Where is your nonfiction section please.
Novelist Matt Haig's two short but powerful books cover his struggles and coping methods for mental illness -- namely depression, in Reasons to Stay Alive, and anxiety in Notes on a Nervous Planet. They both read blog-like -- sometimes confessional, sometimes lists, here focusing on a brighter side and elsewhere acknowledging the depths these illnesses... Continue Reading →
Book review: I'm Telling the Truth but I'm Lying, by Bassey Ikpi (Amazon / Book Depository) It's difficult to distinguish which lies from my childhood are my own and which belong to my family. Which lies I told myself to close the gaps in my brain and which were told to me to silence my... Continue Reading →
Book review: Midnight Chicken, by Ella Risbridger (Amazon / Book Depository) There is a German word, kummerspeck, that translates literally as 'grief-bacon,' and metaphorically as 'comfort eating'. This book is the grief-bacon book...This is the book I wanted to read when I was sad, but it's also a book for good days. I'm not going... Continue Reading →
Book review: The Light in the Dark, by Horatio Clare (Amazon / Book Depository) The struggle is intensifying. It is like being sealed into a grey snowball which keeps gathering defeats. However much I wash, I seem to smell of dirty winter trains and exhaust... Winter is a miser at the moment, giving nothing but... Continue Reading →
Book review: Bluets, by Maggie Nelson (Amazon / Book Depository) Last night I wept in a way I haven’t wept for some time. I wept until I aged myself. I watched it happen in the mirror. I watched the lines arrive around my eyes like engraved sunbursts; it was like watching flowers open in time-lapse... Continue Reading →
Book review: Journal of a Solitude, by May Sarton (Amazon / Book Depository) I am way outside somewhere in the wilderness. And it has been a long time of being in the wilderness. Writer May Sarton retreated to a cottage in New Hampshire for one year, where she holed up and wrote and confronted the seasons, both of the... Continue Reading →
Book review: What Made Maddy Run, by Kate Fagan espnW columnist Kate Fagan wrote a highly-praised and publicized article, "Split Image" about the 2014 suicide of Madison Holleran, a brilliantly promising, Ivy League student athlete. The article explored how and why this talented, successful, ambitious, and vivacious teenager attending the University of Pennsylvania as a track star... Continue Reading →
Book review: This Close to Happy, by Daphne Merkin Writer and literary critic Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for the New Yorker, has suffered lifelong depression. She's been trying to write a memoir about her illness and attempts to cure, or at least contain, it for more than a decade. It was finally published in February.... Continue Reading →
