Title: Lessons in Poetry: For a Wayward Child of Sad Eyes and Lonely Heart
Authors: Anita Garman and John Knowlton
Genre: Memoir
When her husband of 58 years dies, Anita is inconsolable at having lost her best friend, life companion, and soulmate. She slips in and out of periods of severe depression, struggling against her own grief and her terror that she may not be reunited with her husband in the afterlife.
With Angel’s Wings by Stephanie A. Collins
How do you review a memoir? It feels wrong to apply the same criteria I would apply to fiction. This isn’t a story someone has written to entertain the reader. This is someone’s life.
Book Title: Ollie Ollie In Come Free
Author: Anne Bernard Becker
Genre: Memoir
Ollie Ollie In Come Free is the product of an author’s lifelong struggle to deal with and process the traumatic events of her childhood, and to analyze the repercussions that it inevitably had on her as an adult. This memoir is a moving, emotional, and intimately personal tale of a family who had experienced more than its fair share of death. Specifically, it relates what it was like for Anne to grow up amidst the grief and turmoil, with the ever-present background of a rapidly changing and progressing world.
Straight out of the gate, the readers will know that Anne is not coping very well as an adult. She struggles in her role as a wife and as a mother as a result of never having dealt with the pain of losing first her sister, then her brother a couple of years later when Anne herself was turning six. Anne chooses to deal with this problem head on and subjects herself to psychoanalysis as therapy for her ongoing depression and recurring anxiety episodes.
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Title: Nowhere Else I Want to Be
Author: Carol D. Marsh
Genre: Nonfiction memoir
Carol Marsh has no idea what to expect when she founds Miriam’s House, a care home for homeless women living with AIDS in Washington, D.C. Growing up in a stable, loving family, she always felt a passion for helping others less fortunate than herself, and she believed her role as executive director at Miriam’s House would give her the opportunity to serve a group of women often shunned and neglected.
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