philpott
2019 · 288 pages · 1 review
Others: Positive"Mary Laura Philpott thought she'd cracked the code: Always be right, and you'll always be happy. But once she'd completed her life's to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies--check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She'd done everything "right," but she felt all wrong. What's the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart. She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don't happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and advises that if you're going to faint, you should get low to the ground first. Most of all, Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don't have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you're not, and where you belong. Who among us isn't trying to do that? Like a pep talk from a sister, I Miss You When I Blink is the funny, poignant, and deeply affecting book you'll want to share with all your friends, as you learn what Philpott has figured out along the way: that multiple things can be true of us at once--and that sometimes doing things wrong is the way to do life right"--
What made the match, strongest first
Loved iti absolutely loved it and i found all the examinations of where her life and his life could have gone if things had been different really beautiful and i found this just a really wonderful portrait of a place and a person and what they could have been
