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Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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Educated: A Memoir

Tara Westover · 353 pages

Choose the good -- The midwife -- Cream shoes -- Apache women -- Honest dirt -- Shield and buckler -- The Lord will provide -- Tiny harlots -- Perfect in his generations -- Shield of feathers -- Instinct -- Fish eyes -- Silence in the churches -- My feet no longer touch Earth -- No more a child -- Disloyal man, disobedient heaven -- To keep it holy -- Blood and feathers -- In the beginning -- Reci

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseEstranged FamilyMemoir & Biography
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Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs

Elissa Wall, Lisa Pulitzer · 438 pages

In September 2007, a packed courtroom in St. George, Utah, sat hushed as Elissa Wall, the star witness against polygamous sect leader Warren Jeffs, gave captivating testimony of how Jeffs forced her to marry her first cousin at age fourteen. This harrowing and vivid account proved to be the most compelling evidence against Jeffs, showing the harsh realities of this closed community and the lengths

Domestic AbuseEstranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsMemoir & Biography
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The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls · 296 pages

A story about the early life of Jeannette Walls. The memoir is an exposing work about her early life and growing up on the run and often homeless. It presents a different perspective of life from all over the United States and the struggle a girl had to find normalcy as she grew into an adult.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseChild AbuseAutobiography
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Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History

Art Spiegelman · 296 pages

A story of a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe and his son, a cartoonist who tries to come to terms with his father's story and history itself.

Estranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsTragicMemoir & Biography
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Escape

Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer · 426 pages

The dramatic first-person account of life inside an ultra-fundamentalist American religious sect, and one woman's courageous flight to freedom with her eight children.When she was eighteen years old, Carolyn Jessop was coerced into an arranged marriage with a total stranger: a man thirty-two years her senior. Merril Jessop already had three wives. But arranged plural marriages were an integral par

Domestic AbuseAutobiographyEstranged FamilyMemoir & Biography
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Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 318 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseEstranged FamilyChild Abuse
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Spare

Prince Harry · 410 pages

BrothersToxic Family DynamicsEstranged FamilyAutobiography
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A Wolf at the Table

Augusten Burroughs · 242 pages

PREQUEL TO THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER RUNNING WITH SCISSORSFrom the author: 'My father doesn't feature much in Running with Scissors. And one of the reasons for this is because he didn't feature much in my life. But there's another reason, too: Our relationship was so complicated, so dark, so confusing and so big, that to tell the story would require a book. So finally, upon the death of my fath

Toxic Family DynamicsEstranged FamilyAutobiographyChild Abuse
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Angela's Ashes

Frank McCourt · 384 pages

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish im

Toxic Family DynamicsBrothersChild AbuseMemoir & Biography
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Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of an Unwanted Daughter

Adeline Yen Mah · 224 pages

A riveting memoir of a girl's painful coming-of-age in a wealthy Chinese family during the 1940s.A Chinese proverb says, "Falling leaves return to their roots." In Chinese Cinderella, Adeline Yen Mah returns to her roots to tell the story of her painful childhood and her ultimate triumph and courage in the face of despair. Adeline's affluent, powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother

Toxic Family DynamicsEstranged FamilyAutobiographyChild Abuse
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The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 274 pages

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula

Estranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseTragic
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Stitches

David Small · 336 pages

Finalist for the 2009 National Book Award and finalist for two 2010 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards: the prize-winning children's author depicts a childhood from hell in this searing yet redemptive graphic memoir. One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched toget

AutobiographyToxic Family DynamicsMemoir & BiographyChild Abuse
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The Prince of Tides

Pat Conroy · 668 pages

PAT CONROY has created a huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseBrothersTragic
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Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseTrue CrimeChild Abuse
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Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseEstranged FamilyMemoir & Biography
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Not My Father's Son

Alan Cumming · 304 pages

**Acclaimed actor Alan Cumming shares the raw and emotional story of his turbulent relationship with his father and the long-buried family secrets that shaped his life and career.** A beloved star of stage, television, and film, Alan Cumming is celebrated for his unparalleled diversity and fearlessness as an artist. However, his success conceals a painful childhood marked by the heavy hand of a

Estranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsAutobiographyChild Abuse
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Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

Domestic AbuseToxic Family DynamicsEstranged FamilyChild Abuse
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Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape

Jenna Miscavige Hill, Lisa Pulitzer · 416 pages

Jenna Miscavige Hill was raised to obey. As the niece of the Church of Scientology's leader David Miscavige, she grew up at the center of this highly controversial and powerful organization. But at twenty-one, Jenna made a daring break, risking everything she had ever known and loved to leave Scientology once and for all. Now she speaks out about her life, the Church, and her dramatic escape, goin

Estranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsMemoir & BiographyAutobiography
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Brother

Ania Ahlborn · 329 pages

"Deep in the heart of Appalachia stands a crooked farmhouse miles from any road. The Morrows keep to themselves, and it's served them well so far. When girls go missing off the side of the highway, the cops don't knock on their door. Which is a good thing, seeing as to what's buried in the Morrows' backyard. But nineteen-year-old Michael Morrow isn't like the rest of his family. He doesn't take pl

Toxic Family DynamicsBrothersChild AbuseTragic
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My Bloody Life: The Making of a Latin King

Reymundo Sanchez · 299 pages

Autobiographical account of the early life of a member of the Latin Kings of Chicago.

True CrimeAutobiographyChild AbuseMemoir & Biography
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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.

Toxic Family DynamicsEstranged FamilyChild AbuseMemoir & Biography
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Betrayed

Lyndsey Harris, Andrew Crofts · 320 pages

A mother. A daughter. A family torn apart. The heartbreaking true story of an unimaginable betrayal. For the first six years of her life, Sarah Harris was a normal, happy, popular little girl. But from the age of six her life was a living hell - as she became the victim of a vicious eighteen-month hate campaign. Before long she was suspended from school, alienated from her friends, completely bewi

Estranged FamilyToxic Family DynamicsAutobiographyMemoir & Biography
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Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages

This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.

Toxic Family DynamicsDomestic AbuseMemoir & BiographyChild Abuse

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