18 books like Borrowed Time
Days of grace
A remarkable and inspiring memoir by a remarkable and inspiring human being: Arthur Ashe, embodiment of courage and grace in every aspect of his life, from his triumphs as a great tennis champion and his determined social activism to his ordeal in the face of death, a casualty of AIDS. As he brings us into his childhood in Richmond, Virginia, where he was born in 1943, where his mother died when…
Shares: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS, Patients, Personal narratives
Dancer from the Dance
One of the most important works of gay literature, this haunting, brilliant novel is a seriocomic remembrance of things past -- and still poignantly present. It depicts the adventures of Malone, a beautiful young man searching for love amid New York's emerging gay scene. From Manhattan's Everard Baths and after-hours discos to Fire Island's deserted parks and lavish orgies, Malone looks high and…
Shares: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS, Gay men, Psychology
Living in the Labyrinth/a Personal Journey Through the Maze of Alzheimers
Living In The Labyrinth is the story of how one woman found the strength and the courage to cope with a devastating disease that has afflicted five million Americans. Far from being an exercise in self-pity or a standard autobiography, this is an unflinching and ultimately uplifting look at a debilitating illness from the inside out. -- From publisher description.
Shares: Health, Patients, Biography & Memoir
Stick Figure
After happening upon the diary she kept when she was 11 years old, Gottlieb was moved to publish this chronicle of her struggle with anorexia nearly 20 years after she wrote it. In the late 1970s, she lived with her parents and brother in Beverly Hills, where Gottlieb's loneliness and concern about looking attractive to boys swiftly transformed into an obsession with dieting, although she had…
Shares: Health, Patients, Biography & Memoir
And the Band Played on
The blueprint of 20th century investigative journalism. Tracing the course of HIV/AIDS through society; from its earliest as then unknown incarnation, to the height of this 1980s hysteria – the death of Rock Hudson: Shilts's book should be in every High School's final academic examinations coursework reading list, as a compulsory item. An unregrettable read.
Shares: Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome, AIDS, Psychology, History
In the Dream House
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.
And…
Shares: LGBTQ biography and memoir, Gay, Biography & Memoir
Traveling Light
"Travel light and you can sing in the robber's face" was the best advice Summer Zwolenick ever received from her father, though she didn't recognize it at the time. Three years after the accident that ended her career as a ballerina, she is back in the familiar suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, teaching at a local high school. But it wasn't nostalgia that called Summer home. It was her need to spend…
Shares: AIDS, Patients, Gay men
Down Came the Rain
When Brooke Shields welcomed her newborn daughter, Rowan Francis, into the world, a crippling depression followed. In DOWN CAME THE RAIN, Brooke writes about the tribulations, depression, and, ultimately, the triumphs that happened before and after the birth. With a knowledgeable voice and a self-deprecating sense of humor, Brooke discusses her battle with postpartum depression, a disorder that…
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Autobiography of a Face
Lucy Grealy's ruthless self-examination, rich fantasy life, and great derring-do inform this powerful memoir about the premium we put on beauty and on a woman's face in particular. It took Lucy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood surgery left her jaw disfigured. As a…
Shares: Patients, Personal narratives, Psychology, Biography & Memoir
Recollections of an old soldier
As they were in those days, the full title of Capt David Perry's book is its own description:
Recollections of an old soldier. The life of Captain David Perry, a soldier of the French and revolutionary wars, containing many extraordinary occurrences relating to his own private history, and an account of some interesting events in the history of the times in which he lived, no-where else…
Shares: Personal narratives, Biography & Memoir, History
Rebel Girl
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERAn electric, searing memoir by the original rebel girl and legendary front woman of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre.Hey girlfriend I got a proposition goes something like this: Dare ya to do what you wantKathleen Hanna’s band Bikini Kill embodied the punk scene of the 90s, and today her personal yet feminist lyrics on anthems like “Rebel Girl” and “Double Dare Ya” are…
Shares: LGBTQ biography and memoir, Biography & Memoir
The Great Believers
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup: bringing an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDs epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, he finds his partner is infected, and…
Shares: AIDS, Gay men
Brain on fire
The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories…
Shares: Health, Patients, Biography & Memoir
My lobotomy
At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital--or ice pick--lobotomy.Abandoned by his family within a year of…
Shares: Patients, Personal narratives, Biography & Memoir
Just by Looking at Him
Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek.
After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing,…
Shares: Gay, Gay men
Box Hill
In, a vivid coming-of-age novel, a young man suddenly wakes up to his gay self—on his eighteenth birthday, when he receives the best gift ever: love and sex. In the woodsy cruising grounds of Box Hill, chubby Colin literally stumbles over glamorous Ray—ten years older, leather-clad, cool, handsome, a biker, and a top. (Colin, if largely unformed, is nevertheless decidedly a bottom.) Colin…
Shares: Gay, Gay men
Gender Queer
In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of…
Shares: LGBTQ biography and memoir, Biography & Memoir
Wonder
Wonder is a children's novel written by R. J. Palacio,[2] published on 14 February 2012.
R. J. Palacio wrote Wonder after an incident where her son noticed a girl with a severe facial difference and started to cry. Fearing he would react badly, Palacio attempted to remove her son from the situation so as not to upset the girl and her family but ended up worsening the situation. Natalie…
Shares: Health, Psychology