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Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding
Jessie Sholl · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorComing Clean
Kimberly Rae Miller · 272 pages
Swallow the Ocean: A Memoir
Laura M. Flynn
When Laura Flynn was a little girl, her beautiful, dynamic mother, Sally, was the center of her imagination. It wasn’t long, however, before Sally’s fun-loving side slowly and methodically became absorbed by madness. As Laura’s parents divorced and her father struggled to gain custody, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest while Laura and her sisters united in flights of fancy of the sort their moth
Lucky Me: My Life With--and Without--My Mom, Shirley MacLaine
Sachi Parker · 352 pages
Shirley MacLaine's only child shares shocking stories from her out-of-this-world childhood with the famously eccentric and award-winning actress.
Gypsy: Memoirs of America's Most Celebrated Stripper
Gypsy Rose Lee · 350 pages
The memoir, which Gypsy began as a series of pieces for The New Yorker, contains photographs and newspaper clippings from her personal scrapbooks and an afterword by her son, Erik Lee Preminger. At turns touching and hilarious, Gypsy describes her childhood trouping across 1920s America through her rise to stardom as The Queen of Burlesque in 1930s New York—where gin came in bathtubs, gangsters we
Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter's Memoir
Terry Helwig
"Forced by her mother's instability to care for her five siblings, Helwig crafts a moving story of a mother she loved and struggled to understand"--
Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: a Memoir
Melissa Francis · 294 pages
Mess: One Man's Struggle to Clean Up His House and His Act
Barry Yourgrau · 256 pages
The author draws on his experiences as both a hoarder and an investigator to profile subjects ranging from professional decluttering services and anti-hoarding therapy to the brain science behind hoarding and the way clutter affects relationships.
Wild Game: My Mother, Her Secret, and Me – A Gripping Memoir of Complicated Family Relationships
Adrienne Brodeur · 272 pages
Chanel Bonfire
Wendy Lawless · 295 pages
"Wendy Lawless' stunning memoir of resilience in the face of an unstable alcoholic and suicidal mother"--
A Girl from Yamhill
Beverly Cleary · 279 pages
Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.
With or Without You
Domenica Ruta · 210 pages
The author grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, a working-class, unforgiving town north of Boston where in the 17th century women were hanged as witches, in a trash-filled house on a dead-end road surrounded by a river and a salt marsh. Her mother, Kathi, a notorious local figure, was a drug addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare and riches. And yet she managed, despite the cha
Things I've Been Silent About: Memories
Azar Nafisi · 336 pages
I started making a list in my diary entitled "Things I Have Been Silent About." Under it I wrote: "Falling in Love in Tehran. Going to Parties in Tehran. Watching the Marx Brothers in Tehran. Reading Lolita in Tehran." I wrote about repressive laws and executions, about public and political abominations. Eventually I drifted into writing about private betrayals, implicating myself and those close
Running with Scissors
Augusten Burroughs · 320 pages
"Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian in perfect squalor. The doctor's bizarre family, a few patients, and a pedophile living in the backyard
Wishful Drinking
Carrie Fisher · 163 pages
Fisher comes clean (well, sort of) with the crazy truth that is her life, in her first-ever memoir.
Burn Down the Ground: A Memoir
Kambri Crews · 334 pages
In this memoir, a daughter looks back on her unconventional childhood with deaf parents in rural Texas while trying to reconcile it to her present life, one in which her father is serving a twenty-year sentence in a maximum-security prison. As a child, she wished that she had been born deaf so that she, too, could fully belong to the tight-knit deaf community that embraced her parents. Her beautif
Year of No Clutter
Eve O. Schaub · 290 pages
The author explores the hoarding phenomenon as reflected by such cultural examples as Hoarders and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up while sharing the personal story of how she organized a single room in her house that had been overtaken by psychological clutter.
Mommie Dearest
Christina Crawford · 294 pages
Mommie Dearest (1981) Based on the book about Joan Crawford, one of the great Hollywood actresses of our time, written by her adopted daughter Christina Crawford. Joan decides to adopt children of her own to fill a void in her life. Yet, her problems with alcohol, men, and the pressures of show business get in the way of her personal life, turning her into a mentally abusive wreck seen through
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages
Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.
Her Last Death
Susanna Sonnenberg · 288 pages
The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life
Amy Tan · 398 pages
Born into a family who believed in fate, Amy Tan has always looked for alternative ways to make sense of the world. And now, in The Opposite of Fate, her first book of non-fiction she shares her thoughts on how she escaped the expectations and curses of her past, and created her own destiny.
The End of Eve
Ariel Gore · 239 pages
At age 39, Ariel Gore has everything she's always wanted: a successful writing career, a long-term partnership, a beautiful if tiny home, a daughter in college and a son in preschool. But life's happy endings don't always last. If it's not one thing, after all, it's your mother. Her name is Eve. Her epic temper tantrums have already gotten her banned from three cab companies in Portland. And s
Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood
Charlotte Silver · 258 pages
Recounts the author's childhood in her mother's Harvard Square restaurant at the side of a rotating cast of eccentric staff members and her indomitable mother, describing how she grew into an understanding of the sacrifices her mother made to keep the family and restaurant afloat.
Shocked: My Mother, Schiaparelli, and Me
Patricia Volk · 293 pages
From the acclaimed author of Stuffed: an intimate, richly illustrated memoir that juxtaposes two fascinating lives -- the iconoclastic designer Elsa Schiaparelli and the author's own mother, Audrey Morgen Volk, an upper-middle-class New Yorker -- to explore how a girl fashions herself into a woman.