Memoirs - Ordinary people - Extraordinary events

My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor was a 37-year-old, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist when she suffered a stroke in 1996.  At the time, her training helped her to identify what was happening to her — and helped her to see how valuable it was to her work as a scientist to have this otherwise horrific and traumatic event happen to her.

She observed that as she lost the right side of her brain and with it, the ability to walk, to talk, to remember her past — all the things we take for granted and that give us identity — she also experienced a tremendous sense of calm and tranquillity.  She thinks that the cognitive work of our brains create sometimes painfully distracting "chatter."

As she struggled over the following eight years to regain her lost abilities, using her knowledge of the brain’s functions and capacities (and the devotion of her dedicated, spirited mother) she worked to retain that sense of peace her stroke gave her.  In this memoir, she uses her own hard-won experience to argue that feelings of peace and calm are accessible to all of us, at all times.

Chosen Forever:  A Memoir by Susan Richards

Richards writes about the love that little girls everywhere can identify with:  the love of a horse.  Richards adopted a "rescue" horse and, as shes write in Chosen Forever, that single act changed her life in so many ways.  Her horse, Lay Me Down, helped her heal old psychic wounds, and their relationship became the subject of this memoir.  Richards explains that publishing her own book had been a lifelong dream and, amazingly and coincidentally, at the second reading to promote her book, she met her now-husband — someone who now re-entered her life, this time to stay.

The Geography of Love:  A Memoir by Glenda Burgess

Glenda Burgess returned to the United States after working overseas for several years at the age of 30.  Ready to start a family, she fell in love with a wonderful man with a shocking past.  What she wasn’t prepared for was his baggage:  he was a widower twice over and the chief suspect in the death of his second wife.  Despite her fears and doubts, she made a wonderful new life with this man only to be shocked when, after 15 years of marriage and two kids,  he was diagnosed with cancer.  Burgess explains that she began this memoir as a diary in which she attempted to process this enormous trauma: their struggle with his cancer, and her loss of her mother, also to cancer, shortly thereafter.

Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

This well-known memoir, first published in 1994, documents Grealy’s difficult coming-of-age, as she faced adolescence permanently disfigured by surgery to remove a tumor.  Grealy wrote, "I spent five years of my life being treated for cancern, but since then I’ve spent fifteen years being treated for nothing other than looking different from everyone else.  It was the pain from that, from feeling ugly, that I always viewed as the great tragedy of my life.  The fact that I had cancer seemed minor in comparison."  Grealy, an award-winning poet, was born in Ireland in 1963 and died in New York in 2002.  This edition is accompanied by an afterwoord by Ann Patchett, her friend.

Accidentally on Purpose: A One-Night Stand, My Unplanned Parenthood, and Loving the Best Mistake I Ever Made by Mary Pols

In this memoir journalist Mary Pols tells her own story, one of unplanned pregnancy, at the age of 39, as a result of a liaison with a young man who was then unemployed and ten years her junior.  Pols, having always feared and rejected the prospect of raising a child alone, was surprised how happy she became with her decision to keep her baby.   As she wrote in her blog on Amazon.com, she decided to document her own experience because she discovered during her pregnancy that there weren’t many books about pregnancy written for single mothers.