Friday Finds | Memoirs | Stories Unfolded

This Friday I want to share some new memoirs I’ve added to my TBR list. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres mostly because I’m writing one myself and because they are stories about real people and real experiences.

TITLE: Stir

AUTHOR: Jessica Fechtor

PUBLISHER: Penguin Group Avery

RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2015

GENRE: Memoir

An exquisite memoir about how food connects us to ourselves, our lives, and each other.

At 28, Jessica Fechtor was happily immersed in graduate school and her young marriage, and thinking about starting a family. Then one day, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. She nearly died. She lost her sense of smell, the sight in her left eye, and was forced to the sidelines of the life she loved.

Jessica’s journey to recovery began in the kitchen as soon as she was able to stand at the stovetop and stir. There, she drew strength from the restorative power of cooking and baking. Written with intelligence, humor, and warmth, Stir is a heartfelt examination of what it means to nourish and be nourished.”

Woven throughout the narrative are 27 recipes for dishes that comfort and delight. For readers of M.F.K.Fisher, Molly Wizenberg, and Tamar Adler, as well as Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor, and Susannah Cahalan, Stir is sure to inspire, and send you straight to the kitchen. (Description found on NetGalley.com)

TITLE: Below The Water Line

AUTHOR: Lisa Karlin

PUBLISHER: Centennial Publishers

RELEASE DATE: July 20, 2015

GENRE: Memoir

BUY LINKS: AMAZON

In this intensely personal and moving memoir, Lisa Karlin provides a gripping account of her family’s hurricane evacuation experiences and all that followed in the decade after Hurricane Katrina. Her story begins in August 2005, when Lisa, her husband, thirteen-year-old daughter, eleven-year-old son, and two dogs evacuated New Orleans for what they thought would be a two-day “hurrication.”

Her day-by-day account of the weeks that follow vividly chronicles the unprecedented displacement of thousands of Americans, and on a personal level, describes how her family makes the trifecta of major life decisions: where to live, where to work, and where to enroll their children in school. With unflinching candor, Lisa Karlin provides a first-hand commentary on how everyday life has been impacted by Katrina’s aftermath and how, a decade later, there are still lingering effects of one of the most devastating events in American history. (Description found on NetGalley.com)

TITLE: The Boy In The Mirror

AUTHOR: Tom Preston

PUBLISHER: Inpress Books – Valley Press

RELEASE DATE: September 1, 2015

GENRE: Memoir

“When you turn on the bathroom light your reflection stares numbly back at you, gormless and vacant. You blink. Your eyes are yellow, as is your skin. You’ve lost weight: your pyjamas hang off your arms like the wilting leaves of a dying plant.
You stare at yourself in the mirror for several surreal minutes. The thing before you is not you. But it is.”

In January 2011, aged 21, Tom Preston was diagnosed with stage 4 advanced aggressive lymphoma. His chances of survival were optimistically placed at around 40%. This short, autobiographical work tells the story of the fight in the months that followed – but this is no ordinary cancer memoir.

The Boy in the Mirror is written in the second person – so the events in this book are happening to you, the reader, living through the hope, love, suffering, death and black comedy encountered by Tom during the battle to save himself. (Description found on NetGalley.com)

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