Dagbøker og memoarer

In 2001, David LeBrun travelled to Costa Rica to reconnect with an old friend. LeBrun, a young writer at the end of a string of dead-end jobs, planned on living cheaply for a winter while finishing the book he thought would make his career. (And, of course, drinking every night and getting stoned every day. And maybe stealing the occasional pill.) But once there, he was swept up in his friend’s self-destruction and ran out of money far sooner than expected.What followed was an epic odyssey across Central America and Mexico, hitchhiking with random strangers and sleeping anywhere he could as his mental health deteriorated and he tried to finish his book; along the way, he met down-and-out street buskers, a narcissistic thief, a Bible-thumper with multiple personalities, ex-convicts in a Narcotics Anonymous shelter—but, more importantly, himself.Delirium Vitae is a new classic, an On the Road for the twenty-first century. Alternately charming and harrowing, it looks beneath the romance of adventure in a foreign land to see what it’s really like to teeter between freedom and homelessness. (Because, let’s be honest, walking thirty-six kilometers on an empty stomach, or fending off a sweaty and shirtless truck driver, does sucks.) It’s a fantastic book that looks not only at the excitement of the open road, but at why we go there, and what we leave behind—and whether we can ever still come home.

"This book re-framed my entire adolescence. I highly recommend you read it." -- LING MAFrom the critically acclaimed author of Dead Girls ("stylish and inspired"--New York Times Book Review), a sharp, engrossing collection of essays that explore the strange career of popular feminism and steady creep of cults and cult-think into our daily lives.In seven stunning original essays, Alice Bolin turns her gaze to the myriad ways femininity is remixed and reconstructed by the pop culture of the computer age. The unlikely, often insidious forces that drive our popular obsessions are brilliantly cataloged, contextualized, and questioned in a kaleidoscopic style imitating the internet itself.In "The Enumerated Woman," Bolin investigates how digital diet tracking apps have increasingly transformed our relationships to our bodies. Animal Crossing's soothing retail therapy is analyzed in "Real Time"--a surprisingly powerful portrait of late capitalism. And in the showstopping "Foundering," Bolin dissects our buy-in and complicity with mythmaking around iconic founders, from the hubristic fall of Silicon Valley titans, to Enron, Hamilton, and the USA.For readers of Trick Mirror and How to Do Nothing, Culture Creep is a swirl of nostalgia and visions of the future, questioning why, in the face of seismic cultural, political, and technological shifts as disruptive as the internet, we cling to the icons and ideals of the past. Written with her signature blend of the personal and sharply analytical, each of these keen-eyed essays ask us to reckon with our own participation in all manner of popular cults of being, and cults of believing.

Maureen's memoir is a story of migration, family tragedy, resilience, humour and finding peace and fulfilment in the natural world. The eldest of four children from a working class family living in a sleepy corner of South Wales, she experiences the death of her mother and the shock of life with a new stepmother, who was emotionally ill-equipped to deal with four grieving children. The family of ten children travel to Australia to follow her father's dream of living in Paradise, and Maureen writes with candour about her difficult childhood and adolescence, as well as life in Wales and her new home, as she grows up, marries and eventually takes charge of her own life.

'In my life, I have had three names. First I was Vic, then I was Gamal and then I became G. It took a long time before I was comfortable just being me.'Brought up as Vic with a white family in the rural suburbs of Kent, he was the only Black boy in his home and his town.Until one day he is collected by his Nigerian father, when he became Gamal, a Muslim and a boy who was now required to assimilate to entirely new world at the diverse heart of London. Eventually, he becomes G, the UK's first openly gay Black police officer, whose story was made into a BAFTA award winning documentary, The Black Cop.

Charles Ricketts wrote this account of his close friendship with Oscar Wilde, partly as an imagined conversation with a fictitious French writer. Facsimile with afterword.

A heartfelt and hilarious collection of essays from the comedian and entertainer known for voicing Olaf in the phenomenon Disney franchise of Frozen, and for his award-winning turn as Elder Cunningham in the Broadway smash hit The Book of Mormon.

“The Motherload is for all the women who wish someone had told them the truth about motherhood. Honest, unapologetic, and brutally funny…it’s about developing the strength to care for yourself and, thereby, learning to care for another.” —Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter An intimately honest memoir about motherhood that dares to ask, what happens when “what to expect when you’re expecting” turns out to be months of rage, anguish, brain fog, and a total surrender of sex, career, and identity.“The kid was objectively a tiny worm, even worse, a worm with my nose.” Welcome to Sarah Hoover’s unflinching take on motherhood and its expectations in which the beatific narrative women have been fed—one of immediate connection to your child followed by a joyful path of maternal discovery—turns out to be not quite true. In The Motherload, Hoover provides a candid, funny, and sobering look at the journey women undertake as expectant mothers and wives from the early days of pregnancy through labor and beyond. Like most of us, Sarah Hoover grew up imagining a certain life for herself—career, love, marriage, children—and when Hoover moved from Indiana to New York City to study art history, the life she’d imagined began falling into place. She got her degree, landed a job in a gallery, made friends, and went on some exceptionally bad dates. She also met interesting artists, one of whom became her future husband (a whirlwind romance, theirs, exciting even with its imperfections). But when Hoover got pregnant, the life she imagined began to unravel. She felt like an imposter in her own body. She grew distant from her friends and husband. She suffered from anxiety, fear, guilt, and shame. She also experienced trauma at the hands of one of her doctors—a stark trigger. And eventually, when her son was born, there was no… joy. Instead, she felt “disoriented, lonely, and like none of my clothes fit.” Why was she seeing and hearing things that weren’t there? Why was she so angry and miserable when she had everything she thought she wanted? Why was the life she’d built falling apart? It took her months to discover that she was suffering from severe postpartum depression. And it took even longer to trace all the threads that came to inform her experience. At its core, The Motherload is about learning to forgive yourself for not being what you’ve been told you must be and for not loving the way you’ve been told you should. It’s about the uniquely female experience of constantly grappling with expectation versus reality, no matter your circumstance, and a rejection of the cultural idea of the mother as a perfect being. It is a moving, exciting, roller coaster ride, and a propulsive addition to the canon of women’s literature.

Billion-Dollar Visionary to Heartbroken Survivor: Loren Ridinger’s Untold Story of Love, Loss, and Finding Strength to Thrive Again

A Zero Hero's Guide to Self-Acceptance and Personal Empowerment. In this inspirational cross between self-help and memoir, Chad Michael Hardy chronicles his journey from a strict Mormon upbringing to self-acceptance and true authenticity.

How would you feel on waking at just past midnight to witness an enormous, illuminated cloud descending into your bedroom accompanied by an entourage of stars? At the same time, you are being bombarded with biblical manifestations and visions all pointing to Christ, and you have never so much as read a Bible before! But now you must and have been told by vision to write a book about it.This is a true testimony of an extraordinary happening, to a very ordinary woman, told in detail. Author Christine Jones swears by her account as absolute truth. A book for everyone, written for non-believers as well as the religious, it is an encounter with the unknown that may make you question your understanding of who we are and what we are doing here."He will come as a thief in the night"- said the apostle Peter (2 Peter 3:10). So, was this a secret visit by Jesus to warn us of his return?

A warm, sharply written memoir about embracing one's truest self in a world that demands gender fit in neat boxes.

The story of bringing up a wonderful boy called Mac. Tragically, Mac was killed in a motorbike accident just a few months after his sixteenth birthday. This is a celebration of his life, and the enduring love he inspired.

While there was terrorist-related activity happening somewhere in Northern Ireland daily, Belfast bore the brunt of it, and the two-mile stretch of road between Willie's home and the school had more than its share. He travelled that corridor of death to and from school every day. In school, he was prepared to put his life on the line protecting the rights of disaffected young people. He tried to keep the older boys out of the arms of the IRA, who would recruit them into the Fianna (Junior IRA), and out of reach of the security forces who would arrest them for petty crimes and then release them on condition that they became informers. He was ready to protect them against all comers. He walked the middle ground, neither on one side nor the other. The police and the soldiers were professionals. They could look after themselves. He did not support the IRA, nor take orders from them, nor allow himself to be used by them. He saw his role as protecting the young people in his care. He was walking on quicksand, knowing that if he put a foot wrong, he could vanish without a trace.

A unique collection of unpublished letters from the climbing legend George Mallory to his family, revealing his innermost thoughts about people, places and mountains.

An astonishing, intimate and powerful memoir by the author of Richard and Judy Book Club pick SugarThis is necessary work. This is love work. This is legacy literature about me and mine born into a world run by them and theirs.On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died. She was in a car crash on the motorway turnoff to Detroit. For a few minutes, she was clinically dead. From the moment of her resuscitation, we follow a remarkable life, all the way up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar.In 80s Brooklyn, growing up in terror of her alcoholic father, young Bernice loses herself in books, finding solace in summer trips to her aunt's home in Barbados and escaping to boarding school. But it's not until she reads Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, stories about 'messy, beautiful, joyful Black people' so reminiscent of her loved ones, that she sees herself within their pages.Bernice's family story begins in Sandersville, Georgia, with freedwoman Louisa Vicey Wilson in 1870. Her descendants survived Reconstruction, Jim Crow, joined the 'great migration', cried when Dr King was assassinated during The Civil Rights Movement. Wisdom, secrets, and fierce love are passed down through generations of women like Lou's handmade quilt.Tracing her roots gives Bernice the strength to write her own story, liberating herself from generational trauma while honouring her ancestors. A memoir of many threads, Firstborn Girls is an extraordinarily moving account of a life shaped both by family history and a drive to be something more.

For fans of survival memoirs comes a story of surviving the unthinkable and emerging with a powerful story in resilience.

Perfect for any Oasis fanOut of all the bitter feuds in music history, one of the fiercest is between two brothers in the same band: Liam and Noel Gallagher. Now, Bruno Vincent has gained exclusive access to their secret diaries. From the age of two, when they're screaming over each other's nursery rhymes to fifty two, when Liam wants to throw a telly out the window but it's fixed to the wall, the windows are unbreakable PVC with safety latches and he's got a bad back.

'I've still got the diaries somewhere, scruffy from stuffing them in my handbag and covered with something just short of scribble. Five or six diaries. What was happening was earth-changing. I felt compelled to record it as faithfully as I could...'Linda ApplebyDuring the 1990s, Linda Appleby, a brilliant university academic, kept a journal that combined a sharp sense of what was happening in - and in some ways, to - the world with an unintentional timeline of her own mental breakdown, which culminated in a stay at Cambridge's Fulbourn Hospital in the early 2000s. Current events from the period - the long war in the former Yugoslavia, the hostages in Lebanon, the Good Friday Agreement, the rise of Tony Blair - are intertwined with Linda's professional, domestic and romantic concerns. The result is an honest and unapologetic record of a keen mind gradually broken by a combination of external and internal pressures.Through it all, Linda's care for her children, her strong religious faith - which, though Christian, extends to a more than passing interest in both Muslim and Hindu beliefs - and academic grounding in philosophy somehow saved her from total disaster, and the book ends with a few entries in the mid-2000s, when Linda, having left Fulbourn, had been able to make a new life for herself in Cambridge. A few of the poems she was writing at the time are included in the book.

From the legendary author Edmund White, a stunning, revelatory memoir of a lifetime of gay love and sex.